“A prison break.”
I didn’t have to dig too deep to find the subtext. Evan already told me he wanted out of Planerville. Whatever had happened to him today didn’t do much to change his mind.
I wanted to ask him about his bloody nose and why his brothers were such assholes to him. I wanted to hear it straight from him, not via the high school grapevine. I wanted, I realized, to know him more, and that wasn’t like me. I didn’t reach out.
The bell rang and Evan gathered his stuff with lightning alacrity and left without a word or a look back.
That night, I lay in bed with my journal on my stomach, tapping a ballpoint against my lip while Ms. P’s love poem assignment clanged around my head.
A love poem.
Me.
She’d have better results asking a mortician to write about the birth of a baby. Love was the wrong end of my expertise spectrum. Death, loss, loneliness—those were my forte. Love was something that belonged in my grayed-out past. Like someone I used to know well, but lost touch with over time. I can’t remember their face anymore, or their voice, or what it meant to share the same space.
I started to write a few lines along that thread but it was too depressing. Ms. P didn’t want a blackened, rotting version of love. She wanted the real deal.
Summer school was starting to sound inevitable.
I dithered and scratched, crossing out more words than I kept and finally tore the paper out of my journal and chucked it in the wastebasket. My brain wasn’t focused on the task anyway. It was thinking about Evan Salinger.
What was he doing right now? Was he getting more grief from his brothers? Or maybe he was at the pool, trying to see how long he could hold his breath. I chewed my lip, wondering if it would be a bad idea to go to Funtown. Why the hell shouldn’t I? I could go wherever the hell I wanted. Free country and all that.
What if he goes there to escape? What if that’s his only goddamn sanctuary?
I chewed my lip some more.
I’d been in survival mode for the last six years. My mom left me alone, every girl for herself. I didn’t give or receive favors unless they were of the meaningless sexual variety. But it wouldn’t kill me to go to Funtown and offer to time Evan while he held his breath…
Hold your breath
I will mark the minutes
And guard your peace…
I blinked at the words I’d written.
Good god, what kind of weird shit is that?
I tossed myself back on my bed, thinking I’d try for a full night’s sleep for once.
I stared at the ceiling.
I stared at my cell phone. Nearly nine o’clock, it said, and in perfectly good working order. Not cracked. My boots weren’t ruined. But I’d been a bitch to Evan, and I hated having that over my head.
I got up and put on some old jeans, and sandals I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing at school, and headed out.
I biked to Funtown through a stifling, sticky night. The cicadas were deafening, their constant chirp winding around a town gone to sleep already. Yellow light burned in the windows of only a few houses. No one was on the street. No cars drove past in either direction. A living ghost town.
The water park was deserted, same as last time. Evan was in the pool, same as last time. He rested his arms on the cement of the deep end, his chin propped on his forearms. He looked exhausted. Defeated. As if he’d swum a hundred laps though the water around him was still.
My sandals slapped the pavement, announcing my trespassing. Evan came here to escape, I told myself. I was an unwelcome intruder. I should go back and leave him alone. But I didn’t. He looked up without lifting his head—just his blue eyes that looked dimmer somehow.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hi, Jo.”
What was it about my name in his voice? He was always saying my name. Even in my dreams. I don’t think I’d ever said his out loud.
“I don’t want to bother you,” I said.
“You’re not bothering me.”
“I’ll go if you want to be alone.”
He murmured something against his arms.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. He went under, came back up and pushed the hair back from his face. “Why did you come here?”
I sat down on one of the loungers nearest the deep end. “I have my phone. It has a timer. I thought maybe I could time you. You know…holding your breath?”
“Is this really how you want to spend your Wednesday night?” he asked. He shook his head, silently answering his own question. “You should go. If someone sees you here, you’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Like I give a shit what people think of me.” Evan looked me up and down, his gaze coming to rest on my long hair that covered my scar like a shield. I crossed my arms. “Do you want me to time you or not?”
“No, thank you, Jo,” he said quietly. “Not tonight.”
I got up, gathered my bag. “You want to be alone. I get it. I shouldn’t have come. Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. I’m just not good company right now.”
“Bad day?”