The swirling bugs that fluttered and flew against the orange alley light had finally noticed that there was fresh meat below. A mosquito floated past Lindsay’s head, whined beneath my chin, and settled on my chest, where it plunged its sucker into a fleshy spot just above my left breast. I watched it, counted to three, then brought my hand down savagely against my own skin. The bug disappeared in a mash of legs, wings, my own blood.
“Believe it or not,” I said, quietly, “I think I know how you feel.”
CHAPTER
11
I
woke just before noon to the sunlight that came streaming through our house’s south windows and filled every room with choking brightness. It bathed the walls, warmed the faded rugs, shattered against the dangling prisms that my mother had hung in every window. My bedroom was full of rainbows that swept smoothly over the walls. Back and forth, slipping lightly along the surface of my bedside table with its framed photos and green glass lamp.
There was a light knock, and the door creaked open.
“Honey? I think you should wake up, now.”
I rolled over to see my mother, dressed for gardening. A pair of rough gloves was stuffed into her pants’ pocket and her face was marked with thin smears of dirt, but her hands and fingernails were pink and clean.
She moved into the room, stopping by my desk and patting the thick pile of papers that sat there.
“You know, your packing list for college came. It’s over here. You’ve seen it, right?”
“No,” I said. It was only half a lie. The fat packet of orientation materials had been sitting in the same place since it arrived, when I rifled through the thick sheaf of papers and glossy brochures that smelled like glue, but couldn’t bring myself to read them.
“We could go over it together,” my mother said. She settled next to me on the bed and reached a hand out to stroke my hair.
“Maybe later,” I said. “I’m supposed to . . . see James.”
A real lie; the night before, James had dropped me at my door along with the news that he would be missing until next week. I imagined that they’d already begun the day’s brutal task, him and his father, sitting in the dark and dust of a long-shuttered room and gently sifting the contents of its drawers, desks, and closets. They were starting to go through his mother’s things.
“How are things going, there?”
“What do you mean?” I struggled to sit up, leaning back against the headboard. It creaked under my weight.
“You and James,” she said.
I shrugged. “Fine.”
“Fine?” She gave me a pointed look.
“Mom, I just woke up. The whole subtlety thing isn’t really happening for me right now.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, holding her hands up in surrender. “What I mean is, your father and I are . . . concerned.”
My breath caught in my throat.
“About me?”
She knew
. Everyone else was looking through me, but she could see me struggling.
“No, honey,” she said, and then smiled at me with so much clueless confidence that I wanted to scream and fling myself against the wall. “We know we don’t have to worry about you. But for James, your leaving is bound to be hard. You helped him through a rough time.”
Inside, I had gone flat and cold.
“Mom, I’ll handle it.”
“I know,” she said. “But I hope you’ll do the right thing. You don’t want him to assume . . .”
My temper flared. “Would you stop acting like James is some kind of helpless puppy? You have no idea what’s happening with us, okay? I mean, it’s not like he’s never done anything—” I was going to say
wrong
, but my mother cut me off.
“I’m not criticizing him!” she exclaimed. “I’m sure he’s got plenty going on. And of course I think he’s a very nice boy, and he obviously cares a great deal for you. I just worry, honey, because soon you’ll be on divergent paths.”
“Jesus, Mother—”
She held up a hand again. “I know, you know that. I know. But I’m your mother, and as long as you’re still under my roof, it’s my job to give you guidance when I think you need it. And right now, and I’m not saying this is your fault, but James clearly isn’t thinking about what will happen when you leave. And that will end up hurting him. It will.”
I stared at her, wanting to laugh at how much she didn’t get it, wanting to shout that for all his niceness and obvious caring, James had also bruised me and broken me in a way that drained all the color from my world. That I was derailed and drowning.
She mistook the look on my face for disbelief. The hand, the maternal hand of comfort, extended toward my leg and gave it a reassuring squeeze through the blankets.
