He doesn’t answer right away. “No.”
“How come?”
“I just didn’t.”
“What’d you tell your parents?”
“I didn’t tell them anything yet. I just said I was going to school.”
“Are you going to get in trouble?”
“Am I going to get in trouble?” he repeats, amused. “No, I think they’ll be super cool with me cutting class—while I’m still grounded, no less—to drive to basically Oregon without telling anyone. They love that kind of thing. Love it. It’ll be great.”
“You’re sure you want to do it?”
“I’m sure.”
I should ask him why. I should ask him if he’s really sure, maybe try to talk him out of it. The light changes, and we get onto the freeway.
“I could take the bus,” I say. “Or—”
“It’s fine. I wanted to come.” He licks sugar off his fingers and appraises me. “You snuck out, too, didn’t you? There’s no way your parents would’ve let you go.”
“Yeah, no, there’s no way they would’ve let me.”
“What are you going to do when they find out?”
“Nothing.” My phone’s stayed quiet—my mom’s probably still asleep. “I figure we’ll have at least an hour head start.”
“Ah.” He starts to say something else, reconsiders it, goes quiet.
I say, “What?”
“Nothing. It’s just—ah, forget it.”
“Should we do this a few more times before I tell you to just say it, or—”
“Like you never try to think before you say something. Okay, fine. It’s like—so I got into Princeton, right, and I guess I always thought if I did, everything would be different, and I’d be this different person, and all that time I thought everything would fall into place if I’d just get in.”
“And?”
“Nada. I feel nothing. So I was kind of glad you called,” he says. “This morning. Because then it was like, oh, okay, right, Princeton or not, I still have to figure out who I’m going to be. You know?”
He holds out the bag with the rest of the cinnamon twist. My fingers brush against his, and there’s a feeling like a pinwheel in my stomach, and then—something shifts.
All my life, I’ve always waited for signs. Like with art, like with everything, I’ve waited for things to fall into place and to feel right, to feel like the universe had given me its permission and its blessing.
But maybe you never really get that, or maybe only some of us do, if we’re lucky, if we’re born to the right people in the right circumstances at the right time, and even then, maybe not. And the rest of us—the world will tell you over and over you aren’t good enough, in as many ways as it knows how. Maybe you have to fight for your place in it no matter what, no matter who you are. And I know this—I always worried I hadn’t earned mine, that my sister should’ve taken it instead. But maybe she’s been here all along, and maybe that doesn’t mean anything so much as it creates an absence of meaning, a void I get to fill on my own. I know enough by now to know the rest of the world still goes on without you even if you try to retreat from it, that there’s only so long you can hide out. But I also believe that, if you’re lucky, what you share with someone can reshape the way the world contours itself around you. Or maybe it’s not that—maybe it’s just that it fortifies you so that you force the world to contort itself into new ways to fit you.
And Harry here like this, after I’d sort of given up on him, how he dropped everything and is risking getting massively in trouble for me: it is what it is. I feel the way I feel. Whatever it means, wherever it’ll go, I’m in it. And I need to find out if it’s at all like that for him, too.
For a long time when you drive through the bowels of the state it looks like nothing—flat and grassy, rural in a way people from out of state never associate with California, and it feels like you could drive for miles in any direction and find nothing at all.
We’ve been on the road for two and a half hours now and my parents still haven’t called. My mom must be wiped out. Or maybe, because I left my door closed, she just thinks I’m asleep.
That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway. That she’s there, that she’s safe, that when I get back they’ll both be there, immigration agents miles and miles away.
For now, at least, the road is solid and open beneath us, and I’m here with Harry, and I can stow those thoughts away. We’re on I-5 now, passing through small towns with names like Hershey and Harrington, towns that hide themselves off the highway so you feel like you could pull off the road and not find any of them. We hit Arbuckle, and Harry says, “Like Garfield,” and it makes me laugh. “All right, loser,” I say.
My nervousness is expanding with each mile we put behind us. If my parents were wrong and it isn’t her—but I won’t think about it. I know what it’s like to be sketching out rough lines, shading and stippling and crumpling up each attempt; I know what it’s like to watch something take shape in all the chaos. You learn to suspend the questions and give yourself over to the process. I do that now.
I feel hyperconscious of Harry next to me, the smooth outlines of his forearms, the scent of his shampoo. We’re mostly—uncharacteristically—quiet. Once, in Orland, we both reach for the radio dial at the same time and our fingers touch. When my family lived in Austin, every year for the Fourth of July we’d drive out into the country roads with the Parker-McEvoys and buy sparklers from wooden stands and we’d light them when it got dark. That crackling and heady scent of smoke, the way the sparks arced through the night so loud and bright and hot they made your heart race—Harry’s skin against mine feels just like that.
I keep trying to string the words together, what I’ll say to him. But Mr. X won’t leave me alone.
It’s one thing to feel a funny way. It’s another to put it out there in the open for everyone to have to see. You’re asking him to do a disgusting thing with you. If he isn’t funny about you the way you want him to be he won’t be too hot about being around you after this, you sniffing around him with those hungry eyes of yours.
I don’t care what hypothetical old white men think, I tell him. He tips back his head and laughs.
