You Are Here(9)

No, Peter had other plans, bigger plans. And they certainly didn’t include ending up down the street from his dad and their dingy little house with its fading palette of greens and its smell of stale beer. He hadn’t read every single book by Charles Dickens or memorized the map coordinates of every state capital for nothing.

His dad, however, didn’t seem to understand this, which is why Peter often preferred spending time with the Healys. Even though they both taught at the college, they’d also been professors at a handful of other universities, had moved around and seen the world before figuring out where they wanted to be. In fact sometimes he felt they understood him better than anyone—better than his father, and certainly better than Emma.

The first time he’d met the Healy family was just after they’d moved in, the summer that he and Emma both turned eight. Peter had fallen off his bike in front of their house, and Mr. Healy—who was perched on a stepladder in the openmouthed garage—rushed out to help him up. He led him in through the front door, a reassuring hand on the back of his neck, then disappeared to find the first-aid kit. Left alone in the coolness of the entryway, Peter bent to examine his knee. A moment later the professor returned with a Band-Aid, humming to himself.

“‘Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, straight and swift to my wounded I go,’” he sang out, dabbing at the cut.

Peter recognized the words from a book about the songs and poems of the Civil War, a narrow volume he’d recently checked out from the library.

“Walt Whitman,” he announced with a quiet authority, and the professor paused to look up at him, amused.

“Ah,” he said with a grin. “A prodigy, huh?”

“No, sir,” Peter said, shaking his head solemnly. “Just above average.”

Mr. Healy seemed to find this funny, the entire barrel of his chest shaking with a raspy, well-used sort of laughter, and once he’d smoothed the bandage into place, he stood and wiped tears from the corners of his eyes.

“Above average,” he said. “Nothing wrong with that, don’t you think?” This last part he directed over his shoulder, and Peter glanced up to see a girl sitting poised on the staircase, looking at him through the banister like a monkey at the zoo. She had long brown hair and the palest eyes he’d ever seen, a nearly colorless gray that settled on him lightly, and there was something in her manner—a casual lack of interest, a complete failure to be impressed by his knowledge—that made him wish he hadn’t spoken in the first place.

Sometimes Peter felt like he’d spent the past eight years trying to dig himself out of that first moment they’d met, when he’d announced himself as someone intelligent to a girl who seemed to look upon this particular trait with great ambivalence.

But Emma wasn’t like most kids who hated school or found homework boring; she wasn’t indifferent and she wasn’t stupid. It was as if somewhere along the way, she’d simply decided to take a different route than the rest of her family, a conscious decision that seemed to inform everything else in her life. Still, whatever it was that drove her to act this way—brilliant parents and intelligent siblings and a home that sometimes felt more like an old-fashioned literary salon than anything else—Peter couldn’t help being jealous of the simple fact that these things drove her nonetheless.

Just the other day, on the Fourth of July, Peter had run into her as she made her annual escape from her family’s cookout, this almost as much of a tradition as the party itself. He hadn’t exactly been looking for her, but they had an uncanny habit of stumbling across each other nonetheless. Not that this was unwelcome. It was, in fact, the highlight of his days, when all the planning and mapping and waiting and hoping had been cast aside, and all he was left with was a town no bigger than a postage stamp, a father who barely noticed he was around, and a school he considered both too slow academically and too fast socially for someone of his nature. Emma’s tolerance of him—he didn’t fool himself into believing it was something it clearly wasn’t—was the one bright spot in an otherwise dreadfully monotonous existence.

He’d fallen into step beside her as she headed up toward the campus, the collection of pale stone buildings and dorms set high above town. The sun had slipped to the other side of the valley, the day was cooling off already and Peter pushed at his glasses as he tried to think of something to say.

“How long’s your brother in town?” he asked finally, and Emma looked over like she hadn’t quite realized he was there until just that moment.

“Not long,” she said. “I’m going back to New York with him tomorrow.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Emma said, then grinned. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”

Peter ducked his head and kicked at the tall grasses as they crossed the lawn. “Can I come too?”

She laughed, though he hadn’t really been joking. “You don’t even know how long I’ll be away.”

“I don’t mind staying awhile.”

Emma frowned and shook her head. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back. I’m probably going somewhere else after New York.”

“Where?” Peter asked, quickening his pace to keep up with her, but she didn’t seem to have an answer to this, or at least not one worth mentioning to him. “If there’s no room, I could always take a car from the lot,” he said, thinking of the small patch of asphalt behind their house that served as a makeshift lot for impounded or abandoned cars. “We could caravan.”