“And the one thing I just wouldn’t want—your father and I, we wouldn’t want—to see you limiting yourself. Keeping up a long-distance relationship is already hard, but when one person’s ambitions are so different from the other’s . . . you’re just in different places,” she said, nodding in agreement with herself.
I sighed, watching the rainbows hurtling along the walls of the too-bright room, looking at the lines that had etched themselves into the skin near my mother’s eyes and mouth, thinking of James, who would never even know the luxury of maternal disapproval.
“He doesn’t have to stay here, you know,” I said. “He’s smart. He could go to college.”
“I’m sure he could,” she said. “But you need to worry about
you
.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Becca, look at me.”
I did.
My mother’s face was a mask of concern as she said, “You need to start thinking about your future. James can take care of himself, and he’s going to have to, because you have bigger fish to try. All you can do is be honest with him, and I think that means you’ve got to be honest with yourself—”
“Mom—”
“—and remember that there’s a great big world out there, waiting for you!”
Her words seemed to wrap around my throat.
The world began to spin.
When I made it to the bathroom, I threw up in the sink.
* * *
Once upon a time, the great big world outside Bridgeton had seemed like Xanadu—miles of golden road lined with smiling people, waiting to usher me through hundreds of open doors. There was nothing out there but bright light and possibilities. There were big dreams of other places, other people, even other boys.
There had even, for two hours in April, been somebody else.
He was a glimpse of the future, where I would live and breathe and love far, far away from this place. A future where behind a closed door, on Saturday mornings, a boy I hadn’t yet met would wrap an arm around my waist and exhale damp heat into the curve of my neck. Where we would keep our eyes closed, pull the covers closer, burrow down deeper to escape the nine-o’clock sunshine, and the sound of heavy breath echoing along the rusted steel confines of a pickup truck would be nothing but a memory.
* * *
“Are you sure I shouldn’t come with you?” James had said as he watched me try again to zip my backpack closed. I had overpacked, but each time I pulled my clothes back out and took stock of what I was bringing, it all seemed essential. I didn’t want to be too cold, too hot, too casual, too high school. I didn’t want to look like a visitor.
I kept my eyes down and busied myself with the zipper. “You don’t have a place to stay.”
He shrugged.
“And anyway,” I added, “you’d be bored. I’m going to be busy getting orientated with the other pre-froshes.”
He shrugged again. “It’s just a day. I can find something to do. We could make a road trip out of it.”
I crushed the bag between my knees and wrenched the zipper shut over the woolly bulge of a sweater, thinking as the teeth closed that I shouldn’t have packed it. It was bulky and unsophisticated. It was everything I didn’t want my future self to be.
James was looking at the floor, chewing on his lip. The casual feel of the conversation—the no-big-deal way that he’d tossed out the idea of coming along, as though it were just another nothing suggestion—was starting to erode. I realized as I looked at him that things had been like that a lot lately. Our summer romance had lasted so well, deepening as the seasons changed, staying bright and strong through the worst of winter. But between the easy familiarity of us, the inside jokes, the quiet comfort of watching him from the passenger side, was the shadow of summer and the
tick-tick-tick
of our time together drawing to a close.
Lately, I thought, James was having trouble ignoring the sound of the countdown. Lately, our conversations felt loaded, layered, imbued with double and triple meanings.
“This is something I need to do by myself.”
“Need, or want?”
“Does it matter?”
When I kissed him good-bye through my car window, he joked, “I feel like I’m never going to see you again.”
When I crossed the state line at eighty miles per hour, I thought,
You might not.
It was March, and Bridgeton had been edging damply into spring; the air had turned soft and humid and carried the smell of thawing earth, and the lake had begun to swell with the melting snow. But two hundred miles north, I crossed back into winter again. The air was a slap in the face, bitter and biting, and the campus was a mess of mud punctuated by crusts of gritty, refrozen slush. Inside the admissions office, steam heat had fogged the windows.
