In My Dreams I Hold a Knife(50)

“You really don’t want to go home, do you?”

I spun to find Coop.

“What are you doing here? I thought you left with Caro.”

He put a finger to his lips and walked backwards to the bar. While the bartenders’ backs were turned, Coop grabbed a bottle of whiskey and slid it under his sweater. He waved at me to follow and sauntered, as if nothing was amiss, out of the tent.

I drew a deep breath and followed.

He led me through the dark, eerie campus. I remained behind, eyes on his back, walking in silence. Halfway, I knew where we were going, so I wasn’t surprised to see the ivy-covered walls of East House rise in front of us.

He walked past it into the quad, over to our picnic table, the one beside the oak tree Heather’s parents had planted ten years ago, a memorial in her favorite place. The tree had grown to twenty feet now. Looking at it was like looking at the passage of time, made solid and tangible. The branches reached toward East House like imploring arms. It looked uncannily like a person, as if Heather herself was frozen and trapped, begging for help.

I pushed away the thought. We’d been happy here.

Coop ignored the picnic bench and sat right on the table. He twisted the cap off the stolen whiskey, took a long pull, then held it out to me.

I couldn’t help the ghost of a smile. “In the middle of the quad? Out in the open? You rebel.”

Coop didn’t smile back. “Who do you know with an addiction?”

I took the whiskey and sat down next to him. Slugged a mouthful. I had to force it down, trying not to gag. “My dad. OxyContin, at first. Then whatever he could find.”

Coop nodded, looking across the quad at East House. A slight breeze picked up a tendril of his hair and brushed it over his forehead. “All those years, you never told me.”

“Yeah, well, it was the last thing I wanted people to know.”

A few of the windows were still lit in the dorm. Students, up late. I searched for the window on the fourth floor, in the corner. My old room. But it was dark, the curtains drawn.

Coop ran his hands through his hair and held them there. “I feel like I know you so well, and then I discover something like this. I wish you trusted me.”

I scooted the whiskey bottle toward him. “I don’t trust anyone.”

“That sounds lonely. You have to let people in. Let them love you for who you are, the good and the ugly. Then you know it’s real.”

Coop had grown into a good man, or maybe he’d always been one. Either way, he didn’t understand that there were some truths too ugly to see the light of day. Some that would ruin love, if they were uncovered.

The memory came back, this time more vivid. Waking up, disoriented, my head pounding. The sunlight too bright, streaming through vaguely familiar windows. Bracing my hands against the floor to push myself up, only to feel my hands stick to the wood. Looking down. Breath catching. My hands, splayed on the floor, rust-red from fingernails to elbows, covered in flaking blood. Crimson splattered across my pink dress like ink on a Rorschach test. The horrible question: What had I done?

Nothing, I answered fiercely. I’d done nothing. I had to rebury the memory alongside the others. There was nothing to be had from it but ruin and rot.

I turned away from Coop, not wanting him to see my face.

“In the spirit of openness,” he said, “there’s something I wanted to show—”

“Coop.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Why was it so good here?”

“What?”

I wiped my eyes and looked around the quad, at the ivy-covered dorm pulled from a fairy tale, the ring of trees, standing sentinel. Here, in the grass, I’d been reborn, committed myself to a new religion, a strong magic. That magic was still buried in the soil of this place.

It was my home.

My hair fell like a curtain in front of my face. When I spoke, the words were barely discernible. “Why was it so good here, and so bad? It didn’t matter—whatever I was feeling, it was dialed up so high. Why can’t I make myself feel that way again? Everything these last ten years has paled compared to it. I’m scared college was the last time I was really alive, the way you’re supposed to be, and I’ll never get it back.”

“Of course college felt extreme,” Coop said. “You had infinite freedom and almost no responsibility. Nothing was fixed—you had your whole life ahead of you, and it could go anywhere. You had best friends you spent every minute with, so you were never alone. And you were in love. Real love.”

“Yeah, well, Mint turned into Courtney’s Stepford husband, so look where that got me.”

Coop brushed my hair back from my face. “I wasn’t talking about him.”





Chapter 22


May, senior year

I thought I was ready to let go, until graduation day. I sat in the sweltering heat, lined up with the other Millers, watching students in crimson robes inch across the stage, and panic set in. If I walked up those stairs to shake the chancellor’s hand—if I allowed this day to come and go, packed my things into my mother’s car and drove back to Norfolk—it would all be over.

After Heather died, after Mint and I recommitted to our relationship, driven by a gutting guilt neither one of us wanted to talk about, after I started avoiding Coop, I couldn’t wait for the semester to be over. I thought I wanted to move on. But now that the day was here, red-and-white-balloon arches and Eliot Lawn crammed with families in folding chairs, I realized: there was no more time to change things. This was how it was going to end. How the story would be written.