Hypothetical? You think you conjured me from nothing? I’m your neighbor. I’m your dentist. I’m your cop. I’m your congressman. I’m your boss. I’m your teacher. Don’t think for a minute—
My phone rings. I jump.
“Your parents?” Harry says.
It rings again. “Yep.”
“You going to answer it?”
“Yes?” I say. It rings again. “What else should I do, just ignore it?”
Ring. “I mean, what are you going to tell them? I won’t pick up if my parents call.”
The phone feels hot in my hand. It rings again. Then it stops, and I feel—inexplicably—desperate for it to be ringing again, to have the chance to answer still.
I wanted that, though, didn’t I? Otherwise I would’ve just picked up.
On her voicemail, my mom is frantic. “Daniel, where are you? Pick up your phone. Call me right now. I’m going to call you again.” She does. I silence it. There’s a pit in my stomach.
And then the guilt comes flooding into the car, heady and loud, slinking around my shoulders like a cat. What if something happens to them while I’m gone? I could come back and find the apartment empty, and I’ll be stuck forever with the image of her praying I’ll pick up as the phone rings and rings.
I sink back against the seat. “I should’ve picked up.”
“Call her back, then.”
“I can’t.”
“How come?”
“I just—I can’t.” I crack the window. The air outside feels dusty and hot. I open up his glove compartment and stick my phone inside. I’ll keep it off, let the messages I’m sure she’s leaving pile up.
I shouldn’t let them worry more than they need to. I know that. All the same, though—I’m not proud that the thought o
ccurs to me the way it does, blaring neon in my mind, but all the same, there was a lot they let me worry about and mourn and believe. And none of it was ever true.
Traffic slows to a trickle as we lose a lane to construction, and then the road releases us back into open lanes and Harry sets his cruise control. In the distance you can see Mount Shasta starting to come into focus, towering over the valley. We drive toward it, the grasses and flatlands blurring past the windows.
It’s funny about being in a car with someone—all those miles you plow into the road tie you to each other somehow, intertwine your fates at least temporarily, and they blur the borders between your two existences and etch away at whatever was keeping you so separate and distinct. I have a weirdly certain feeling that if I touched him again right now both of us would get shocked. I can feel the charge building up in the air, how it ratchets higher every time the road dips and we get jostled closer together. I know that feeling with him, what it’s like when every time you touch the rest of your body stops existing and all of you funnels itself into that shivery point of contact.
I make a deal with myself: in five minutes, I’ll say something. I won’t practice or overthink it like I always do. I’ll just start talking. The truth will come out.
But then five minutes go by—I watch them tick off on his dashboard—and I can’t do it. I make the same deal with myself for ten minutes, then fifteen, holding it there in front of me the whole time we’re talking. But I can’t do it. What if he never wants to see me again?
Around Redding I start to get jittery. It’s flatter out here, more fields and trees and open space than the Bay Area, and Mount Shasta has been expanding in the windshield a while now, massive and looming and covered in snow. We stop at an A&W, where a white man in a hat watches us openly and a white mom with her kids pretends not to, and get burgers and root beer floats. Harry doesn’t finish his.
“I’m too amped,” he says to me, clearing the table for us. “Your sister you didn’t even know was alive, and you’re going to see her—how are you even functional right now?”
It’s twelve-forty-five by the time we leave, and it’s supposed to be just three or four hours from here. We pass through an abandoned mining town, and soon the road drops down to two lanes. It’s not like Redding felt especially crowded, but without all its buildings and roads the land starts to feel naked, kind of, and barren—long fields of dying grass pockmarked with trees. Here the trees are tall and huge and old and leafless, their branches wizened and sort of gothic-looking. The cars come fewer and fewer between, and even though I know it’s not true, it feels like being in a place where no one’s ever been.
We pass through Montgomery Creek, which isn’t a town so much as a few old farmhouse-looking houses that overlook the highway and a speed limit that slows to fifty-five as you go through the fields. The fields give way to forest, and you feel small.
I lose a battle with myself and turn my phone on, wondering if it’s worse if my parents have been calling and calling or worse if they haven’t. Then there are seven new messages—I listen to each one, my mom crying by the last three—and that emphatically answers my question: it’s worse that they did.
I imagine staying home with them next year, dodging endless awkward reunions at Target and Ranch 99, making up stupid excuses when people ask why I’m still here. I imagine being forty and telling everyone how once upon a time I had an acceptance to the best art school in the nation. And I imagine losing Harry. He’d call sometimes, probably, but he’d feel guilty and embarrassed about how crappy my life was turning out—he’d do that loud talking where he tries to get you to laugh, where there’s no room in the conversation for any of your sadness to leak out, and he’d have his roommate and his fratty friends there and he’d be a reasonably short plane ride away from Regina and—
I have to stop. When I really let myself think about not being with him next year, about just fading out of his life, I can hardly breathe.
“I just wish they’d told me sooner,” I say abruptly. “I spent literally my whole life being lied to. They should’ve been honest with me. And then maybe—”
He waits for me to finish, and when I don’t he says, “And then maybe what?”
