Page 127 of Wayfarers

“Hence the defensiveness.”

“Yeah,” I say, after a second. “I guess so. Has someone ever done that to you?”

“No. I think people do that more to girls than to guys. At least from what I’ve seen.”

“Ugh.”

“I think there’s also the feeling that if you push on a guy too hard, he’ll stop arguing back and take a swing at you instead.”

“So what you’re saying is that I need to start punching people more.”

“Yeah,” Knox says. “Probably solve all your problems.”

Behind us, Winslow is making sweet little sleep woofs. “He’s chasing dream squirrels,” I tell Knox. “Maybe a rabbit.”

“Does he catch them?”

“No. Are you kidding? This is my fantasy, and so he never catches anything small and furry and cute. There are never any teeth involved. Just lots of happy chasing.”

Knox glances at the cast on his arm. “That dog only has one thing on his mind. Violence.”

“Hey!”

“I’m kidding,” he says. “Two things: violence and cuddling.”

“That’s better.”

“What’s Dr. O like? Why do you want to see him?”

“Well, I went to him for a lot of extra help. And I felt bad, because it was usually during his free periods, and I’d walk in to see him grading a giant stack of problem sets, but he’d put them aside and make time for me. And eventually I just . . . started to tell him things. We talked about college, at first, and places with good math programs. He wrote my letter for Northwestern. When stuff with my mom got bad, he was the one who set me up with a counselor at school to talk about it. And then the funeral. He was the only one of my teachers who came, and he and his wife brought brownies, and he told me to call them if I had any trouble on the road this summer. Which—”

So much for always thinking before I speak. My mouth ran way far ahead of me. The funeral? Really?

And I know Knox was paying attention. And I can tell he’s making a decision about what to say next.

“Do you think,” he asks, “we should see if Dr. O wants to go get lunch with us?”

“No,” I say, relieved beyond words, beyond reason. “I think that would be too complicated to work out.”

Sylvie Visualization Exercise

Nights doomscrolling in my van

with the curtains drawn, I learned

more about the world than I did

when I was living in it. All these girls

parked in the driver’s seat, filming themselves

telling the stories of their victimhood—

I’d hit Replay, daydreaming

about the gorgeous moral clarity that had to come

with knowing you’re never the victimizer,