You Are Here(59)

Peter hung back as she started out across it, and when he thought she was a safe distance ahead, he kicked his way through the high grass, his shoelaces undone, his backpack heavy with books, his glasses slipping down his nose. He rarely ventured up to the college, which had its own campus security force and didn’t often require his dad’s services. To Peter it seemed almost like a monument, untouchable and sacred and very far away from his own sagging house down the street.

At the edge of the field a wall of trees rose from the untidy lawn, and Emma disappeared into their midst, pulling back branches and picking her away along a leaf-covered path. She paused at one point, and Peter froze and held his breath, sure he’d been caught. But after a moment she kept moving, and he couldn’t help following, pulled along behind her as if by some magnetic force. When she finally reached a small clearing, Peter was still a good ten yards back, but he could hear Emma—her back turned toward him—sing out, “We’re here.”

He stepped forward, blushing.

“Sorry,” he muttered as he joined her. “I wasn’t …”

“Yeah, you were,” she said, frowning at him. “You were following me.”

Not having anything to say to this, Peter poked at the leaves with the scuffed toe of his sneaker, examining his too-short corduroys. Emma sat down beneath a tree and unpacked a thermos and an apple from her backpack.

“I only have enough for me,” she said unapologetically. “I didn’t know I’d be having company.”

“That’s okay,” Peter said, sitting down cross-legged a few feet away.

The crows were circling overhead, their calls harsh and distant-sounding in the empty sky. He watched her bite into the apple, thinking how she—like him—didn’t seem to have any friends at school, but though he couldn’t have explained why, he knew the situation was different somehow.

“What do you do up here, anyway?”

She shrugged.

“Do you come up here every day?”

She shrugged again, and Peter stood up to circle the faded gravestones, which were covered in sap and bird droppings and stained with juice from the berries growing thickly in the surrounding bushes. There were a few dried flower petals beside one of them, but most looked largely abandoned.

“Who are these people?” he asked, stooping to read the names. “Did you know any of them?”

She shook her head.

“Then why do you come up here?”

“It’s quiet,” she said simply. Peter glanced over at her, thinking that her house must be fairly quiet too. He knew her older brothers and sister had all moved away, and her parents spent most of their time up at the college, or at least in their home offices, writing poems and researching speeches and lectures. He wondered what could possibly be quieter than a house that ran itself like a library, thinking of his own home, his dad half asleep on the couch with only the sound of the beer settling in its can, the soft swish as he scratched at one socked foot with the other.

“I like it here,” he said, tripping along from tombstone to tombstone, studying each with interest. He could feel Emma’s eyes on him with an intensity that he was unaccustomed to, and he felt a sudden tightness in his throat, like he might cough or cry without warning, like something that had been caught there for ages might now decide to come tumbling out.

He was standing before the grave of a woman who’d died in 1924 at the age of thirty, the same age his mom had been when she’d died giving birth to him, and because it was autumn and the leaves were falling all around them, because the world was a blur of red and brown and orange, because he had no one to talk to—had never had anyone to talk to—and because Emma was here and his dad wasn’t (was never really there, even when he was), because of all this Peter turned to tell Emma about his mother, about the hole that had been torn in the map of his life, like a town he’d never had the chance to visit, like all the towns in the world he’d never seen and maybe never would.

But when he looked over, Emma had her head tipped back against the tree, and was humming as she watched the clouds move through the branches. Peter realized then how alone they each were. It was just that now they were alone together.

As he drove away from Nate’s house, Peter gave the steering wheel a good solid pound with his fist. When the car jerked to the left with an enthusiastic little surge, he twisted to apologize to the dog, who opened one eye and yawned.

Peter couldn’t believe he’d driven all this way only to end up alone again.

It was hard to believe that after all these days with Emma he hadn’t picked up even a shred of her self-confidence, her reckless spontaneity and unchecked impulsiveness. He was still just as awkward and hesitant and hopeless as he’d always been, and the more he tried to overcome it, the worse it seemed to get. Just now he’d stood outside the car, and he’d waved good-bye, and he’d watched her march up to the door on her own. And then he’d driven away like a coward.

Now he considered heading south, but he’d come too far in that direction with Emma to continue on without her. East was the ocean, and Peter could already imagine a more forlorn version of himself gazing out at the open sea, angrily tossing rocks, tracing pathetic little hearts into the sand. It would all be very melodramatic, and so he thought it best to head west instead, a nod to the time-honored tradition of starting over.