Our relationship flared up fast and burned out just as quickly. We spent most of freshman year breaking up, making up, and repeating it all over again. Sophomore year, too. Even when our relationship was done for good, our friendship never faded. We became closer, actually, as if we just needed to plow through the romantic BS to finally reach the real core of our kinship. There were always persistent whispers behind our backs about whether or not we were still sleeping with each other. He loved fueling those rumors. Let them talk, he’d say. Our friendship goes deeper than that.
I wanted to see myself the way Silas saw me. When he laid his eyes on me, nothing else existed. There was just me and him, the here and now and those breaths in between.
Amara and Tobias felt it, too. We were all under his spell.
Then we graduated.
Now we’re stranded in that liminal space between childhood and adulthood, which most days feels like being stuck somewhere between the living and the dead. Amara moved back in with her parents so she could shovel her way out of student debt. Tobias has twenty roommates in some dingy apartment I’ve never been invited to. He’s plodding away at some brain-dead temp job while Amara has her soul-sucking waitressing gig. Careers with no consequence, if you can call them careers.
I have chosen survival at whatever cost. Any writerly ambitions I might’ve had after graduating—which, let’s be honest with ourselves here, was never going to happen—have long since faded. I’m just trying to land an entry-level job at the McMartin Agency and buy the independence I’ve been dreaming of.
That includes letting go of Silas. Living in his orbit has always been exhausting. What burned as bright as the sun all through our undergrad years now feels like a black hole. I keep getting dragged back into the gravitational pull of his bullshit. His nu-beatnik existence always defied the rest of our conventional career paths. At first, I used to think if he could succeed—and by succeed I mean just be him, just live his life and write—then maybe I could exist vicariously through him. It became my postgrad project to take care of Silas. I took it upon myself to ensure his survival at whatever cost, even if that meant protecting Silas from himself.
But I’m tired. I’m done being his lifeline. I can’t keep doing this. By the time I pull off the interstate, closing in on the Wawa, I’ve made up my mind. This is it. No more bailouts.
I never know what he’s on most of the time. I don’t want to know. Don’t ask, don’t tell is our policy now. I always spot the paraphernalia falling out of his pockets—a charred spoon, a lighter with REHAB IS FOR QUITTERS printed on its side, burnt asteroids of tinfoil with a gummy black tar clinging to their crumpled cores—the totems of his own decline. His addiction shouldn’t have come as a surprise to any of us. Silas always wanted to experience everything. That addiction entered the fold was just the natural progression of things.
I know how awful that sounds. That we’re all—that I’m—resigned to Silas’s fate somehow. But sometimes the best kind of help a friend can offer is to just stop helping. I’ve tried everything else. Silas keeps contaminating everything he touches, like a bacterial infection spreading throughout our circle.
His younger sister finally convinced him to go to rehab when no one else could. It’s just been the two of them ever since their mother died. Silas is the only family Callie has at this point. Somehow she got Silas to enroll in a no-frills twenty-eight-day residential treatment program. A cage with no bars. By my count, he’s barely made it through the first three days—a new record for him—before stealing back his phone.
Come save me.
I light a cigarette and roll down my window a crack to let the smoke out. Rain dapples my forearm. There’s the Wawa sign up ahead. Better script out what I’m going to say to Silas:
I can’t do this anymore…I’m sorry. I need to move on with my life.
I spot a gauzy form through the windshield as I pull into the Wawa lot. The wipers sweep over the glass, parting the veil of rain, revealing him.
Silas.
I spring up in my seat, gripping the wheel with both hands. The rush is instantaneous. After all these years, even now, just the sight of him is enough to send a flood of blood straight through me.
He steps into my car’s headlights. He’s completely drenched. His stringy hair covers his face. He’s carrying a plastic shopping bag, a yellow smiley face printed on its side: THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING WITH US. He’s barefoot. Wet leaves cling to his feet. He doesn’t look like Silas. Doesn’t feel like him somehow. He’s gotten worse, as if he has atrophied in rehab.
“Where are your shoes?” I ask as he opens the door and jumps in.
“You don’t see them?”
I glance over my shoulder. “…See who?”
“Nothing? Nothing at all?”
“I don’t see any—”
“Never mind. Just go. Go go goooo.” He punctuates each go by smacking the armrest.
I pull out of the parking lot, suddenly worried the police are on his tail—that this is actually some kind of jailbreak and I’m his goddamn getaway driver.
“You wouldn’t believe that place. Fucking religious nutjobs sitting in a circle, talking about accepting Christ into their life. Such a con. You realize that, right? They pull you in with these promises of getting better but it’s really just a front for converting you. Once you sign in, they don’t hide it anymore. They just keep the God talk out of it until you’re stranded. Then it’s all tambourines and prayers and—”
“Where are we going?”
He glances over his shoulder, checking to see if we’re being followed. “Your place?”
“What’s wrong with your apartment?”
“Home’s in flux. It’s safer at your pad.”
“Safer?”
“Less static. Less interference.” He keeps peering into the side mirror. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. The headlights from passing cars streak through our windows.
I can’t help but think, I ditched Tanner for this? I could still be out, at least striving to have the quasi–time of my life, but instead, I’m stuck carting Silas’s soaking-wet ass back to my apartment before he freezes to death. “Callie will be worried if we don’t—”
“She’s dead to me. Fucking witch. Anyone who would—who would do that to their own brother? And call it love? Fuck that. That’s not love. She doesn’t understand what I’m trying—”
“That’s not true. She just wants you to be—”
“Look out!” Silas’s attention locks onto something outside of the windshield. He braces himself for impact, as if there’s something in the middle of the highway, but nothing’s there.
“What?” I shout. “What is it?”
Silas spins around to look out the rear window. “Did you…? Did you see that?”
“See what? I don’t see anything!”
Another car passes us, its high beams illuminating his wild eyes. “Pull over.”
“We’re on the highway!”
“I need to get out. Now.” He’s already opening his door as the car clocks in at sixty-five fucking miles an hour on the rain-slicked interstate. I’m in the middle lane of a three-lane highway at eleven at night and he’s about to leap.
“Silas! Stop!” I have to veer to the right to reach the shoulder before he jumps. A horn blares behind us as I cut off another car. We swerve onto the far shoulder, gravel shredding the chassis’s underbelly before I suddenly skid, dovetailing back onto the interstate.
“Are you crazy?! You’re gonna—”
“Pulloverpulloverpullover!” Something in his voice—the sudden rush of words, the fury that fills the cabin—frightens me. I course-correct the car and pull over. We barely come to a stop before the door flies open and Silas tumbles onto the gravel. He lands on his hands, then springs to his feet.
“What the hell are you thinking? You could’ve—”
But he’s not listening. He leaves his door open and bolts. The steady rush of traffic flies by, high beams sweeping over his body.
“Silas, where are you—”
I put the car in park and turn the hazards on—orange lights pulsing with a click-click-click—then reach over the passenger side seat to close his door.
“Silas!”
By the time I sit up, Silas has climbed over the barrier and is entering the woods that surround the interstate, the happy-faced shopping bag bobbing along behind him. Where are his shoes? Why isn’t he wearing shoes?
“SILAS!” I scream.