“Your mama’s inside. She ain’t gonna hear me.”
“There might be a window open. And if she got wind of what happened with Colt, she’d never let me out of the house … or she’d hunt him down and make him marry me.”
The second option didn’t sound so bad, really. I’d never wanted to get married right out of high school, but if it meant moving in with Colt, getting out of here, I might’ve been on board.
And Bo could come, too. She could move into the guest room. Or sleep on the couch. I wasn’t real sure how big Colt’s place was. But we’d make it work. Maybe Bo could get a job singing somewhere in the city. There was a school for the blind there—maybe I could teach braille. Colt and me would be together, and Bo could find a boy of her own. Or maybe a girl. I could see her with a pretty brunette—a poet. Bo’d be great with a poet. The four of us would eat dinner together every night, then we’d sit out on the back deck counting fireflies and talking about the towns we’d escaped from …
“Maybe we could do that.” And for a second, I thought she was commenting on my fantasy. But then she added, “We could go see Colt. Bet he’d like that, actually. And not just because you’d be fucking him.”
“Hush,” I said, blushing.
She laughed. “All right. But really, what brought this on? You didn’t even wanna talk to your parents about it when I had the idea.”
“I’ve just been thinking, and you and Colt were right.” And so was Christy. I hadn’t told Bo about talking to her that day in January, and I hadn’t talked to her since. But the things she’d said had stuck with me. “Complaining about their rules won’t change them. So, maybe if I just talk to them, reason with them, it’ll make a difference. And, I mean, they let Gracie go to Florida with her friends for a whole week when she was seventeen,” I said. “And Louisville’s only a couple hours from here. Not near as far.”
“Your sister wasn’t in Florida with a pair of Dickinsons, though,” Bo said.
“Stop it,” I told her. “Mama and Daddy have really come around on you, you know. They like you, Bo. They don’t care that you’re a Dickinson.”
“Well, they’re about the only ones.” She started flipping the pages of her book again. “But all right. Let’s do it. Let’s go see Colt.”
“Yes!” I threw my fist in the air, the way Daddy did when UK won a ball game. Then I fell back into the grass, stretching my arms over my head. “We gotta work out all the details. Starting with how we’re getting there. Maybe Gracie will let us borrow her car?”
“We’ll figure it out,” Bo said. “Later, though. I ain’t done reading yet. This poem’s by Lord Byron. He’s one of my favorites.”
I nodded and closed my eyes, sinking back into that pleasant place between waking and sleeping, more content and happy this time. Even as Bo’s slow, sad words lingered in the sweltering air.
“ ‘Thy vows are all broken, and light is thy fame: I hear thy name spoken, and share in its shame.’ ”
“We could go in July,” I said. “Maybe for the Fourth? Maybe there’s good fireworks up there.”
“You can see fireworks?”
“Yeah. If they’re bright enough.”
It was the last week of May. We’d been out of school a few days, and Bo had spent almost every night at my house. She’d leave in the morning and head to the Scotts’ farm. They’d just started setting their crops, so she’d go help all day and come back to my house around dark, smelling like tobacco. She’d use our shower—always apologizing to my mama, like it was a huge inconvenience—then we’d head up to my room to watch TV and talk until bed.
Tonight—every night—we were talking about the trip to see Colt.
“Fourth of July’s good,” she said. “I get paid next week. Then I’ll be helping in the field in June. I can have some money saved up for gas.”
That was still the problem, though. The car. There was no way Bo’s mama would let us borrow the blue car for a few days to go out of town. Hell, there was no way that blue car could get us out of town. I wasn’t sure how it got from one side of Mursey to the other without falling apart, based on how the engine wheezed and the frame clanked.
“How old do you have to be to rent a car?” I asked, picking up the brush from my nightstand and combing through my hair.
“Older than seventeen,” Bo said. “Don’t worry. We’ll think of something.”
“Well, we’d better. I’m gonna have to ask my parents soon.”
“Maybe we can take my aunt’s car. Colt’s mama don’t leave the house much.”
I finished combing my hair and stood up, stepping over the pallet of blankets Bo sat on and walking toward the bedroom door. “While we’re in Louisville,” I said, shutting off the light, “we ought to go to Churchill Downs. You know, where they run the derby?”