We wound up back in the attic. Isaac wanted to see the wig. I hadn’t taken it along. Instead, I unlocked my phone and showed him the shot of the Greek Monologue class for our upcoming showcase, where I stood at the end of the row, bright-pink lipstick and long hair. It was 4:15 a.m., and everything had turned vivid with sleepless delirium, everything tenser and funnier and more electric than it should have been. We wound up stretched on the bed, side by side, staring at the ceiling, talking music and home and nothing at all. His guitar was a gift from his mother, so expensive he’d wanted her to return it. My mom’s most valuable present had always been her time.
In the slanted attic ceiling, a set of narrow skylights displayed slices of the outside world. Pine branches shivered overhead. A hollow moan of wind passed by, distant, a ghostly lullaby. I had thawed from the trip outside, my muscles tired and empty.
A glittering spray of snow toppled from the branches and scattered across one of the skylights. Time slowed. There was nothing pressing at the edges of the night anymore, not the dawn, not the day. The sun would never come up. The flakes of snow in the yellowing moonlight would keep shifting and dancing for years, graceful in the dark.
“I’m kind of glad you found out,” I murmured. It came out vanishingly quiet.
Isaac hesitated. The mattress warped as he edged back. In my peripheral vision he moved into a slender cut of moonlight, his hands folded behind his head. When he spoke, his voice had softened a fraction. “Weight off your chest?”
“Yeah.” Something like that. Relief always came after guilt, one way or another. “Have you ever lied for three months?”
“I don’t think I could.”
I half-smiled. “Must be weird having morals or whatever.”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” he said. “I definitely lie all the time. Dumb little things. People will be like, what’d you do this afternoon? And I’ll be like, oh, I was studying, when actually I watched Netflix for a few hours and ate about four metric ass-tons of cheese puffs.” He yawned. “But it’s never anything somebody’s going to hold me accountable for.”
“Except the past couple weeks.”
“Right. And it was the worst. I can’t imagine three months of that. Honestly, I don’t think I have the patience.”
I was still and quiet, wanting to tell him that the patience couldn’t hold a candle to the isolation. How could I explain the ever-present tightness in my chest? The sense that between me and the rest of the school, I’d built an indestructible wall? The sense that I would never belong again, with Kensington, with my friends at home, with the Sharps—maybe even with myself, inside my own head?
“Sometimes I’m trying to go to bed,” I said, finally. “And I just think about the people who know me.”
After a second, he said, “The actual you, you mean.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to sound pathetic. But it felt good to let it out. “You guys are kind of my only friends here, and it’s not even real.”
“No offense, but how’d you go freshman and sophomore year without making friends?”
I gave a humorless laugh. “Because my ex was my whole life, and then he—” I cut myself off. Don’t get into it. “He, um. Graduated. And we don’t talk.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah.” I closed my eyes. Tiny confetti shapes danced behind my eyelids, cartwheeling down over the darkness. My brain felt wrung out.
“It’s kind of funny,” Isaac said.
“What is?”
“It . . .” He paused. “I mean, we’re so comically, laughably tiny. You know? The universe is expanding forever, and there are nebulas a hundred billion miles away, like, spectacularly shitting out stars, and suns collapsing every twenty seconds, and essentially what I’m trying to say is that we’re the tiniest speck of dust on an infinite space plain and our lives are these insignificant little minuscule pinpricks on the timeline.”
His spiel petered out into quiet. Outside, the wind was back. That low, gentle whistle.
“And?” I said.
“And what?”
“You said it’s funny. What’s the punch line?”
“I guess I was going to say, like . . . all this, and human beings act like it’s such a big deal if you talk a little deeper than usual and wear baggier clothes. That was going to be the punch line, I don’t know, if there was one. I’m not the comedian, ask my dad.”
An exhausted chuckle fell out of my mouth.
Isaac’s voice had turned scratchy and slow with sleep. “But now I kind of want to say, with all that going on, I guess it’s no surprise the world feels totally unmanageable sometimes.”
“Yeah,” I murmured. I felt like I might melt into the covers and the mattress and the carved bed frame. It all cradled me like gentle hands. I kept thinking of home, for some reason, but in a quieter, sweeter way than usual. No worry. Just my mother humming me to sleep, and my father content in bed. “But it keeps turning,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“So at least there’s that.”
“Yeah.”
My laptop eked out a shriek of complaint as I bent the screen back, getting rid of the glare. “Hush,” I told it, and double-tapped Skype.
As it loaded, I glanced out my dorm room window. Dusk had fallen. Ropy icicles drooled down behind the glass, and beyond them stretched the tree line, stripes of black wood on white snow. Kensington over breaks looked twice as beautiful as when everyone was here. Burgess fell silent as a cemetery, nobody padding down the hall outside my door or chattering by the water fountain.
The application loaded, revealing an empty contacts list. My parents hadn’t gotten online yet. I carried my laptop to my bed, flopped down, and waited.
The retreat already felt like it had happened years ago, although Isaac had driven us back to Kensington only this afternoon. I should have stuck with Trav’s car, tight-knuckled steering and all. Mama hadn’t been kidding about Isaac’s driving: He drove with his knees guiding the wheel, mostly, his right hand occasionally drifting up to adjust the car’s trajectory. He sat with a generous lean against the driver’s door, peering out the windshield with piercing eyes, as if he were hunting the empty roads for a victim to slam into. I spent most of the ride digging my fingernails into my thighs, doing breathing exercises.