“You’re f**king crazy,” he screamed.
I stared at him.
His cigarette lay smoldering on the boards.
“I’m not like you,” he said. “I don’t want to self-destruct.”
“What?” I said in a soft voice.
“If you want to kill yourself, don’t do it in front of me. Don’t make me try to save you.”
I watched, speechless, as he climbed down the ladder and stalked off through the tall grass.
Then I stood there alone. The cherry still burned. I stubbed it out with my toe and sat down. I felt empty, a sort of diffuse hunger, a gnawing sensation in my belly and lungs and throat.
The world shivered brightly.
Don’t. Don’t f**king cry.
I took my phone out. Lost myself in those lights, the stupid pixels that formed words that meant everything.
From up here I had a view of the carnival, too. I snapped a pic. Mine was farther out, a sprinkle of rainbow glitter. I sent it without a message. His reply, almost instantaneous, was what I’d expected, and I smiled.
Wish I was there, he said.
Me too, I answered.
I pressed the phone to my chest, a warm rectangle of light irradiating my bones. I wasn’t sitting there alone. I wasn’t alone anywhere anymore.
Something made me check the screen again. I’d read it fast, teary-eyed. It was different when I read it the second time.
What he’d actually written was, Wish you were here.
Wesley met me Monday morning outside calc with a carrot cupcake.
“Olive branch,” he said.
I split it with him.
“Hey,” he said, licking frosting from his lips, “if shit gets crazy at your house, you can come to mine. My mom won’t try to give you advice. She’ll just stuff your face.”
On impulse, I hugged him. He was ungodly tall. “Thank you,” I said somewhere in the vicinity of his xyphoid process.
When I let go he was blushing.
A pang of guilt. Had I been leading him on, by habit? Nip that in the bud. I flicked his ear. “Hiyam’s having a homecoming after-party. You want to go and drink her booze and stare at her tits?”
“Fuck yes.”
I walked into Film Studies later that morning feeling more in balance with the universe than I had in a long time. Which meant, of course, that the universe had to swing a big rusty wrench straight into my face.
He wasn’t there. A sub sat at his desk.
“Where’s Mr. Wilke?” I said.
The sub shrugged. “His instructions say you can use this period to work on your semester project.”
Wesley and I slipped out after she took attendance.
“This is f**king weird,” I muttered.
“Why?”
Because he drove me home Friday. Because we made out in his car, in the rain. Because he said he thought of doing terrible things to me in his head.
“I don’t know. He didn’t seem sick last week.”
“Mysterious illnesses often strike the elderly.”
I kicked the back of Wesley’s knee.
“Are you gonna spend the whole day pining for him?”
Yes. “Meet me in the lab in ten. We can start on our masterpiece.”
Where are you? I texted Mr. Wilke when I was alone at my locker.
I waited for a reply. Five minutes. Ten. Then I sighed, and tossed it in, and buried myself in schoolwork.
He finally responded that afternoon. Court date. Nothing major.
I didn’t reply.
A minute later, he added, I miss you.
I stood at my locker as kids milled around me and felt like I was on a movie set, surrounded by extras. Their lives were so small, so simple. So scripted. No one had a secret life like this. No one was texting the teacher they’d f**ked, the teacher they were planning to f**k again.
I want to see you, I said.
I expected a brush-off. I did not expect him to say, Can you meet me outside school?
Yes. God, yes. Where?
He gave me an address not far away for a pickup.
And then where? I said.
Wherever you want.
I sat on an old cold case outside a derelict gas station half a mile from school. The sun banged off chrome pumps scabbed with rust, ricocheting into my eyes in bright bullets. Heat baked up from the cracked concrete. A tin sign pocked with BB holes creaked mysteriously, no breeze touching it. I reclined in a cool bath of shadow, my body relaxed, my mind going a million miles an hour.
He pulled up like a movie star, one arm propped on the headrest, mirrored aviators flashing.
I got in. The seat leather scorched my legs.
We didn’t speak. He took his sunglasses off. His eyes were tender and soft beneath. He wore a pinstripe shirt and tie with jeans, sleeves rolled up, hair wind-tossed. Sun gilded the feathering of stubble on his cheek.
We didn’t kiss.
Our hands met on the scalding seat between us.
I breathed fast. I hadn’t been this scared since I got into that rollercoaster car by myself. This was the same thing, really—getting on a ride that might destroy us.
Worst Case Scenario: he loses his job, I get kicked out of school.
Best Case Scenario—
I don’t know. What is the best case scenario? Sneaking around, peering out of curtains? Lying to everyone we know?
I thought of that Robert Frost poem they love to ruin for you in high school. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. This was where my life forked. I could only go one way; in the other, Gwyneth Paltrow plays my alternate self like in Sliding Doors, ending up miserable or happy. That was the question. Which one was she? Which was I?