We were standing on the front steps, waiting for my sister, when Bo said, so quiet I almost didn’t hear, “Thank you for coming today.”
“Of course. Did you think I’d just say something like that and never come apologize?”
She didn’t answer, and I realized that’s exactly what she thought. That we’d fight and never talk again. That I’d leave her, like so many others had before me.
“You’re the most important person in my life, Bo Dickinson,” I said. “I don’t know if I could make it without you. So no matter what we fight about, I’ll still be around.”
She leaned her head on my shoulder just as a fresh flurry of snowflakes began to fall. “I got a better idea,” she said. “Let’s promise to never fight again.”
“All right. I think I like that plan. So last night was the first and the last fight you and me will ever have.”
“Promise?” she asked.
“I promise.”
Agnes ain’t talking to me.
We’ve been walking for hours, and it’s dark now. Real dark. There ain’t no streetlights on this dirt road, and the mountains block out about half the stars. Even I can hardly see, but she still won’t hold on to my arm. Insists she’s better off just using the cane.
And maybe she is, I think, stumbling over a rough patch of ground.
The silence and the darkness and the hunger are starting to drive me crazy, though. And every time Utah, who’s gotta be starving, whines up at me, I feel like the guilt might eat me alive. I can’t control the dark or the food, but maybe I can get Agnes to talk to me if I try hard enough.
“Seems like I might need one of them canes,” I say.
She stays quiet.
Utah pulls on her leash, lunging after something I can’t see. Maybe a rabbit or maybe just a cricket. She likes to chase both. But I pull her back. “This damn dog,” I say to Agnes. “Walking this long, and she ain’t tired at all. Still trying to chase anything she sees.”
Nothing.
I don’t think I’ve ever been cold-shouldered before. When Dickinsons are mad, you can’t get us to stop yelling. But I think the quiet is worse.
A few minutes later, I give it another shot.
“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” I say, hoping maybe our old game will get her talking to me.
But all she does is sigh.
“All right … I guess I’ll go first,” I say. “So, when we were kids, Colt nearly drowned me. We’d gone down to the river by ourselves to swim. He was twelve and I was ten. And he dared me to jump off that big wall—you know, the one by the Thomases’ bait shop?”
She don’t answer. Don’t even look at me. Just keeps walking.
“Well, he dared me to jump. He went first, and he was fine. So I did. And I went under the water, but when I tried to come back up, I had a hard time. Colt hadn’t thought about the current. I was so little, it about washed me downstream. Thank God he caught hold of me and pulled me up on a rock.”
I don’t tell her the part about how I cried. Or how I was so mad at Colt for daring me to jump that I threw a rock at his head once we got back on dry ground. How I’m the reason he’s got a scar right above his ear. I ain’t even sure if Agnes knows about the scar. Her eyes probably ain’t good enough to notice it.
And right about now, with how Agnes just keeps ignoring me, I’m wishing Colt hadn’t bothered saving me at all. Maybe we’d both be better off if I’d just washed away that day.
I clear my throat and say, “Your turn,” just as we round a curve and— Light.
Headlights. Small, twin pinpoints of white way off in the distance, speeding past. They’re far, but they’re there.
I almost shout. Because that’s a road—a real road—up ahead of us. And in a few more steps, I even spot what looks like the giant sign of a Shell gas station. We’re probably still a quarter mile away, but that ain’t nothing compared to how far we’ve already walked.
“Holy shit!” I shout. “Agnes—can you see that? There are cars up there. And a gas station. Oh, thank God. Finally.”
Her voice is flat when she says, “Good.”
“Good? It’s great. If there are cars, then there are people and we can get a ride or—”
“Bo.”
“What?”
Agnes takes a deep breath, and then she plays the game I started. It’s her turn, after all. And with the lights looming in the distance, she takes away all the relief and joy I just felt. She tells me something I didn’t know.
Something I should’ve known was coming.
“I’m leaving, Bo,” she says. “I’m going home.”
I hadn’t spoken to Christy in months. We sat on opposite sides of the room during Sunday school and kept our distance in English class. We crossed paths in the hallway at school a few times—and she bumped into me while I was at my locker once—but after a quick, mumbled sorry, she was gone.