I'd Give Anything(48)
In the end, it was my mother’s anger that yanked me out of that stupor. On New Year’s Day, two days before school was scheduled to restart, I told her I wasn’t going. And she said, “This melodramatic display of grief for a man who wasn’t even related to you is making you ridiculous, Virginia. If you refuse to go back to school, if your grades drop at all, you can forget about your fancy private college in North Carolina. You will go to school here and live at home, and Trevor won’t even be here to keep you company.”
Because Trevor was gone. I don’t know if my mother had cleaned up Trevor’s mess once again or if the arson had simply gone unsolved, but no one ever came to arrest him. And within a month, Trevor had been admitted as a transfer student to a college in Atlanta that was far too prestigious for him to have gotten into without my mother’s help. When winter break ended, he was gone, and for the first time in my life, my brother’s absence was a relief.
I needed to go, too, to get as far away from home as I could. Living in that house was impossible. So I went back to school and took notes in class and did my homework. Kirsten tried to talk me back into my circle of friends more than once, and then screamed and called me a traitor and a bitch and left me alone. CJ just hated me in silence. And at the end of January, Gray, his heartbreak still so fresh, came to my house to see me. We stood on my front porch, and he said, “Where are you, Zin? Where did you go? The real you, I mean. I don’t understand what’s happening.”
Oh, but that boy, edged in sunlight, being my friend, standing there and being my friend. I ached for a life in which I deserved him.
Years later, when I remembered that sad, unmoored girl on the porch, I wanted to will her to suck it up, to step forward instead of back, to, yes, keep her secret, but to find a way to reach around it and take hold of that boy.
“I can’t tell you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
“I don’t know. I just know I need to be alone. I’m sorry.”
For a moment, I saw the old flash of kind concern in his eyes, and then he shut like a box and walked off my porch, and he never came back.
In one night, one night, I lost all of them.
After Gray left, I called a summer camp in Vermont I’d gone to when I was eleven and asked them to send me a job application. I trudged through the last months of school—numb even to my own loneliness—graduated, spent all summer with kids, little strangers, taking them on hikes and canoe trips, teaching them the names of trees, tending their minor wounds. By the time I got to college, I wasn’t cracked in a thousand places. I wasn’t hopeless. But I wasn’t Zinny anymore either, Zinny fierce and true, night-jumper, rule-breaker, maker of things never before seen on planet Earth, Zinny who Adela had thought was something to see. I’d learned the beauty of treading the safest path, a path that led me straight to Harris.
But now, Zinny was back, alive inside the pages of my old journal and inside the head of my daughter.
And the old secret was back, too, here, in my house, throwing up a wall between me and Avery, reminding me that I was a fool—the worst kind of fool—to believe it had ever left.
Chapter Thirteen
Avery
Avery didn’t find Zinny at the quarry. She didn’t find deep insights in the distance between the quarry’s edge and the water or great truths among the dead leaves she scuffed free and sent flying with her boots.
But it was late morning; the day was the bright kind of cold, and the air bore the spicy scent of rotting wood and clean dirt and pennies. When Avery had stepped off the bus at the entrance to the state park, she’d felt as if she were planting her boot soles on the soil of a foreign country, a new world.
That morning, after a silent car ride, Avery’s mother had dropped her off at the entrance to the school, and Avery had walked in, stowed her backpack in her locker, and then, a few minutes later, walked out. No one had stopped her. If anyone—any teacher or parent, or even any other student—had noticed, they probably thought she had been given permission to leave because that’s who Avery was, or had been, a girl who got permission.
She had never taken the bus before because kids like Avery did not take buses, not even school buses, except to away games or field trips. The bus smelled like diesel fuel, sun-warmed plastic, and air freshener. The driver wore a blue jacket and matching pants and said “Morning,” to everyone who got on the bus, including Avery. Avery focused. She tried to take everything in. A little girl’s plastic hair clips shaped like bees. A woman wearing duck boots just like Avery’s own. A guy listening to music on his earbuds so loudly that Avery could hear it: a beat like a pulse and a tinny voice rising above it. Across the aisle from Avery was a baby who kicked off its tiny sneaker twice and a mother who sighed and picked it up from the floor of the bus and put it back on his foot. Looking out the window, Avery saw a chickadee sitting on top of a mailbox, people running in black running clothes and neon-colored shoes, a couple kissing goodbye on a street corner and going their separate ways.
Just before her stop, Avery got a text from her mother: I got a call from the dean that you missed homeroom. She said one of the other students said he saw you getting on a bus. What’s going on? Are you okay? Please text me back right this minute.