He shrugs. “Chicago, New York City, Portland. Wherever. You clearly hate it here, is what I’m saying. You look down on everybody. You could go someplace with fancy people with fancy degrees and fancy opinions. You don’t have to stay in Vacca Vale and sneer at everyone.”
It’s as though he’s hurled the lemons at her. Blandine backs away, eyes wide with fear, injury, shock. “I don’t sneer at everyone,” she says. “I only look down at those at the top.”
Jack shakes his head. “See, I don’t think that’s true.”
“It is, though.” She bites her lip. “It—it is true.”
“Oh God. Don’t cry. Please don’t. I just—sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you or anything. I was trying—”
“I’m not leaving Vacca Vale,” Blandine cuts in. Now her voice is angry. “If I wanted to get out of here, I would have by now. But I don’t want to, and I don’t sneer at the people here. Do you understand? I am never, ever leaving Vacca Vale.”
He looks at her like she’s told him that the moon is actually a golf ball, hurled out of bounds and lodged in the sky. “Well, that’s just insane,” says Jack.
“What?”
“I’d leave the second I got the chance. Why the hell would you stay?”
“Are you serious? A second ago you were—”
“I was saying you can be a little snobby, that’s all. I never said that Vacca Vale was some kind of paradise. If I ever got the chance to escape, I would fucking seize it.”
“It’s not like we’re surrounded by a moat of sharks.”
“Maybe I’ll leave someday, but it’s not as easy for me as it would be for you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on, Blandine. We know you went to Philomena’s. We know you got that scholarship.”
She looks outraged. “How—”
“It’s all online, okay? I didn’t look it up. Malik did. He’s got a thing for you. He’s actually sort of obsessed with you, but you didn’t hear it from me. Anyway, it doesn’t take a team of detectives to figure out that you had options that the rest of us didn’t have. We hear the way you talk. The books you lug around? We know you go to those community meetings about the revitalization. You—you’re . . . different.”
She rolls her eyes.
“No, I’m serious. You had a shot to find something beyond this place, and you didn’t take it. And I don’t care what you say about your undying loyalty to Vacca Vale—I don’t buy it. I think you desperately wanted to get out of here, and something went wrong. So what was it? Why’d you drop out of high school? Why do you serve screwy pie for a living?” He pauses, standing tall. “Why?”
Blandine’s face goes hot. In the drawer of her nightstand, she keeps a printed email from her guidance counselor, Mrs. Wood. Nearly two years old, the paper is worn and delicate now, folded countless times in the same three places. The email was short and unadorned, but it filled Tiffany with a druglike euphoria when she first read it, tripling the oxygen available to her, stretching the ceiling several stories higher. She received the message at lunch, in the library of St. Philomena, on a stormy day in October. It was the beginning of her junior year, before her life collapsed under the weight of her stupidest desires. Immediately, Tiffany printed the email and stowed it in the front pocket of her corduroy backpack so that it would always be close to her.
Although the message now plunges her into very different psychological weather, Blandine still returns to it from time to time, reading and rereading the futures that Mrs. Wood had imagined on her behalf. A list of the most elite universities in the country. A serious inquiry into Tiffany’s visions for herself, as though they were relevant to other people, as though they were achievable. The actions that she could take to realistically pursue acceptance into these mahogany worlds of choice, mobility, beauty. Tiffany understood herself to be woefully uninformed—she had turned seventeen just three weeks prior—but even then, trembling under fluorescent light, listening to rain on glass, inhaling the scent of library books, she knew that any one of the degrees described by Mrs. Wood ranked among the most powerful passports on Earth. Was it possible that education could not only distract Tiffany from the windowless waiting room of her life, but actually liberate her from it? With continued hard work, Mrs. Wood wrote, it’s clear that you could put forth an exceptionally strong application. While I can never guarantee an admissions outcome, I have no doubt that you merit the consideration of these institutions. At the very least, you have earned the right to their attention.
In Pinky’s sunlit loft, Blandine feels horribly visible, as though she is unclothed. “College isn’t for everyone,” she snaps.
“Right,” says Jack. “It’s for people like you.”
“I’m not going to tolerate a lecture on education from you.”
Jack’s not offended. “What?” he asks. “Because I didn’t go to college, either? Come on, Blandine. Don’t make this about me. I’m smart enough to understand that I’m not that smart. But you had—”
“You don’t have to be a genius to go to college. From what I understand, it’s easier if you’re not.”
“Doesn’t matter. College wasn’t for me, that’s obvious. But—”
“You act like college is some kind of sanctuary. But it’s a system, as corrupt as the rest of them. You can’t just climb up some credits, out of your history, into a better life. You can’t. You’re trapped inside yourself no matter how many degrees you get. College is just another level in the game that oppresses us—oppresses everyone.”
“I’m not lecturing you,” says Jack. The tenderness in his expression catches Blandine off guard, makes the room glitter vertiginously. “And I’m not judging you. I’m trying to figure out what happened to you.”
In the ensuing silence, feeling skittish, Blandine spots a camera, situated atop a thick book called Rust Belt: The Second Coming. Easy to reach with a slingshot.
“We can’t leave Vacca Vale,” she finally murmurs, eyes on the fishbowl of political pins. “We’re the only ones who can save it.”
Jack doesn’t say anything, but when she looks at him, he meets her gaze like a dare. He has understood something crucial. Some subtext has become audible to him, and he has listened to it. Evidence of this change is packed into his expression, and Blandine sees it. Feels it. In the loft, in his sky blue T-shirt and yellow baseball cap, buzz cut and summer tan, Jack looks sturdy, convincing, real. He glows with the radiant health Blandine associates with the Amish and the fatal obedience she associates with the military. She looks at him—truly looks at him—for the first time. Freckles splashed on his nose from the sun, facial asymmetry, speckles of acne, the bright and endearingly crowded teeth. His muscles have become more defined since the spring, his chest broader, his clothes tighter. Even though her roommates are a year older than Blandine, they usually strike her as a generation below. But right now, in the July light and immaculate loft and the buzzing aftermath of their first real conversation, Jack appears her age.
It occurs to her that she could walk up to him, touch his shirt, and kiss him. Undress herself in a shrine of someone else’s wealth. What would he do? Suddenly, she finds it unbelievable that they have shared a shower for a year. As they look at each other, warmth blossoms inside her, and her pulse quickens, and she feels like an idiot. With a ferocity that commandeers her entire body, she longs to take his hand and guide him into the bedroom, under her dress, into some kind of future, a future of his hand on her knee at the cinema, boiling pasta, waking up and describing their dreams. She longs to sleep in for the rest of her life. To sink into that pool of white linen and tell him to do whatever he wants to her.
The Samoyeds cry at the door.
“Okay,” says Jack. “They have to go. For real this time.” He scratches his buzz cut nervously, shifting from foot to foot, clutching the leashes. “You ready?”
She crosses the room, stopping inches from him. Her eyes at the level of his chest, she can feel his body heat. For a moment, he seems shocked by her proximity, but then his face softens, as though he’s expected this for a long time. Her hand hovers close to his torso, and she can almost feel the worn cotton of his shirt. Gently, he traces a scratch on her arm. She feels his touch swimming up and down her body like a minnow. They are both breathing quickly, pumped with a familiar panic—one that arrives the first time two people reach for each other. The kind that says: if you get any closer, you will shatter this.
Remembering the cameras, Blandine abruptly kneels and pets the agitated dogs. Their fur is clean, white, unrealistically soft. As she scratches their necks, they stop whimpering. Globs of drool hang from their mouths.