This is What Goodbye Looks Like

by Olivia Rivers

  “Um, resting back at your dorm?”

  “Nope. Homemade chicken noodle soup.” Seth holds out his hand and flicks a couple fingers toward his palm, gesturing for me to follow him. “Let’s go get him some, okay?”

  “Okay,” I say hesitantly. Seth gives a small, triumphant smile, and as he starts walking off down the street, I call after him, “But I’m paying!”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Definitely so,” I shoot back.

  He gives one of his almost-not-quite chuckles, and his gait slows as he waits for me to catch up. “How about we argue about it over a burger?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The streets of Hendrickson should be just as freezing as the rest of this state, but somehow they seem warmer, as if the small-town charm keeps the natural chill at bay. Or maybe it’s Seth doing that. He strides along beside me, narrating the town as we pass by sleepy little cafes and shops. Seth feeds me details as we make our way to the burger place, breathing life into the town with tidbits of public gossip.

  According to him, the fire station is the color of puke because the only local painting company happens to be owned by the fire chief’s ex-wife. The art gallery next door is managed by a bizarre man, although no one can figure out if he’s actually a creep, or if he just enjoys putting up perverted works of art to watch the local church throw hissy fits. And the empty shop near the center of town was a pet store that went out of business a year ago, but Koda still gets excited every time she passes it.

  I think his rambling should be boring, but it’s impossible not to go along with Seth’s obvious affection for his hometown.

  “So where do you fit into all this?” I ask as we cross the street next to the old pet shop. I figure if I came all this way to figure out how Seth’s family has remained intact, it’s about time I start asking some substantial questions. “I mean, does your family live near here?”

  He shakes his head. “I used to live right on the edge of town, but my family moved to Brooksport a couple years ago so my parents wouldn’t have to commute into work anymore. But Hendrickson will always be home to me.”

  “That’s neat,” I say lamely, but I can’t help breathing a small sigh of relief. Seth has no way of recognizing me, but I know his parents would definitely remember my face. I’d been worrying about running into them, but if they’re living forty minutes away in Brooksport, it’s probably not a concern.

  “Do you see them a lot?” I ask.

  “I go home on the weekends sometimes.”

  “They must appreciate that. I mean, since Parker’s not there…”

  I trail off as I see pain flash across his expression, followed by a look of confusion. He’s clearly wondering why I’m suddenly prying into his personal life, but he just quietly says, “Yeah, they like having me home.”

  “It must be nice having them so close.”

  “Not since Parker died,” he says flatly. And, at that, my urge to question him further just shrivels up. Seth lets out a sigh and gestures down the street. “We should be getting close. Just keep heading toward the gas station.”

  “I don’t see a restaurant here,” I say, gratefully accepting the change of subject. “You’re sure it’s this way? It looks like most of the restaurants are over by the art gallery.”

  “Yeah, most of the restaurants for non-locals are over there,” he says. “But this place is purely a local spot. The secret haven of Hendrickson. Just keep heading for the gas station.”

  I glance to my right, where some ancient gas pumps sit in a parking lot. The place is well taken care of, at least. There isn’t a single weed peeking from the cracks, and even though the pumps look unused, they’re clean. The building behind the pumps is like the rest of the lot—small, tidy, and unremarkable.

  Seth smirks, as if sensing my skepticism. “It’s not exactly the most prestigious establishment, but the food’s good. Now come on.” He holds out his arm to me, like he’s some gentleman, and I’m a lady from the thirties. “Let’s head inside.”

  I hesitantly take his arm, letting my hand rest on the sleeve of his hoodie.

  “Lead the way,” he says, but he’s the one who moves first toward the building in the back. He tries to play his touch off as being casual, as if he just wants some extra guidance across the lot, but he leans a little too close for it to be just friendly. But I don’t mind his touch. It’s strong and warm and unmistakably alive, exactly the sort of comfort I’ve missed lately.