There were a hundred of us, give or take. Seventeen and eighteen, all trying to look unself-conscious and cool despite the peel-and-stick name tags and overstuffed backpacks that gave us away as weekend interlopers. They herded us into a room, handed us folders that were emblazoned with the university crest and stuffed inside with campus maps, meal tickets, and a list titled “Things To Do” that conspicuously avoided any mention of alcohol. Over sandwiches and sodas, we exchanged information: names, states, intended majors. We were mostly from New England, except for one—a tanned, fit boy with wire-rimmed glasses who had flown up from Tallahassee, and who laughingly told us that he was planning to spend the winter months crying in the fetal position. I snorted too loudly, and next to me, a pink-cheeked blonde with a Coach bag looked sidelong at my shoes and said, “Where are you from?”
“Bridgeton,” I said.
She blinked at me.
“You know, where Silver Lake is?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, picking the lettuce out of her wrap with long, manicured fingers. “I didn’t know people actually lived there.”
When she stood and left, joining the other kids who were drifting out with student hosts or going to audit a two o’clock class, Tallahassee looked after her and rolled his eyes.
“That was rude,” he said.
“It happens,” I said.
“If it makes you feel any better, my grandma would’ve called that girl a ‘peroxide-loving whore,’” he said, grinning.
At the front of the room, more hosting students had appeared in a clump. An obese young woman, her cheeks chapped red from the cold, scanned the remaining crowd and then called out, “Rebecca Williams?”
“That’s me,” I said, hoisting my backpack. The fat girl—whose name turned out to be, hilariously, Bonnie Biggs—smiled and waved at me.
As I turned away, Tallahassee raised his hand in a half salute.
“See you later, Rebecca.”
Even then, I didn’t expect to. Even now, when I think back on that night, I come away knowing that it was pure chance: a gift from the universe, or maybe a test. When I stepped out of Bonnie’s room and padded down the cold stairs in search of a vending machine, it wasn’t because I was looking to cheat.
I wasn’t looking for anything. I had found what I was looking for. I’d sat in on an archaeology class that made me go cross-eyed with all the things I didn’t know; I’d sat, exhilarated, in a cafeteria full of the shouts and laughter of a thousand kids just like me; that night, Bonnie had gamely taken me to a real, live party where the music was deafening and the floor was sticky with spilled beer and kids laughed and spun boozily into one another’s arms. It was a perfect day, a twenty-four-hour trip into my own future that left me breathless with the magnitude of what lay ahead.
But when I tripped barefoot into the dorm’s lounge that night, I found him there. He was propped on a threadbare couch, surrounded by four tired-looking kids who were passing a flask back and forth. As I stepped into the room, I heard somebody slur the words, “David Foster Wallace.”
“Rebecca,” he said, looking at me with heavy-lidded eyes.
“Tallahassee,” I said.
“Are you looking for me?” he asked, grinning in a slushy way that made me think of bonfires, beer, and small-town summertime. Drunkenness: the great equalizer.
“I was looking for Gatorade, actually,” I replied, causing the literary couch kids to explode with laughter. Tallahassee laughed, too—a sound so light and easy that it made me think suddenly of James, who was neither—and patted the empty spot next to him.
Of course, he wasn’t Tallahassee. Of course he had a name, but I don’t remember it. It was gone by morning, had leached out of my brain overnight along with the content of our conversation, the books he’d recommended, the things we’d used to fill the time while we waited to be alone. We’d talked, an unspoken agreement passing between us, until the last lolling drinker had stumbled off to bed. He was getting nervous, I could tell; he’d started to fumble with his glasses, taking them off and then putting them on again, until the lenses were smudged and cloudy.
At some point, he’d told me his name.
But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t about this guy, who he was, the way he smiled, the taste of his mouth. He could have been anyone. He was an experiment. A test. A one-kiss chance to remember where I was going and what lay ahead. And he was something else, too: proof that in spite of how things had changed since that first night by the fire, I had not lost sight of my goal. That no matter what, I was not too in love with James to leave him behind.