“Not so bad for being alone on a garage, right?” you said.
“Only you weren’t alone,” she said.
She seemed completely sober now, like the meteors had zapped her of something. She looked at you again, and it felt like she was going to say something else, but you cut her off.
“He’s nice,” you said.
She didn’t ask for any additional explanation. She knew what you were referring to.
“Hmmm,” she said. “It’s sweet that you would lie for him.”
And before she disappeared beneath the lip of the roof, she gave you one last smile that appeared genuine.
“Happy birthday, Case,” she said.
And you thought, after she left your sight, that this would probably be the last time you saw her. She didn’t seem like the type to keep coming around—too interesting—and Sean got bored of people pretty quickly.
But, amazingly enough, this was not to be the case.
Diana, as it turned out, had staying power. And before long, she had done what few others had managed to do: achieve girlfriend status with your fickle brother. Which meant youwouldsee her again over the next year until they broke up only weeks before he died. At which point she would call you every night at exactly ten o’clock for nearly a month, and you would never pick up, not even once, even though you wanted more than anything to do just that.
So she never called again.
FOUR
“So…,” she says now, outside the truck stop.
She’s scuffing the bottom of a hiking boot against some pea gravel.
“So,” you say.
And it seems like this might be it: the underwhelming extent of your reunion. Until she looks at you quizzically, one dark eyebrow arched. You can’t tell if she’s surprised you’re on this trip, or that you have nothing to say for yourself. Time has suddenly gone geological, and you have approximately an eon to ponder some things.
Like the fact that it’s been since the funeral that you saw her. And that you barely recognized her there because she had cut her hair and dyed it blond. Now it’s growing back and she’s done nothing to disguise the roots, so her dark curls are flecked with gold at the ends. Neither of you is saying anything, but since you are a born anxious silence-filler, you eventually point to the bus and say the first thing that pops into your head, which is:
“What are the odds?”
What you mean is: What are the odds we’re both here? Or maybe what you mean is: What are the odds that any of this should have happened at all? Actually, you’re not sure if evenyoureally know what you mean, so you don’t blame her for notresponding right away. It’s hard to read her expression. Frustration or confusion. Maybe anger.
“Yeah,” she says. “I guess.”
Then her voice kind of dies. There’s no high note at the end like usual. And there’s none of the familiarity or intimacy it once held. She just turns around and heads toward the truck stop.
“See you on the trail, Case,” she says.
She has the same swaggering stride—even grief hasn’t touched that—but when she gets to the glass doors of the building, she stops for a moment to look at her reflection and carefully moves a hair behind her ear. It looks almost like she’s scared to go inside, to cross the threshold of a public place—which you can definitely identify with. Finally, though, she opens the door and steps through, and you watch the glass swing shut behind her, and then your brain just kind of shuts down entirely.
This has been happening off and on in the past half year, this freefall of “disassociation,” as your therapist called it. Basically, when things get too overwhelming for your nervous system, time seems to disappear and you feel outside yourself until suddenly you are you again and the fugue just drifts away as quickly as it descended.
“Why are we just sitting here?!” you ask to no one in particular.
Somehow, you are back on the bus. Fran, who has re-disappeared into her hoodie, points a long grim reaper–like finger toward the window behind you. And when you look out into the copse of towering pines beyond the parking lot, you see the kid in the white tracksuit marching back to the bus with Silas behind him. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was at gunpoint.
“Sporty made a run for it,” says Troy.
The first thing you notice is that the once-pristine white tracksuit is no longer pristine or white. It is an abstract-expressionist canvas of mud spatters and grass stains. Troy lowers his window, and the guy’s voice comes through clear as can be as he stomps closer to the bus.
“I keep telling you, I’m not supposed to be here!” he says. “This isn’t for people like me. It’s for…thosepeople!”
