Page 145 of Wayfarers

“Been in any fatal car accidents lately?” It doesn’t come out kindly. “Sorry.”

“No, I haven’t. But I have thought, hey, if I don’t ever bring this up, this—invisible anchor I’m carrying around on my shoulder, then maybe it’ll be like it never happened. Maybe when people look at me, they won’t see it. Nobody will rearrange their opinion of me to make this awful thing fit, make it make sense. Nobody will leave me high and dry.”

“I never thought you’d leave me high and dry,” I say, and I’m realizing what I feel as I’m saying it. “But can we be realistic? You broke your arm. You’re short on cash. Let’s set aside the fact that I wanted to give you a ride, okay? I was your best option, maybe your only option. You’re not getting a restaurant job with that cast on. And if”—I am not going to cry—“if you looked at me and thought, this girl here, this girl I can’t get rid of, that I’m relying on now, this girl went on vacation in a Mercedes days after her boyfriend’s funeral, this girl who’s driving me hours and hours who killed the last person who kissed her—I didn’t want you to feel trapped. I didn’t want to have to see me through your eyes.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know when a new friend walks into your bedroom and suddenly all the Harry Styles posters tacked up to your ceiling look . . . weird? Childish? Kind of stalker-y? When the night before you really loved them and maybe even whispered a little good night to Harry before you fell asleep?”

“Yeah,” Knox says, dead serious. “I know that exact feeling.”

I shake my head. “Okay, okay. But what I mean is—before I met you I couldn’t be alone. And I also couldn’t leave my van. I couldn’t look in a mirror, knowing what I knew about myself. And if you knew it too . . . I’d see it in your face, when you looked at me. And I couldn’t handle that.”

“Remember how when we met in front of the showers for the first time and I said I saw you before?” Knox says.

“Yeah.”

“I kinda understated the extent to which I noticed you. You were barefoot, at your campsite, but your eyes were serious. You had these serious eyebrows, too, and all this wavy hair and Winslow was smiling next to you. I thought—I thought, there’s another beautiful girl I’m never gonna talk to. There’s another door I won’t have a chance to knock at. But you know what?”

My skin is prickling. My face is hot. “What?”

“You do have serious eyebrows, but you’re funnier than I thought you’d be. You have these passionate opinions about everything, things I didn’t even know existed. And I can say anything to you, it feels like. Anything at all. And those things were true yesterday, and they’re true today, too.”

“But you said,” and it comes out small, “that you’d never see me again.”

“We’ll be in North Carolina in a day or two. And after that—Where would I fit into your life?” He fiddles with a frayed hole in his jeans. “Would you want me coming to visit you in your college dorm? Anyway, if you’re going to school hours and hours away, I can’t get to you. Bus would take too long, I’d never get that much time off work to do that more than once. I don’t know. Maybe I could write you letters.”

“Letters.”

“If you wanted.”

“I do. I want you to write me letters.”

He nods. “Then that’s decided.”

Knox

“I’m gonna write you these long, flowery, old-timey letters like Civil War soldiers wrote back home,” I say. “My dearest Sylvie—”

“Dearest, beautiful Sylvie.”

“Yes. Sorry. My dearest, beautiful Sylvie—”

“Hang on.” Sylvie hands me her phone with Spotify open. “Search ‘Ken Burns Civil War.’ Then just pick a song from the soundtrack at random.”

“Are you going to let me finish this joke?”

“Do you want to tell the best joke you can or do you just want to tell a joke?”

“Obviously the best I can.”

“Then obey me.”

I do. Plaintive fiddle music weeps from the speakers.

“Perfect.” Sylvie beckons me to continue.

“My dearest, beautiful Sylvie. How I have laid awake at night pining after thee, my little sunflower—laid or lain?”