“Xavier,” she said.
“Sasha,” he said. “Can you pick up a whole human being? A whole human being in addition to an entire bag of seven donuts? I mean, I know you are very strong, but . . .” Xavier stopped, satisfied. Because her face was changing. Was she smiling? Well, no. But she didn’t look the same as before, at least.
“You don’t even know where I’m going.”
“I don’t care,” Xavier said. “I just want to come. Hang out with my best friend, who I have really missed.” His friend who obviously needed his help even though she wasn’t going to ask for it.
He leaned halfway out the window, out there with the chirping birds and the blue sky. Somewhere nearby someone had started up a lawn mower.
“So where are we going, anyway?” he said. “Georgia? Canada? To the Moon?”
“South,” she said. “I don’t know how long it will take.” She paused. “What would you tell your parents?”
Xavier knew then that she was going to let him come, and his insides started lifting. “That I’m home but have taken a vow of silence and also a vow of invisibility, so they won’t be able to hear or see me?”
“I’m serious,” Sasha said.
Xavier thought for a moment. “I’ll tell them I’m with you. I’ll say I broke up with Ivy and that we’re on a trip with your mom and her boyfriend. My mom will be so glad that I’m not stuck in bed this time, and my dad honestly probably won’t even notice.” Xavier paused. “Please. Please. Please. I’m literally not letting you leave without me so you might as well say yes and save us some time.”
When their eyes met, he felt like she was telling him something in a language he couldn’t understand. All he knew was that he cared about her more than anyone in the world, and he very, very much didn’t want her to drive off without him. He got out of the car then. He picked up the tent and started carrying it around toward the trunk. “I’ll help,” he said.
“No!” Sasha shouted. “I mean, give that to me. I have . . .” She looked at him. “A whole packing system.”
“Since when?” he asked. He was smiling.
“Call your mother,” she said. “If you’re coming, call her.”
So he did. He called his mother and told her they were going on a trip together. And she was happy, just like he knew she’d be.
Xavier got into the car. Sasha already had the motor running.
He gave himself permission to stop thinking. There is a luxury in giving up control, in handing everything over to someone else. Someone who you trust more than anyone in the world. Someone who you know will always take care of you, and you of them. He realized in that moment there was only one person on earth who he had ever felt like that about. And she was right beside him.
“It’s like we’d always planned,” he said. He got in the car. “Two outlaws on the run.” He held up a set of finger guns and shot them high into the sky. “Pew pew!”
“But one rule,” she said. “No phones. Take it out and put it back inside.” She was playing their game then, the one where she told him what to do. He knew it was because of Ivy— Sasha was worried he’d be tempted to get in touch with her. He wanted to say, So far as I’m concerned, she might as well be dead, but he didn’t. To refer to her at all would give her power, would put her in the car with them. And he just did not want her there, or anywhere, anymore.
He took his phone out of his pocket. “I’ll put it inside,” he said. And she nodded. On the way he texted his mom, told her they’d probably be out of range so if she texted or called he wouldn’t get it, and she shouldn’t worry.
He left the phone in Sasha’s room, came back outside, gave her a thumbs-up.
He got into the car. He was glad not to have his phone, he realized, to have nothing connecting him to the world, nothing connecting him to anything but Sasha. He had a flash of good feeling like maybe all the bad things were behind him and there were only good things up ahead now.
He reached out then without even thinking, without even meaning to, and took Sasha’s hand. He squeezed it. Her face flushed. She opened her eyes wide. She squeezed his hand back.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“Road trip!” he said.
She turned the key.
The engine started.
They went.
Part 2
Sasha
People try so hard to figure out how to pretend, but it’s easy, really. The simple secret is to trick yourself first, be the thing you’re pretending you are. Be the person who believes the lie you need to tell. You are a character in a movie or a play doing the things you need to do, believing the thing you need to believe. You are outside yourself now. It helps if you haven’t slept in a very long time and nothing feels real, anyway.
Inhale, close your eyes. Exhale, float away. The old you is gone, and the other you is all that is left. You know what you need to do. Let your pulse pound with it. Taste the salt of it on the tip of your tongue, burn your lips with it.
Swallow it down.
* * *
Here is what you knew, here is all you could let yourself know:
You were on a road trip with your best friend.
There was a tent in the backseat and music on the radio.
You were young and free.
What a great time to be young and free in the summer.
What a time to be alive!!
Do not think about what you’ve done.
Do not think about what you are going to do next.
Do not think about all the steps along the way.
Do not think do not think do not think of anything.
(Do not think about what’s in the trunk. And how it got there.)
The trip would take you twenty hours if you drove straight through. Between the money your mom’s boyfriend had given you and your earnings from the copy shop, you had 2,746 dollars in cash rolled up in a sock in your duffel bag. A thick stack of bills that felt like play money when you looked at it all together. Like play money for a game. That’s all this even was.
