The Lies About Truth(60)

“I’m going to leave something to keep you company. You were the first one to stuff a fortune inside Big. And practically everything in him is what you loved about me and our friends. I’m going to leave them here, with you.”

I dug down into the pile of pine needles and made a place for the vase.

I covered it up with needles.

I covered it up with tears.

And I told my friend good-bye.

When I listened for his voice, for that chorus of last words, there was only silence.

I guess he’d finally said good-bye too.

The stars were still out as I climbed the ditch to the Spree. I gazed up at the constellations, allowing myself a moment of observation and, perhaps, hesitation. I remembered a conversation Trent and I had when we were kids.

He’d just come back from space camp in Huntsville, and we were lying on the dock for an hour of Star Time.

“Sadie, did you know we can see nineteen trillion miles with our eyes? Nineteen trillion miles.”

This clearly impressed him. He went on about it, pointing out the stars and telling how far they were from Earth. One week at space camp hardly made him an expert, but he didn’t know that.

Space camp or no, I wanted to show him it mattered to me. That I’d done my own space camp that week with Google and books from the library.

“Cool. Watch this,” I told him.

I lifted my thumb into the air, closed my left eye, and made Orion disappear. “Did you know Neil Armstrong did this after he got into space?”

“Did what? Gave Earth a thumbs-up?” he asked, interested.

I loved that I knew something he didn’t.

“Yeah, so Armstrong said he realized that from where he was in space he could lift his thumb into the air and make all of Earth disappear. He said he didn’t feel like a giant, though. I read it in a book while you were gone.”

Trent lifted his thumb into the air, closed one eye, and blocked out the Big Dipper.

“Crazy,” he said. “Sometimes a small thing is bigger than a big thing.”

The wisdom of Neil Armstrong, Star Time, and a thirteen-year-old came back to me as I stared up at a perfect sky, balanced with equal parts light and dark.

I held my thumb out to the past until I couldn’t see it anymore, and then I drove home.

Sometimes a small thing is bigger than a big thing.

I’d just done a small thing.





CHAPTER FORTY


Max knocked on my window at six thirty a.m.

I’d come home from Willit Hill and napped.

“Hop to it, Kingston,” Max told me when I raised the window a crack.

“I’m coming. I’m coming.”

I rushed around for five minutes doing the necessary things—like putting on clean underwear and deodorant, and packing essentials—and five minutes doing totally unnecessary things, like changing clothes and hairstyles several times. I shoved Big, what was left of him, deep in my bag.

“We’re not going to the third world,” Max said from his perch in the window when he saw my bag.

“Cut me some slack. I rarely leave my street.”

He kissed my cheek and said, “Speaking of. You’d better tell them”—he pointed toward my parents’ room—“where we’re going.”

I wrote Mom and Dad a note that could warrant either a high five or a What the hell? and left it on the bar. They wanted my driving status out of neutral, but St. Augustine wasn’t exactly one city over. As far as they knew, I hadn’t even made it to the bridge by myself, and that was only down the street. So in a moment of overkill, I added a big smiley face to sell them on my mental state.

I’m happy. I’m good with this. I can drive ten hours round-trip.

I expected a phone call in T-minus soon.

As Max and I drove the Spree down our street, the first hint of sunbeams struck the pale-gray sky in a brilliant effort. The houses glowed like color cards at a paint store in shades of peach, tan, blue, and aquamarine. There was a white stucco house shaped like a dome that had been rebuilt several times. Some places still had blue tarps secured to the roof with two-by-fours, the aftermath of the storm that tackled the dome.

But they were all still here.

So was I.

And in a few minutes, I’d sit behind the wheel and drive to St. Augustine. When I was a kid, I marveled at airplanes and space shuttles. I watched fighter jets from Eglin Air Force Base run routes out to sea, leaving white traceable contrails against bright blue skies. Dad had even taken me to Cape Canaveral once to watch a launch. Those crafts seemed like impossibilities hurling through space. Cars had never dazzled me. They didn’t look like miracles with their wheels, engines, and speed. They were made of logic.

Until the accident.

Every day, the people around me got into vehicles and hurled their bodies down the road at high speeds. Didn’t they know that more people died in cars than in airplanes? Didn’t they know Trent was one of them? That Max and I almost were? I didn’t think they did. They texted and talked on the phone and ate take-out and changed their iPods from one song to another.

Driving needed a little more formal dining room and a little less backyard toy box. That fear was what started me running. My feet felt pretty damn safe.

But I couldn’t walk to St. Augustine.

“You’re quiet,” Max said.