  The front door of the gas station opens as soon as we near it, and a girl around our age peeks her head out. She has approximately eighty-thousand piercings, but her smile is genuinely sweet when she spots Seth. Her gaze flicks to Seth’s side in an automatic motion, but when she sees no one but the two of us, her lips twist into a momentary frown.

  She was looking for Parker. I’m not exactly sure how I know—I think it’s the flash of pain that darkens her eyes, the same sort that haunts Seth’s expression sometimes. But it hardly lasts a second before her smile springs back into place.

  “Hey!” she says to Seth, and I take a moment to examine her while she’s focused on him. She’s maybe around twenty and has short, pink-tipped blond hair above a pixie-like face. Her clothes look like something a toddler on a sugar high would pick out—a bright purple scarf, leopard-pattern tights, and a sweater filled with psychedelic swirls of color. It should look terrible, but her perky smile makes that sort of impossible.

  “Long time, no see,” she says, jumping down the front steps to give Seth a quick hug. “It’s been, what, two months?”

  “It’s been a little over two months since I could last see,” Seth says dryly, but he returns the hug, wrapping the girl in a strong embrace. My shoulder suddenly feels cold without his hand on it, and I eye the door, wishing I was inside and under a heater.

  The girl rolls her eyes, and I can’t help but cringe as I watch her eyelids pull at all the surrounding piercings. “Don’t be a smartass,” she says, stepping back and smacking Seth’s arm. “And, come on, get out of the cold. Your little friend looks like she’s freezing.” She raises an eyebrow at him. “You want to introduce her, or are you just going to make her stand there?”

  “I’m Lea,” I say, carefully picking my way up the steps. They’re slick with ice, and my cane keeps trying to slip off them, but Seth follows right behind me and rests a steadying hand on my shoulder.

  My chest tightens, but I manage to wobble to the top of the steps, and I try not to sound too flustered as I look at the girl and say, “I’m Seth’s...” Do I dare call myself his friend? No. “Um, I go to Harting with Seth.”

  “She’s helping me with Parker’s photo project,” Seth says. “We were just dropping her camera off to get tuned up, and I figured I’d bring her by for a burger.”

  “Cool,” the girl says. She flicks her gaze back toward me. “I’m Seth’s semi-sorta-not-really sister, although I think I failed to live up to the title, since I let him grow up to be so rude that he won’t even give me a proper introduction.”

  Seth lets out a sigh and makes an exaggerated flourish toward the girl. “Lady Lea, I introduce thee to Lady Tanya, granddaughter to the owner of this fine burger establishment.” He raises an eyebrow at Tanya. “Now can you let us inside before we freeze to death?”

  Tanya makes a shooing motion at us, and I head past her and into the old building. “Go get warm,” she says. “We’re just firing up the grill, so it’ll be a few minutes before I can get you any food. But you guys can hang out by the fireplace.”

  The inside of the gas station has been completely refurbished into a restaurant, which is much larger than it looks from the outside. Tables crowd the front room, old and scratched, but scrubbed perfectly clean. I run my hand over one of the chairs, letting my fingers drift across the worn spot on the seat where hundreds of diners have smoothed the wood over the years.

  All around me are pictures—some old photos, some new, some framed, and some just tacked in place. Ne
arly all of them show the same room I’m in now, with its wood-paneled walls and linoleum floor, and every single one features a smiling customer.

  “Does the entire town eat here?” I ask, trailing my fingers across a frame. The picture features a pudgy toddler sitting in his dad’s lap and struggling to lift a milkshake glass. It’s an old photo, but the laughter in the dad’s eyes is still alive, preserved behind the carefully dusted glass of the frame.

  “Pretty much,” Seth replies. “All the locals come here.”

  I take another look around and gesture to the pictures. “Did you take any of these?” I ask Tanya.

  She shakes her head. “Nope, my grandpa is the only photographer in the family.” She hesitates and then adds, “But Parker took some of these, too. Grandpa used to give him lessons when he was little.”

  “That’s really neat,” I say, but my words sound strained and awkward, just like the silence that follows.

