"Can I ask you something?" I asked.
"Go ahead."
"Do you do this all the time? Sleep in the woods?"
"When I can." A pause. "It's where things make sense."
"And things don't make sense anywhere else?"
He was quiet long enough that I rolled onto my side to look at him. He was lying back against his pack, one arm behind his head, watching the canopy. The fireflies caught the line of his jaw, the breadth of his shoulder.
"People don't make sense," he said. "The way they complicate things that don't need to be complicated."
"And out here?"
"Out here, everything is what it is. The creek runs or it doesn't. The trail's clear or it's washed out. Nothing out here is pretending to be something else."
I understood that more than he probably knew. My entire life in Charlotte was pretending—pretending the major was right, pretending the classes mattered, pretending I had a plan when the plan had always been someone else's and I'd just gone along with it.
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the folded syllabus. "Come here."
He turned his head. In the dark, I couldn't read his expression, but I could feel the weight of his attention. He got up, crossed the clearing, and sat beside me on the sleeping bag. So close. Close enough that the heat of his body added to the heat of the night, and I didn't mind.
I held out the list. He took it, and I turned on the flashlight and aimed it at the paper—just long enough for him to read. The light drew a cloud of tiny moths that scattered when I clicked it off.
I knew what he'd seen. Eleven items in my handwriting—some practical, some ambitious, all of them things I had never done.
Eat at a restaurant alone.
Drive somewhere new with no plan.
Go camping alone in the mountains.
Learn to change a tire.
Swim in a river.
See the sunrise from a mountain.
Tell someone the truth about how I'm doing.
And near the bottom, in smaller handwriting, the one I hadn't been able to write at full size.
Have sex.
He refolded the paper and handed it back. No comment on the list. No comment on the last item. He just returned it like it was exactly what it was—something that belonged to me.
"College isn't working," I said. "I'm heading into my senior year, and I still don't know what I'm doing there. I waited two years after high school to even start because I didn't know what I wanted, and I still don't. I picked my major because my mom's friend said it was practical. I picked my classes because my advisor said they'd look good. I picked my dorm because it was the cheapest option. I'm twenty-three years old, and nothing I've ever done has been because I wanted it."
I tucked the syllabus back in my pocket. The paper was warm from his hands.
"The list was the first thing I chose. Every item on it. Nobody told me to write it. Nobody approved it. I just—" I stopped. "I needed to know if I could want things. On my own. Without someone telling me what to want."
The cicadas pulsed. A firefly drifted between us, close enough that for a second his face was lit in gold—eyes steady, jaw set,the expression of a man who was listening like it was the most important thing happening in the world.
"You drove four hours to camp alone in mountains you've never been to," he said. "In a car you didn't know would make it. With gear you'd never used." He looked at me. "You can want things."
My throat tightened. It wasn't what he said. It was the way he said it—like it was obvious. Like the evidence was already in and the verdict wasn't even close.
