I spend the next day holed up in my bedroom with the blinds closed, eating Red Vines and watching weird Netflix documentaries on my laptop, hiding out like a wounded fugitive in the last third of a Clint Eastwood movie. Vita, my mom’s ornery old tabby, wanders in and out as she likes. Everything up here is the same as I left it: blue-and-white striped wallpaper, the cheerful yellow rug, the fluffy gray duvet on the bed. The Golly, Molly artwork a designer friend of my mom’s did when I was a baby hanging above the desk, right next to a bulletin board holding my track meet schedule from junior year and a photo of me at the Donnellys’ farmhouse with Julia and Patrick and Gabe, my mouth wide open mid-laugh. Even my hairbrush is still sitting on the dresser, the one I forgot to take with me in my mad dash out of Star Lake after the People article, like it was just waiting for me to come crawling all the way back here with a head full of knots.
It’s the photo I keep catching myself looking at, though, like there’s some kind of karmic magnet attached to the back of it drawing my attention from clear across the room. Finally, I haul myself out of bed and pull it down to examine more closely: It’s from their family party the summer after freshman year, back when Patrick and I were dating. The four of us are sitting sprawled on the ratty old couch in the barn behind the farmhouse, me and all three Donnellys, Julia in the middle of saying something snarky and Patrick with his arm hooked tight around my waist. Gabe’s looking right at me, although I never actually noticed that until after everything happened. Just holding the stupid picture feels like pressing on a bruise.
Patrick’s not even home this summer, I know from creeping him on Facebook. He’s doing some volunteer program in Colorado, clearing brush and learning to fight forest fires just like he always dreamed of doing when we were little and running around in the woods behind his parents’ house. There’s no chance of even bumping into him around town.
Probably there’s no good reason to feel disappointed about that.
I slap the photo facedown on the desktop and climb back under the covers, pushing Vita onto the carpet—this room has been hers and the dog’s in my absence; the sticky layer of pet hair has made that much abundantly clear. When I was a kid, living up here made me feel like a princess, tucked in the third-floor turret of my mom’s old haunted house. Now, barely a week after high school graduation, it makes me feel like one again—trapped in a magical tower, with no place in the whole world to go.
I dig the last Red Vine out of the cellophane package just as Vita hops right back up onto the pillow beside me. “Get out, Vita,” I order, pushing her gently off again and rolling my eyes at the haughty flick of her feline tail as she stalks out the door, fully expecting her to turn up again almost immediately.
Day 3
Vita doesn’t.
Day 4
Imogen doesn’t, either. When I was staring down my summer-long sentence in Star Lake, the idea of seeing her again was the only thing that made it feel at all bearable, but so far my hey, I’m back and let’s hang out texts have gone resolutely unanswered. Could be she hates me, too. Imogen and I have been friends since first grade, and she stuck by me pretty hard at the end of junior year, sitting beside me in the cafeteria at school even as everyone else at our lunch table mysteriously disappeared and the whispers turned into something way, way worse. Still, the truth is I didn’t exactly give her a heads-up before I left Star Lake to do my senior year at Bristol—an all-girls boarding school plunked like a missile silo in the middle of the desert outside Tempe, Arizona.
Absconded under the cover of darkness, more like.
By the next day it’s been a full ninety-six hours of minimal human contact, though, so when my mom knocks hard on the bedroom door to let me know her cleaning lady is coming, I pull some clean shorts out of the pile of detritus already accumulated on my floor. My Tshirts and underwear are still in my giant duffel. I’ll have to unpack at some point, probably, although the truth is I’d almost rather live out of a suitcase for three months. My old sneakers are tucked underneath the desk chair, I notice while I’m crouched down there, the laces still tied from the last time I wore them—the day the article came out I remember suddenly, like I thought I could somehow outrun a national publication. I had sprinted as hard and as fast as I could manage.
I’d thrown up on the dusty side of the road.
Woof. I do my best to shake off the memory, grabbing the photo of me and the Donnellys—still facedown on the desk where I left it the other night—and shoving it into the back of the drawer in my nightstand. Then I lace my boots up and take my neglected old Passat into Star Lake proper.
It’s cool enough to open the windows, and even through the pine trees lining the sides of Route 4 I can smell the slightly mildewy scent of the lake as I head for the short stretch of civilization that makes up downtown: Main Street is small and rumpled, all diners and dingy grocery stores, a roller rink that hasn’t been open since roughly 1982. That’s about the last time this place was a destination, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell—the lakefront plus the endless green stretch of the Catskill Mountains was a big vacation spot in the sixties and seventies, but ever since I can remember Star Lake has had the air of something that used to be but isn’t anymore, like you fell into your grandparents’ honeymoon by mistake.
I speed up as I bypass the Donnellys’ pizza shop, slouching low in my seat like a gangbanger until I pull up in front of French Roast, the coffee shop where Imogen’s worked since we were freshmen. I open the door to the smell of freshly ground beans and the sound of some moody girl singer on the radio. The shop is mostly empty, a late-morning lull. Imogen’s standing behind the counter, midnight-dark hair hanging in her eyes, and when she looks up at the jangle of the bells, guilty, awkward panic flashes across her pretty face in the moment before she can quell it.