And then maybe I wouldn’t have spent my whole life pierced by a grief I couldn’t ever talk about; I wouldn’t have carried the guilt of having outlived her with me everywhere. And then maybe I would’ve been more careful at school. And then maybe I would’ve understood why they were so panicked about the principal and I wouldn’t have been as angry as I was, and then I would never have lost control driving. And then maybe it wouldn’t feel like this now, this massive debt I’ll never—because it’s still my fault, I still have to blame myself—be able to pay back.
They shouldn’t have lied to me. And if they’re waiting at home right now, worried, frantic each time they get my voicemail—then maybe it makes them they wish they would’ve just told me the truth, too. I don’t have it in me to spare them that.
But it doesn’t matter, I guess, whether they regret it or not. It’s all too late for that. I pull my seat belt tighter around myself. “Eh, it’s not important. I’m going to withdraw from RISD.”
“You’re—wait, what, what the hell? Why are you withdrawing? Because of your parents?”
“Yes and no. It’s because—” I hesitate. I thought I’d never tell anybody this. “It’s because we wouldn’t have gotten into the car accident if not for me. The accident was my fault.”
“How was it your fault?”
I tell him. It sounds even worse when I say it out loud.
“You definitely can’t withdraw,” he says.
That surprises me, actually—I kind of expected he’d say Yes, obviously, of course you don’t deserve to go, and also maybe and get the hell out of my car. “My parents are pretty fucked, Harry. And I made it so much worse. They had to give the police their car registration, and now they have no car, and my mom got hurt. I have to stay here.”
“Danny—you didn’t know.”
“Yeah, well, when you deliberately crash a car it doesn’t really matter what you know.”
“I mean—okay, yes, I’ll give you that. But what if—what if it really is your sister? If they have their daughter back, doesn’t that make up for literally anything?”
I hadn’t quite let myself form those thoughts. But they’ve been kindling, because as soon as he says it they catch flame. What if it is her? And what if she only knows a false version of the story and I tell her the truth, I tell her what really happened and how they’ve never stopped wishing for her back—can I balance that, somehow, that and all those years they lied to me, the anger I probably shouldn’t feel but do, against my guilt?
“It doesn’t change their situation,” I say finally. “Even if it somehow makes up for some of it—they’re still in the same boat. It doesn’t change anything.” This is the part I’ll have to carry alone, though: that a part of me will always resent them for this. Always.
“That’s literally been your dream for as long as I’ve known you, Danny.”
“It has.”
“You really think you can fix anything by not going? You honestly think that’s better?”
Of course I don’t think it’s better. But you don’t always get better—sometimes you just get less bad. Sometimes you just get right. “I don’t know if I can fix anything no matter what. Neither one of them are perfect options, but if I just bail on my parents I don’t think I can live with myself.”
A lesser friend, I think, would try harder to talk me out of it whether or not he believed it, unfurling a safe, attractive future I could map myself into in order to make me feel better in the moment, so he could duck away from how it feels. Harry doesn’t, though. He says, “Is.”
“Excuse me?”
“Neither one of them is a perfect option.” He reaches out and claps his hand against my thigh, and leaves it there. “Subject-verb.”
Then he grins, holding it u
ntil, in spite of myself, and in spite of the fact that his eyes are sad, I smile back.
And I almost tell him then. I almost do.
I don’t, though. He puts his hand back on the wheel, and the letdown that floods me, like a wave receding and then crashing back, makes me wonder if maybe I can’t. Maybe I just won’t ever. I try to tell myself I will, that I still have time—but time always almost feels like it belongs to you, like you can stretch and sculpt it to make it what you need it to be, but that’s a lesson I hope I never need to learn again: you belong to it, and not the other way around.
In Burney—a stretch of flat buildings lining the side of the road, a section carved out of the forest—we stop to get gas. A white woman in a pickup truck at the pump behind us scrutinizes us, leaning against her truck with her arms crossed, and I feel that old mixture—maybe it’s not justified, but a lot of times it probably is—of defiance and pity and shame. She lifts her cigarette to her lips and I watch her cheeks hollow and then fill back in as she inhales.
Everything feels different when we start driving again. The clumps of trees thicken, mostly pine now, and as you climb higher sometimes you come through a bend and the trees open up and you can see small valleys spread out below you, blanketed in a green that stretches across to the tree line, peaks rising up bluish in the distance. The air’s thinner up here and the sunlight streams through the sky differently, landing on the windshield in a way that looks clearer than how it does at home. Mostly, though, I think it feels different because I know that was our last stop, because the next time we get out of the car it’ll be to find Joy.
My pulse has been higher ever since the gas station. I try to tell myself it’s that there’s less oxygen up here, but I know I’m just nervous. I can’t quite sit still, either—I fiddle with the radio, tap my hands on my knees. I wish I’d brought my sketchbook, even though trying to draw in the car always makes me carsick. I would draw us, though, I think: me and Harry in the car. I’d draw the way the light keeps glancing off the rearview mirror and the way the world outside the window looks like a painting and the way inside the car we feel kind of buffered from it all, how really everything that matters is right here inside. For now, at least.
Picture Us In The Light Page 29