It lives somewhere else.
THIRTEEN
I can’t wait any longer.
I won’t be the girl who lets just one more day pass, one more month, one more year. Just another girl who forgets to leave Cutwater. And ends up like everyone else in this town. Bitter and regretful, still dreaming of the life they might have had if only they’d mustered the courage to leave.
The next morning, after Dad is long gone, I stuff the contents of my life back into my suitcase.
I scan my closet, to be sure I haven’t missed anything… when I find it.
I tried to forget, push it away from my mind, but the copy ofPeter and Wendyrests beneath an old, moth-eaten sweater. I sink onto the edge of the bed and open the cover, finding the sketch of Oak tucked inside.
My eyes pinch closed, and I consider just crushing the portrait in my fist and throwing it away—destroying everything that’s left of him. But instead I run my thumb down the curves of his face, suffocating on each detail: the way he stares up from the paper, his eyes dangerous and full of sorrow. Unforgettable.Unforgivable.In them I see all the words never said between us.
All the days I’ll never get back.
I fold the sketch of Oak, creasing the paper across the pencil lines of his face, folding it into halves again and again until I hold a tiny square of paper in my palm. Tears soak the paper. My heartache held within its folded edges. I slide it into the pages of the book, hiding it away. Promising myself I’ll never look at it again.
Archer walks by my doorway, peers inside, sees the suitcase. “You’re really doing it?”
I nod.
“Okay,” he says, like he knows it’s real this time. “When?”
“There’s a train at ten p.m. Last one of the night.” In the dark I will leave Cutwater behind, and when the sun begins to rise, the Pacific will stretch out to greet me.
“I’m proud of you.” He exhales, pulling the guitar pick from his pocket, tapping it with his thumb. “Make sure you say goodbye before you go.”
“I will,” I promise.
Standing alone in my room, I know what I need to do.
I retrieve my notebook, the stub of a pencil, and leave the house.
At the end of the driveway, I stop and stare up at the house that I have hated for so long. I open my notebook and press the pencil to a blank page. I sketch the sunken walls, the roof with its sagging eaves, the windows that look like eyes weeping from the moisture always clinging to the glass.
I draw its likeness in my notebook, among all the faces I’ve sketched over the years. The faces of people I’ve been too afraid to ever really know. My notebook is filled with memories, of ghosts, of my past. Filled with a town called Cutwater.
This is what I will take with me.
So I never have to return.
“You running away?” a voice croaks from behind me. I turn, and Mrs. Thierry is standing a few paces away—she must be out for her morning walk, her dog, Peebles, sniffing at the tall wildflowers growing up beside our mailbox.
I snap my notebook closed so she won’t see the sketch.
“The only reason to draw that house”—she nods up at the Goode family home—“is if you plan on leaving it behind.”
I don’t answer her.
She laughs from the back of her throat, like she already knows the answer. “Locals claim they’re leaving Cutwater all the time.” She raises a coarse eyebrow at me. “But they don’t mean it. They always come back.”
Peebles makes his way toward me, huffing at my shoes before he looks away, disinterested.
“I’m not coming back.”
Her eyebrows pull up into her forehead, and her hand trembles against the leash as Peebles tries to tug her forward. “What about that boy of yours, the one named after a tree?”
