Expelled(56)

“Theo—”

“I’m so sorry,” I say. Then I stop. “No, I’m not. I really like you or I love you or something in between those things, and it’s been this way forever and you have to have figured that out by now, right?”

Sasha looks down at her hands.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“I’m sorry. I can’t do this,” she says.

“Do what? Sit in a boat?” My voice is getting higher, more desperate. “Kiss me? Have a meaningful human connection?”

She shakes her head without looking up. “I need you to take me back to shore,” she says. “And then I need you to come with me to my house. There’s something you have to know.”





53


Sasha doesn’t say a word on the whole drive to her house on the nice side of town. When she pulls into her driveway, I think she’s finally going to say something. But instead she just sits there, her hands on the steering wheel and her eyes staring blankly, straight ahead.

“Are we—” I begin, but she interrupts me.

She says, “And now I need you to come inside.”

“All right, I can do that,” I say, trying to sound upbeat, like nothing’s changed since we were in the boat. It has, of course: the mood’s turned strange. But at the same time, I’m still thinking about our kiss—the surprise and the rightness of it. I felt it in basically every cell of my body, and I can still feel its echoes now.

What had it felt like to her? Was she thinking of it, too?

Opening her front door, Sasha inhales deeply and says, “Okay, here we go.”

It’s like it’s the house of a stranger that she’s entering for the first time.

Inside it’s dark and cool. Sasha slips off her shoes and so I take mine off, too, and then we walk down the hallway into a cavernous living room painted a deep forest green. There are big leather chairs and floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, and unlike every other living room in Pinewood, there’s no huge flat-screen TV. Instead there’s a whole shelf of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and another one of Hemingway, the spines covered in plastic like they’re first editions, which they probably are.

Sasha has no patience for my obvious admiration. “I need you to come upstairs,” she says.

In any other moment I’d be ecstatic—I’m being invited deep into the dwelling of the eternally mysterious Sasha Ellis. But there’s something seriously off about this. There’s a tight, nervous edge to the way she’s holding herself, almost as if she’s trying to shrink into someone even smaller. She won’t look me in the eye.

We go up the dark wooden steps, and Sasha stops in the hallway. She’s still not talking, and the silence is unnerving.

“Are you going to admit to me that you stole something else? Besides my heart, I mean.” I make a stupid, hideously goofy face in the hopes of breaking the tension, but it doesn’t even come close to working.

“That joke is beneath you,” Sasha says.

“I know,” I say.

She looks so small and sad now I don’t know what to do. “I’m sorry I kissed you,” I blurt.

She shakes her head. “It’s not that,” she says.

We’re standing outside a bright, airy room. There are a million books here, too, but they aren’t on shelves: they’re on the bed, the floor, and piled in towering stacks on the desk.

“Yours?” I ask.

She nods. “Go in if you want,” she says.

“Do you want me to?”

She shrugs.

And so I walk in. The faintest flowery smell hangs in the air—of incense, maybe, or perfume. Sasha’s bed is made, and her clothes have been hung carefully in the closet. The only visible mess is the books.

I pick up a book of poems by Theodore Roethke. “This is the guy your dad was quoting, isn’t it?”

“‘I know the purity of pure despair, / My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,’” Sasha recites. Her voice sounds wooden.

And why does every line she quotes have the word despair or hell in it?

I set the book down again. “Sasha, what’s wrong?”

“I need you to see another room.”

And so I follow her down the hall again. This room is smaller and barer, with only a double bed and a rocking chair. Sunlight flickering through trees makes shifting patterns on the pale yellow walls.

“This is it,” she says, stopping at the doorway. She’s not looking at me—she’s just staring straight ahead.

“What do you mean?” I ask. “What is it?”

She shakes her head, and then she starts sobbing.





54


I reach out and take her small, cool arm. “Sasha, what’s wrong? Here, come sit down.” I try to pull her toward the rocking chair inside the room, but she shakes her head sharply.

“No, not in there!”

“Okay,” I say, “let’s go back to your room, then.”

Mutely she follows me, wiping the tears from her eyes even as they keep on falling. I sit at the foot of the bed, and she sinks down next to me.

“What is it?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “Hang on,” she says, sniffling. “I have to turn off these fucking faucets. I have to…” She takes a shuddering breath. “I have to calm down.”