The radio was on and your best friend Xavier was humming along to a song he didn’t know, staring out the window, and dancing in his seat with his sweatshirt on, and the hood up, because you’d cranked the AC all the way to keep it cold enough, to keep everything in the car very cold. “It’s like a meat locker in here!” Xavier had said about the inside of the car. “In a fun way!” A meat locker. He was giddy with freedom, with relief, with the fact that you were doing something so sudden and crazy. Giddy with the fact that you were reconnecting after the blip of strangeness that had divided you. “I can’t believe like forty-eight hours ago I was so . . .” He paused. Shook his head. “Actually, it doesn’t even matter what I was before. I feel like nothing but right now matters or ever even happened. Do you know what I mean?” He turned to you and smiled. And you told your mouth to smile back, and your mouth agreed and did. On the side of the highway was a sign for a rest stop. “Ooooh, should we stop at McDonald’s? Get cones of that stuff that they are legally probably not even allowed to call ice cream because who knows what it even is, so they have to just call it cones?”
“I’m not hungry yet,” you said. You hadn’t been hungry in two days and would probably never be hungry again. But more than that, you needed to stay moving, keep moving and never stand still. Standing still was very dangerous.
“Since when does a person have to be hungry to have cones?” Xavier said. “C’mon, we can take stylish pics for our Instagrams.” He was kidding. He had only ever used Instagram to check Ivy’s posts back when he followed her, which he no longer did. And he thought you didn’t use it at all.
“Well, you make a good point,” you said. Now that you had officially left your body, it was easier to act normal, to agree to things. To do what needed to be done.
You took the next exit, pulled into the lot, parked, walked inside, past the convenience store, past the buckets of saltwater taffy and the penny pressing machine (which under other
circumstances you might have wanted to try out, because you loved watching a penny go in as a regular penny and then get pounded and squashed until it was something else entirely). But you had no time for that now. You could not let your thoughts go that deep. You could not consider what you liked and what you did not. It was crowded in that rest stop, everyone on their way to or from somewhere. Just regular people on regular trips. Just like you.
Xavier got into the McDonald’s line, and you told him you were going to the bathroom. You went into a stall and took out the phones, the real reason for this stop. The reason you agreed to it. You had to be someone else then, too, you and not you at the same time. You had a text from this guy Steph, who you sort of started dating without quite meaning to. He had written: around this weekend?
Ugh. Im sick in bed! you wrote back.
A second later he wrote:
So sorry to hear!!
I can make you soup!
Well . . . actually, that would probably not help you be less sick. But I can BUY you soup ha ha
Or ice cream?
Or exciting medicines!
Let me know if you need anything or if I can come over
I’m not scared of ur germs . . .
You shut your own phone off then, put it in your pocket. You could not allow yourself to feel anything about this. Anything about anything.
You took out the other phone. The one you kept hidden in the small pocket of your bag, the one you’d deleted one very specific photo off of, the one you tried to forget about while you were driving with Xavier but had to remember now because there was work to do. The sooner anyone knew she was missing, the sooner someone would start trying to find her. And the sooner they might find out that missing was not the only thing she was.
What would happen next? You didn’t know.
You can’t buy innocence. But you can buy time.
Or, at least, you can try.
There were three new messages in the phone sent to the owner of the phone. You would have to speak for her now, as she could not speak for herself. But first, there was Instagram:
Ivy hadn’t posted in a few hours, and she normally posted all the time, every day, all day long. You looked around for something suitable. It was a typical crappy rest stop bathroom—neon-pink soap dribbling from broken soap dispensers, seats sprinkled with pee. There was a machine by the door selling condoms and tampons, glitter temporary tattoos and perfumed towelettes. You took a photo of the machine, which was oddly beautiful when framed just so. The only person who would know these were fake was Xavier. But Xavier didn’t follow Ivy. And her account was locked. And he didn’t even have a phone. There was no way he would see this. You hesitated for only a moment before you clicked share. Within seconds, it had thirteen likes and a comment. “Get the tattoos!! Whereya off to?”
But you weren’t done. The public part was easy. The private stuff was harder. You looked back at the conversation with Gwen over the last two days. At what you’d already written her so far.
Gwen: 1:15 a.m.: how was your night? You ended up seeing Xavier right?
Gwen: 11:12 a.m.: Uppy uppy you lazy bich
Gwen: 4:45 p.m.: I’m assuming you’re just w/ X still and out of batteries . . . but LMK if something terrible has happened to you . . . haha
Gwen: 4:46 p.m.: My dad is being a dick and I’m bored. Let’s go to the movies or something????
Gwen: 10:59 p.m.: You know that thing you do where you just stop texting back sometimes? It is laaaaaaaaame
Ivy: 7:20 a.m.: What are you my jealous boyfriend? Calm the fuck down. JK I love you. But I’m a little busy ahem. Never saw Xavier . . . w/ someone else. Can you guess who?
That last text was the first thing Ivy had sent to Gwen since Ivy stopped being Ivy.
You needed to find out what Gwen knew.
Gwen: 10:34 a.m.: I don’t know, it could literally be anyone, slut.
Ivy: 11:45 a.m.: Heh, true. But it’s only fun if you guess . . .
