Picture Us In The Light(93)

“Oh.” She yawns. “All right.” Then she mumbles something that sounds like be careful, but her voice slurs—the medication, probably—before dropping off. It has a deeper hold over her overnight. It’ll be a few hours before she wakes up and realizes I lied.



Harry’s car pulls into the lot just as I come out of the stairwell, and I am so happy to see him I feel weak. He leans over to unlock the passenger door. The air inside his car smells vaguely soapy, and his hair’s still wet.

“Thank you,” I say. I toss my bag into the back seat, buckle my seat belt and turn to face him. “Seriously, Harry, thank you. I owe you.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it.”

I swallow. I wish I’d never told him about the election. “And look—I’m sorry about—”

He looks away. “Don’t mention it.”

I know he means it, that he’d rather I didn’t. So I don’t.

I’d almost forgotten how quickly he can change the mood. But he does it—he adjusts his rearview mirror, then holds up a brown paper bag with grease spots on the bottom. “It’s your lucky day: I stopped at Donut Wheel on my way here.”

I’m so flooded with gratitude for him, for everything, it takes effort to sound normal. “Excellent.”

“Maple bar or cinnamon twist?”

“You pick.”

He breaks both donuts in half, holding the bag out to me. I take the half maple bar and eat it while he backs out of the parking spot and onto the street. We’re doing it; we’re officially on the way. The donut is pillowy and sweet.

“So where am I going?” he says. “Do you have an address?”

“Yeah,” I say, my mouth full. “It’s a field station. Here.” I reach for his phone, which is charging on the dashboard, and tap in his password and put the address in. “Eight hours. There’s some traffic.”

“You’re sure she’ll be there? You didn’t call her or anything, did you?”

“No, I couldn’t find a phone number, just the address. But I’m assuming she’s just living there.”

There’s a sort of a sense of magic that can envelop you, a sense of destiny, that feels vulnerable to parsing everything out carefully or overthinking things. I wonder fleetingly if maybe that’s what my dad always felt, and maybe that was his mistake—believing it would inoculate him. Whatever, though; that’s the whole thing about that feeling, that you have to leave it intact so it doesn’t evaporate on you. I change the subject. “Did you tell Regina you were coming?”

He doesn’t answer right away. “No.”

“How come?”

“I just didn’t.”

“What’d you tell your parents?”

“I didn’t tell them anything yet. I just said I was going to school.”

“Are you going to get in trouble?”

“Am I going to get in trouble?” he repeats, amused. “No, I think they’ll be super cool with me cutting class—while I’m still grounded, no less—to drive to basically Oregon without telling anyone. They love that kind of thing. Love it. It’ll be great.”

“You’re sure you want to do it?”

“I’m sure.”

I should ask him why. I should ask him if he’s really sure, maybe try to talk him out of it. The light changes, and we get onto the freeway.

“I could take the bus,” I say. “Or—”

“It’s fine. I wanted to come.” He licks sugar off his fingers and appraises me. “You snuck out, too, didn’t you? There’s no way your parents would’ve let you go.”

“Yeah, no, there’s no way they would’ve let me.”

“What are you going to do when they find out?”

“Nothing.” My phone’s stayed quiet—my mom’s probably still asleep. “I figure we’ll have at least an hour head start.”

“Ah.” He starts to say something else, reconsiders it, goes quiet.

I say, “What?”

“Nothing. It’s just—ah, forget it.”

“Should we do this a few more times before I tell you to just say it, or—”

“Like you never try to think before you say something. Okay, fine. It’s like—so I got into Princeton, right, and I guess I always thought if I did, everything would be different, and I’d be this different person, and all that time I thought everything would fall into place if I’d just get in.”

“And?”

“Nada. I feel nothing. So I was kind of glad you called,” he says. “This morning. Because then it was like, oh, okay, right, Princeton or not, I still have to figure out who I’m going to be. You know?”

He holds out the bag with the rest of the cinnamon twist. My fingers brush against his, and there’s a feeling like a pinwheel in my stomach, and then—something shifts.

All my life, I’ve always waited for signs. Like with art, like with everything, I’ve waited for things to fall into place and to feel right, to feel like the universe had given me its permission and its blessing.

But maybe you never really get that, or maybe only some of us do, if we’re lucky, if we’re born to the right people in the right circumstances at the right time, and even then, maybe not. And the rest of us—the world will tell you over and over you aren’t good enough, in as many ways as it knows how. Maybe you have to fight for your place in it no matter what, no matter who you are. And I know this—I always worried I hadn’t earned mine, that my sister should’ve taken it instead. But maybe she’s been here all along, and maybe that doesn’t mean anything so much as it creates an absence of meaning, a void I get to fill on my own. I know enough by now to know the rest of the world still goes on without you even if you try to retreat from it, that there’s only so long you can hide out. But I also believe that, if you’re lucky, what you share with someone can reshape the way the world contours itself around you. Or maybe it’s not that—maybe it’s just that it fortifies you so that you force the world to contort itself into new ways to fit you.