  Seth jerks his head toward the end of the room, where a fire crackles in a huge fireplace. “Let’s go get warm, okay?”

  The fireplace is surrounded by smaller tables draped with checkered cloths, and I pick the one closest to the fire before settling into a chair. Koda guides Seth over, pausing for a moment to shoot the fireplace a suspicious look and woof at a popping log.

  “Hush, you,” Seth murmurs to Koda as he sits across from me. His movements are a little clumsier than usual, and I get the feeling he’s not quite as familiar with this place as he is with Harting’s campus.

  Windows border both sides of the stone fireplace, looking out onto the snow-blanketed woods that fence in the back of the gas-station-turned-restaurant. I’m suddenly itching for my camera—this town is almost enchanting enough to make me forget that I shouldn’t enjoy photography anymore.

  Tanya follows us over to the table, shamelessly staring at me. Usually, that sort of thing makes me immediately self-conscious of my cane, but there’s no pity in her eyes. Instead, she squints at me and tilts her head a little, examining me the way a rancher would look over a horse. She eventually nods, and I guess that means I pass inspection, because she whips out an ordering pad and a pen.

  “You know, it’s a shame you’re letting Seth take you out on such a cheap date,” she says to me, smacking Seth’s shoulder with her pad of paper. “So I think you should order the most expensive thing on the menu.”

  “We’re not dating,” Seth says as he rubs his shoulder ruefully. “And I really doubt Lea is going to want a triple-decker bacon burger.”

  “I don’t really like bacon,” I admit, giving Tanya an apologetic smile.

  “That’s a crime in here,” she says, wagging her pen at me. “But I’m always telling Seth he needs to live a little, so I guess I’m okay with him dating a criminal.”

  “Uh, we’re really not dating,” I say.

  “Sure you’re not, sweetie,” Tanya says, flicking my words away with a swish of her pen. “You just keep telling yourselves that. Now, what can I get you?”

  I get a salad, which Tanya rolls her eyes at, and Seth gets a cheeseburger and asks for a to-go container of chicken noodle soup for Landon. As Tanya saunters off back to the kitchen, Seth gives me one of his soft smiles. “Sorry. She’s a little presumptuous sometimes.”

  “Is she actually related to you?” I ask.

  He smirks and shakes his head. “No, not at all, even though she’s been calling me her brother since I can remember. Tanya lived next door to my family up until we moved, and she and Parker were the same age, so they were really close growing up.”

  “Oh,” I murmur. I glance around, making sure no one else is in the room to see how I flinch whenever he says his brother’s name. But we’re the only people in the diner, probably because it’s still too early for it to really be lunch time.

  My heart beats a little too fast as I stare across the table at Seth, but he seems perfectly at ease, leaning back in the solid wooden chair and running one of his delicate fingers along its arm. His fingertip follows the grain of the wood, swirling in small patterns and occasionally stopping to brush twice over the rough spots. It’s strangely mesmerizing to watch, and I forget to be weirded out by the sudden silence.

  Then Seth asks, “So do you want to take a look at the thesis project? What Parker left of it, I mean?”

  “Sure,” I say as I tug off my mittens. I try to sound confident, even a little interested, but it just comes out as a choked whisper.

  He sighs. “This is never going to work if you keep going all shy on me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And please stop apologizing. You seriously have no reason to be sorry for anything, and you’re making me feel like an ass for making you uncomfortable.”

  “You’re not an ass,” I say, trying to make my tone a little more confident.

  “Glad you think so. Now can you please try to act like you believe it? You’re going to hurt yourself if you keep cringing from me so much.”

  “I’m not cringing,” I mutter.

  He scoffs. “Sorry, Lea, but I call bullshit. I don’t know who I remind you of, but can you try to forget about him? Just at least when you’re around me?”

  I stare into the fire, trying to track the flames and figure out where they start and where they end. It’s impossible, but still easier than this conversation.

  “Lea?” Seth prods. He sounds all injured again, like a kicked puppy. Why does he have to be sweet even when he’s upset?

