“Climb in,” Jon Cox called from the driver’s seat, one hand lazily resting on the dark curve of the wheel. Isaac lounged in the back, his guitar in his lap. Mama sat in the passenger seat, fiddling with the bumping radio.
“Climb?” I repeated. No way was I putting my dirty shoes on a car that had probably cost what my parents paid for five years’ rent.
“Yeah, I mean, within reason,” Jon Cox said.
After a second, Mama snapped his fingers at me. “Maaake haaaste,” he sang, a rumbling operatic sound.
I braced my hands on the door and vaulted in. My elbow buckled a second too soon, and I barreled into the neck of Isaac’s guitar. He snatched it away, instantly inspecting it, fingers skimming every inch of the wood. It was a beautiful instrument, sleek and rosy.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, settling in the soft black leather of the backseat.
“All good. She’s intact.” Isaac peered at me through narrowed eyes. “But watch it. Damage my baby, and I will ship you back to California in my guitar case.” His face lit up. “Did you guys know there was this girl who tried to ship herself to the Beatles in a box? Apparently she forgot to put air holes in the crate, which was, like, amateur mistake. If I was going to—”
Mama turned up the music, drowning him out. Isaac gave him the finger, Jon Cox laughed, and we revved down the street and through campus.
I kept one hand on my head, holding my baseball cap on. The film houses passed by, identical dollhouses, square black windows shielding musty-looking curtains. We rounded a corner and slid between the two biggest dorms on campus, Wingate and Ewing, which faced each other down as if in a Western standoff. Finally, we passed through Arthur’s Arch, leaving campus behind, framed by that imposing iron A.
Instead of continuing through town toward its array of shops and restaurants, we headed down a side street and out into the open countryside. Jon Cox accelerated until the wind started to billow around us, heavy waves of air. The woodland that encircled Kensington was assuming the tinge of autumn yellow, worn out by a long summer. Every so often, a peeling clapboard house cropped up on the side of the winding road, or a clearing dipped into the woodlands, fields rippling with tall grass and wildflowers.
The breeze tasted like loam and the coming fall, and it made the golden tassel of Jon Cox’s hair ripple. “Hey,” he told Mama, “can you Insta this?”
Mama sighed. “Like I said. Slave to the Internet.” He picked up Jon’s phone, entered his password, opened Instagram, and snapped a stupidly photogenic picture. “You should pay me for doing your branding,” he grumbled.
Isaac glanced at me. “Jon Cox has, like, eighty thousand Instagram followers,” he explained.
“Ugh,” I said, involuntarily. He laughed.
“What can I say?” Jon Cox said, sounding satisfied. “Insta girls love me.”
“It’s probably 90 percent bots,” Isaac shot back. “The spam algorithms love you.”
“Follow me,” Jon Cox called back to me, ignoring Isaac. “Join the crowds.”
“I don’t do social media,” I said, which was true. If I’d had it, I would have deleted it to stay under the radar, anyway.
We were far off-campus by now, and the music faded out. After a second, a plucking guitar riff rang through the speakers. “Love Me Forever.”
“Yes,” Jon Cox yelled, turning it up, summoning the bass to thud against my back.
“Here we go,” Mama groaned, sinking in the passenger seat. I glanced into the side mirror. He’d sunk so low, all I could see were his thick eyebrows hiding beneath the chaos of hair over his wide forehead.
Jon Cox and Isaac were already singing along at the top of their lungs. Isaac was strumming along on his guitar, too, the strings vibrating inaudibly under the crisp envelope of the sound system. “Last night you said you love me,” he and Jon wailed. “You said you can’t stop, can’t stop thinking of me—”
In front of me, Mama started to sing an octave down. His voice cut through the song like a bassoon. “Baby, I hope it doesn’t tear you apart . . .”
Jon Cox cracked up. The persistent bray of his laughter was infectious. I couldn’t stop myself from grinning, and as my smile spread wide, a warning chimed in me. Arm’s length. Keep your cover. Don’t get in too deep.
As the chorus approached, Jon Cox turned up the volume even more, drowning my thoughts. That huge, splashy hook blared out, and before I knew it, I was singing too, yell-singing at the top of my lungs. “And you asked, ‘When you gonna tell the truth?’ and I said, ‘Never’ . . .” The sound of our voices dissipated instantly, whisked away in the rush of the wind barreling through Jon Cox’s car. Lost out in the world. “’Cause you’re looking for somebody who can love you forever, and I can’t do that—I can’t do that—I can’t do that, oh no, no, no.”
The sun glowered down at us. The wind rose. We rushed by a house where a pair of middle-aged women sat on the lawn in plastic chairs, reading yellowing novels, dressed in florals. They glanced up as we passed, and their deep-set eyes tracked us until we were gone. The woods around us broke into rough waves of grass as we headed for a steep hill, and when the car crested and plunged down the incline, my stomach lifted. My heart lifted. Everything lifted, and I looked around at the guys in the car, laughing now, laughing about those dumb lyrics, all love and yearning, and I thought, This is wonderful, this is wonderful, this is never going to last.
Nothing lasts. I knew that, and I spent half my life repeating it to myself. Only Michael had ever managed to make me forget. He lived in the moment so much, he threw away everything other than the world in his immediate orbit. Sometimes I could’ve sworn he had no past and couldn’t give a damn about the future, that he was some temporary blessing that flickered in and out of existence exactly as he wanted. You had to grab Michael by the shoulders and bully him to wring out any information about his life back home: Seattle and his three little brothers. His parents’ calm suburban life did not interest him, and neither did Kensington kids’ usual obsessions with what was coming next, colleges or conservatories or auditions. All Michael wanted was the wildness of the present, and he wanted it all at once. It was exhilarating, right up until the point that it became selfish.
I sat in the back of that glimmering car with its purring engine and I let myself think about him without anger, without longing, without anything. Michael wasn’t perfect, which I’d known, but maybe he wasn’t even perfect for me, which hadn’t occurred to me. It seemed a little clearer to me now. It wasn’t enlightenment to live like you had no history and no consequences. The world wasn’t just made out of instants—it was made out of plans, too, and the ability to learn from your mistakes. I wished he’d learned.