All the Bright Places(16)

“Or we can make out.”

“That’s okay.”

A minute or so later, we’re at my car. “How’d you get up there, anyway? The door was open when I tried it, but it’s usually sealed tight.”

She smiles for the first time. “I might have picked the lock.”

I whistle. “Violet Markey. There’s more to you than meets the eye.”

In a flash, she is up the walk and inside her house. I stand watching until a light flicks on in an upstairs window. A shadow moves in front of it so that I can see the outline of her, as if she’s watching me through the curtain. I lean back against the car, waiting to see who gives in first. I stay there until the shadow moves away and the light goes off.


At home, I park Little Bastard in the garage and start my nightly run. Run in winter, swim the rest of the year. My regular route is down National Road, out past the hospital and Friendship Campground to this old steel bridge that seems forgotten by everyone but me. I sprint across the tops of its walls—the ones that act as guardrails—and when I make it without falling, I know I’m alive.

Worthless. Stupid. These are the words I grew up hearing. They’re the words I try to outrun, because if I let them in, they might stay there and grow and fill me up and in, until the only thing left of me is worthless stupid worthless stupid worthless stupid freak. And then there’s nothing to do but run harder and fill myself with other words: This time will be different. This time, I will stay awake.

I run for miles but don’t count them, passing dark house after dark house. I feel sorry for everyone in this town who’s sleeping.

I take a different route home, over the A Street Bridge. This bridge has more traffic because it links downtown with the west side of Bartlett, where the high school is and the local college is and all these neighborhoods are, growing up in between.

I run past what’s left of the stone guardrail. There is still an angry hole in the middle where the rest of the wall used to be, and someone has placed a cross beside it. The cross lies on its side, white paint faded gray from the Indiana weather, and I wonder who put it there—Violet? Her parents? Someone from school? I run to the end of the bridge and cut onto the grass, down the embankment to the bottom, which is an old dried-up riverbed full of cigarette butts and beer bottles.

I kick through the trash and the rocks and the dirt. Something shines silver in the dark, and then I see other shining things—pieces of glass and metal. There is the red plastic eye of a taillight. The shattered lump of a side mirror. A license plate, dented and nearly folded in half.

All of this makes it suddenly real. I could sink like a stone into the earth and be swallowed whole by the weight of what happened here.

I leave everything as it was, except for the license plate, which I take with me. Leaving it there seems wrong, as if it’s too personal a thing to sit out in the open where someone who doesn’t know Violet or her sister might take it and think it’s cool, or collect it as a souvenir. I run toward home, feeling both heavy and hollowed out. This time will be different. This time, I will stay awake.

I run until time stops. Until my mind stops. Until the only thing I feel is the cold metal of the license plate in my hand and the pounding of my blood.





VIOLET


152 days till graduation


Sunday morning. My bedroom.

The EleanorandViolet.com domain name is expiring. I know this because the hosting company has sent me an email with a warning that says I must renew now or let it go forever. On my laptop, I open our folders of notes and sort through all the ideas we were working on before last April. But they’re only fragments that don’t make sense without Eleanor here to help me decipher her shorthand.

The two of us had different views on what we wanted the magazine to be. Eleanor was older (and bossier), which meant she was usually in charge and usually got her way. I can try to salvage the site, maybe revamp it and turn it into something else—a place where writers can share their work. A place that isn’t about just nail polish and boys and music, but other things too, like how to change a tire or how to speak French or what to expect once you get out into the world.

I write these things down. Then I go onto the site itself and read the last post, written the day before the party—two opposite takes on the book Julie Plum, Girl Exorcist. Not even The Bell Jar or Catcher in the Rye. Nothing important or earth-shattering. Nothing that says: This is the last thing you will ever write before the world changes.

I delete her notes and mine. I delete the hosting company email. And then I empty my trash so that the email is as dead and gone as Eleanor.





FINCH


Day 8 of the Awake


On Sunday evening, Kate and Decca and I drive to my dad’s new house in the more expensive part of town for Weekly Obligatory Family Dinner. I’m wearing the same plain navy shirt and khakis I always wear when I see my father.

We are silent on the way over, each of us staring out the window. We don’t even play the radio. “Have fun over there,” Mom said before we left, trying to be cheerful, when I know that the second the car hit the street, she was on the phone to a girlfriend and opening a bottle of wine. It’ll be my first time seeing my dad since before Thanksgiving and my first time in his new home, the one he shares with Rosemarie and her son.

They live in one of these colossal brand-new houses that look like every other house up and down the street. As we pull up out front, Kate says, “Can you imagine trying to find this place drunk?”