  “Yeah, sure,” I murmur. “I’ll try to stop acting so weird.”

  “You’re not acting weird, just uncomfortable. And I just don’t want you to have to feel like that.”

  “That’s... nice of you.”

  He sighs at my hesitant tone and reaches down to pet Koda. “So, about the project,” he says, keeping his focus on Koda as he slips his phone out of his pocket and nudges it across the table. “Brie made copies of all of Parker’s work and uploaded it to a file. You can take a look at it, if you want. She said she put it in the main picture folder.”

  I find the folder and open it, and the files slowly start loading. “Exactly how much material did Parker leave?”

  “His paper, of course. But also a bunch of notes and about a hundred pictures from four different photo shoots. Which sounds like a lot, but really isn’t much. He always said that only one in every thirty shots is ever worth anything. So maybe three or four of those pictures are actually good enough quality to submit to the university.”

  “It’s better than nothing,” I say, scrolling through the files as they load. “Can you explain the paper to me more? You said it was something about literature.”

  Seth goes back to tracing the grain of the wood on his chair. “Yeah. His main thesis was that the Hero’s Journey can be applied to photojournalism just as easily as it can be applied to written stories. So his paper took a bunch of famous photojournalists and explained how their work fit the Hero’s Journey model. And then he was going to create his own series of images that illustrated it.” Seth raises an eyebrow at me. “I’m hoping they teach the Hero’s Journey in California schools. Do you know about it?”

  I nod and set down the phone, figuring the rest of the files are going to take at least a few minutes to load. “Yeah, I know it well.”

  Better than well, actually. My sophomore year, I had an English teacher who was absolutely obsessed with the Hero’s Journey, and we talked about it nearly every class period. A few decades ago, a mythology expert named Joseph Campbell figured out that all the world’s myths follow a certain pattern, and that same pattern can be found in practically every notable story ever written.

  The Hero’s Journey boils that pattern down into twelve simple steps. People have used it to study all sorts of stories, everything from Greek myths to Star Wars scripts to real-life memoirs. Pretty much every story containing a journey follows the same pattern.

  “So what journey was your brother trying to photograph?” I ask.

  Seth rubs at his temples
and shakes his head. “I don’t know. That’s the big question I’m stuck on. We know he was planning on creating a gallery of twelve photos—one for each step of the Hero’s Journey—and we know it was about something local, because the four shoots he already did were all in Hendrickson. But we haven’t been able to figure out much beyond that.”

  “You don’t even have any ideas?”

  “The entire point of the Hero’s Journey is that it fits practically every story involving a journey of any kind. Which makes it damn near impossible to know what journey Parker wanted to illustrate with his photos. It could be anything.”

  “That definitely complicates things,” I admit.

  He gives a frustrated sigh. “Brie thinks Parker was trying to show the journey of the seasons. He came home for a couple weeks right before he died, and that was when he took all those pictures. It was just after we got this huge snowstorm, so Hendrickson was covered. The time-stamps on the pictures show he was taking a new set about once every three days, so Brie thinks his goal was to capture the progression of winter. Catch it at its peak and then watch it dissolve into spring.”

  I consider this as I reach over and stroke Koda’s head. Her tongue flicks out to lick my hand, and then she gives me one of those guilty-goofy smiles only dogs can pull off. I don’t know how she can be so happy right now, but I’m officially jealous.

  “You don’t agree with Brie,” I say to Seth. “Do you?”

  He shakes his head. “No. I mean, it’d make sense, and it’s the best theory we’ve got. But it makes too much sense. Parker liked to be abstract. He’d never use something so simple and predictable for his senior thesis. And, besides, Parker told me that he wanted to take some shots with me in it. And why would he want me in a series of pictures about changing seasons?”

  “We’ll figure it out,” I say, trying to sound confident.

  The folder finishes loading on Seth’s phone, and I quickly send the file containing the paper to my own phone, figuring I’ll read it later. Then I start sorting through the pictures inside the folder.