She looked at him, saw he was studying her intently. “Follow my finger with your eyes,” he said, and then his fingertip dragged through the air, back and forth. After a moment, his hand dropped. “All right. Looks like nothing’s too badly rattled in there.”
He strode around the car, slid into the driver’s seat, one hand on the steering wheel and one reaching out, hovering over her shoulder. She sucked in a shuddering breath and then another.
She felt so heavy. Dragged down by the weight of despair. Such emotions threatened to unravel her from the inside out; she was beginning to fray, a sound building at the back of her throat.
She tried to hold it back, but then her eyes were stinging; she was shaking, and all the grief she had held pent up for so long began to escape her in little sobs and gasps.
James did not reach for her, for which she felt impossibly grateful; she could not have borne anyone’s touch in that moment.
Minutes passed. She could not be sure how many. They simply sat in the car, on the curb, outside of the house she grew up in—that house where she couldn’t untangle the good memories from the bad. And suddenly, she could not be there anymore; she had to leave, to look away. It simply hurt too much to be there.
“I can’t,” she said, when she could speak again. “Go back. There. I can’t.”
This probably made no sense to him, but he nodded as if he understood. “The dorm?”
She shook her head and the world swam. “Away,” she said. “Anywhere.” She expected him to inquire, to ask for more information, but he remained quiet.
She barely noticed when he put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb.
He drove.
She wasn’t sure where they were going; the world faded into the quiet hum of the engine, the sound of air rushing by, the gleam of headlights, and the familiar cologne-and-paint smell of James’s coat.
He had draped it over her legs at some point.
Probably because she was shivering. He had noticed, even if she hadn’t.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Does it matter?”
She thought about it, which was harder than it should have been. “Not really.”
“Do you care about missing a day or two of school?”
“Not really.”
“All right, then.”
TWENTY-FIVE
James pulled the car onto a freeway and drove east.
If they’d never left Portland, if they’d never gone to her house, Dee realized things would’ve been different. She’d be calling James a hipster hobo and a weird artist and he’d be smiling and taking it. But here, in this car, it felt like she’d shed her skin—raw and exposed.
No one had ever seen her like that. Cowering and weak, in that house that seemed to sap the life from her. She half expected him to ask questions, to probe at the raw memories.
But he never said a word. He simply drove, his fingers flicking down to the radio when the silence became oppressive. There was something soothing about the sound of pavement beneath the tires, of the low hum of the radio, the voices that occasionally fizzed in and out of audibility, of the taste of stale water when Dee found a bottle in the glove compartment.
They drove for hours, until evening crept in and all she could see were headlights.
They drove.
Because she could not bear to remain still.
It was sometime after night had fallen that James pulled off the interstate, found a dark nook of a gravel road. “I need to sleep,” he said. “You should, too.”
Dee curled up in the backseat, under a thick woolen blanket James pulled out of the trunk. James took the passenger seat, cranking it to a nearly horizontal position.