Where was all this leading? You hadn’t figured it out yet. You knew only the next step, and the one after that. You would just have to trust that, when it was time for more steps, your monster brain would figure them out for you. The way it had so far with everything else.
The next message was from Nikolai, the guy whose party you’d gone to. Haven’t heard from you in weeks. Are you ignoring me? . . . You deleted that one.
There was one more person to respond to. Ivy’s mom.
You took a breath, you steeled yourself.
You were lucky that Ivy had such a history of vanishing, of being bad, of doing whatever she wanted. Her mother didn’t even seem worried, just fed up. Since two nights before, her mother had sent a short string of texts, a half dozen or so threatening greater and greater punishments when Ivy finally appeared. But that was it. You looked through the most recent texts:
11:31 p.m.: Come home now or don’t come home at all
7:15 a.m.: Calm the fuck down you/Ivy had written back early that morning.
And her mother had written this, moments later: We mean it this time. Now, or do not bother.
Now you wrote: Nope not coming home. Guess that’s it.
You swallowed hard as the feelings threatened to bubble up. Ivy had a mother. No matter how angry this mother was, Ivy had a mother who was her mother who would never see her again. And one day, who knew when exactly, her mother would look back at these messages and see what she had said to her daughter and think it was the last thing her daughter ever got from her. It was too terrible, it was too much.
So you found yourself writing one more message back.
Even if you say that, I know you love me. And I love you too.
Your fingers clicked send before you could stop them. You had to be careful, stick to the script. The more you didn’t sound like Ivy, the more likely it was that someone would get suspicious, come looking for her—come looking for her before she was ready to be found.
You turned the phone off, put it back in your pocket, and walked out of the bathroom. Xavier was waiting for you right outside, standing there with two cones, holding one out to you, smiling like this was the best day of his whole goddamned life.
Xavier
Xavier spent six hundred miles trying to figure it out.
Six hundred miles of car coffees and bags of Twizzlers and Combos and dangling one arm out the window while the radio blasted. Six hundred miles of sitting there with Sasha next to him gripping the steering wheel, silent and steely like she was alone as they passed through New York and Pennsylvania and Maryland and Virginia. And now, ten hours later, there they were at a campsite in North Carolina, all green grass and tall trees and tents full of parents and kids and dogs with bandannas around their necks. He spent all that time thinking and thinking, and what he was thinking was this: What if all the things he usually felt when he was with Sasha—deep connection, unconditional understanding, total comfort, delight at just being with her—weren’t just friend feelings? What if they were something else? And they had been all along?
They parked and got out of the car. Sasha took the tent from the backseat and brought it over to the campsite without letting him help. He watched her. Her jaw was set, gaze distant.
Xavier had made so many mistakes. He realized that now.
The night of his birthday, when Ivy had found him, he shouldn’t have gone outside with her. He shouldn’t have messed with her at all. He should have stayed with Sasha, taken her somewhere and looked her straight in the eye, and said, “It’s scary to let things get weird, but maybe we should try it.” It would have changed things. It would have changed everything.
What if it was too late?
* * *
The sun was down and someone at the next campsite over was playing a guitar. Xavier walked back from the woods toward their tent. Through the thin netting of the door, he could see a glow of a screen, her phone. But one rule, she’d said. No phones. So what was she doing with hers?
She looked
up when Xavier entered. They’d barely spoken in hours. Xavier wasn’t sure how to act now, not after everything he’d been thinking. She slipped the phone under her thigh so Xavier wouldn’t see. He felt the sticky fingers of jealousy uncurling in his belly. But what right did he have to be jealous, after everything? Still, he couldn’t help but wonder who she was talking to. Steph? Had she been texting with him this whole time?
Suddenly, Xavier knew he had to get out of that tent. Sasha had said they didn’t need to make a fire. They had peanut butter and bread from a rest stop convenience store, apples, and a jug of water. There was nothing to cook. But there was a fire pit right there, so Xavier gathered up sticks while he tried to slow his racing heart. He found old newspaper in the trash and started twisting the pages into kindling. He wanted to be useful and needed something to do with his hands. Sasha came out of the tent.
“Did I ever tell you how I was a Boy Scout?” Xavier said. “I must have, right? Top-notch fire starter.”
“I don’t know,” she said. She stared at him like he was a stranger.
“Hi, my name’s Xavier. Nice to meet you.” Xavier held out his hand for her to shake and she shook it, and when their hands touched, he had the almost overwhelming urge to lean forward and kiss her. She quickly pulled her hand away and stepped back, like she was reading his mind maybe. Or like she was thinking about something else entirely.
* * *
It was late and the fire was out. They were inside the tent. Sasha had unzipped her sleeping bag and spread it across the floor. Xavier had his sweatshirt balled up behind his head for a pillow. He was lying on his back. They were in the dark, close together, breathing in the same warm tent-scented air. They had slept this close a couple times before—it had never meant anything. But somehow, now, it felt different. Maybe it was time to say something. Maybe now was the time to tell her what he’d been thinking.