Harder (Caroline & West #2)(27)

Before she left, Caroline told me, You have to find a way to get out from under it, knowing it’s never going away. You have to make your own life, because if you don’t, you just won’t get to have one at all, and that’s the worst f*cking thing I can imagine.

She says that to me over and over.

She says it in my head every day, and every day I say the same thing back to her.

The way I’ve lived—the life I’ve had—I can imagine worse things than you can.

It’s not so bad to waste your life. It’s not so hard. What’s harder—what’s f*cking impossible—is thinking you’ve got a future and then losing it.

I don’t think I can survive it a second time.

In the glove box, I locate my last pack of cigarettes and light one up. I smoke it fast, sucking in deep carcinogenic lungfuls, trying to get used to the fact that it doesn’t matter if I can stand to live in Putnam or not.

I don’t have a decision to make.

We’re going to Putnam, because there’s a two-hundred-thousand-dollar education waiting for me there. A bachelor’s degree that means something. I’d be an idiot to turn it down when I can grab it and use it for Frankie.

I burned my life in Putnam to the ground. I don’t want to wade among the ashes and pitch a tent over top of what’s left of it, but I will. I haven’t got a choice.

Later, I’ll call Dr. Tomlinson.





Caroline


Every year, winter takes me by surprise.

Fall comes and shears the edge off summer, mellows out the temperatures for a few golden days of gorgeous perfection, and then when I’m ready to live the rest of my life in those stolen moments, snap.

It turns cold one night. Just like that.

Growing up, I’d deny what it meant. No, not yet. It’s not time yet.

I’d ignore the signs. I’d leave my jack-o’-lantern on the front porch long after Halloween, celebrating a season that had passed until black spots showed on the flesh around the pumpkin’s mouth and it started to look ancient and wizened.

Once the first frost did it in, my dad would make me take it out back and chuck it into the woods. So long, fall.

But the autumn of my junior year at Putnam, I was ready for the days to get shorter and the temperatures to drop. I braced myself for the cold, preparing to carry on in a Putnam without West, a life without West.

It would be cold for a while. Lonely. But I’m an Iowa girl. I was used to the cold. I knew how to bundle up against it, muffle my breath behind a scarf, muffle my needs so I could endure the early nights and the long winter.

My dad finished annoying the lawyer, and my complaint against Nate got filed in mid-September. Sixty days to respond. Plaintiff identified as Jane Doe.

The trial date was set for the end of next year. I braced myself for four seasons of waiting and strategizing, subpoenas and scrutiny, depositions and petitions to compel.

I thought I had it under control.

Then I got a text from a number I didn’t know. It was West, telling me he was coming back to school.

Another to say he was bringing Frankie.

A third to let me know I shouldn’t worry, because he’d keep his distance.

I think what I was supposed to do when I got those texts was freeze. Snap. Go cold, just like that.

It would have been easier if I could have locked myself off. Safer to tend my rose garden of ice crystals, pretending to love the cold.

But I was through with pretending.

I got those texts, and I felt joy–pure and deep, as real as anything I’d ever had with him. I felt vindicated, because this would be another chance. The future he’d killed off, now brought back to life.

And maybe our future was an ugly, shambling thing. Maybe it was half-dead, scarred and foul–but it was ours, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t want it. I couldn’t even pretend not to be elated, burbling through the days after I got the news, wondering when and where I’d see him again, how it would be, how it would feel.

That sounds stupid. Naive.

I know how it sounds.

And I know, too, that a jack-o’-lantern on the front porch is only a jack-o’-lantern until midnight on October 31. One minute after midnight, it becomes a rotting pumpkin. My father used to explain it to me every November.

But it’s the same pumpkin, right? It’s the pumpkin you bought, carried home, planned over, cut carefully into. It’s the pumpkin you gutted and scraped at, lit up, placed proudly on display.

It’s the same f*cking pumpkin the day after Halloween that it was the day before, and the fall when West came back to Putnam, I was through with people trying to tell me how to feel and what to love.

When there are pictures of your cunt on the Internet and strangers emailing to tell you they want to jizz in your face—when that’s happened to you and there is a way in which it will never stop happening—you have to get really comfortable with the notion that the only person who’s allowed to define how you feel about anything is you.

I shared an off-campus house with seven friends and friends of friends, including my best friend, Bridget, and West’s former roommate, Krishna. Bridget and Krishna nagged at me. What happened, what happened? You can talk to us. You should tell us. We need to know.

Everyone wanted to talk to me about West that September. What happened in Silt. How I felt about it. What I was going to do when he came back to Iowa. Even my friend Quinn, who was studying in Florence that semester, pestered me over email. I heard you went out to see West. I need details.