Page 78 of Wayfarers

I laugh a little. “It’s a lot easier to figure out what someone else wants and give it to them than it is to figure out what I want. Sometimes I’d only know it through, like, resistance. Like when Cal—when my friend wanted to go to Home Depot, and I’d be getting in the car to go with him and feel this big wave of frustration and only then realize that what I wanted was to . . .” I trail off. “Nothing I was proud of. Lie in bed. Play Candy Crush. Go—”

“Go swimming?” Knox supplies.

“Oh my God, I haven’t been swimming yet this summer.”

“Really?”

“Okay, now we have to go.”

Out the window, the sign says Saugatuck: 5 Miles, and I start looking for an exit. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I know.”

“That’s not the first time you haven’t.”

“I know.”

“Like maybe it’s the third time in the last hour.”

“Sylvie,” he says, laughing.

“I’m serious!”

He looks at his tanned hands. “When I was a kid, I read this book called My Side of the Mountain. It’s about a boy who runs away—sort of with his mom’s permission—to go live in the woods. He burns out a giant tree and makes a house there. He hunts a deer and uses every part of it. I still remember him curing the hide to make a door for his little tree hut. And he only goes back into town to read stuff at the library.”

“That sounds magical. Authentic.”

“Maybe? I mean, I guess I’m saying that all my answers would disappoint you. I’ve been living on my side of the mountain. I can tie forty different kinds of knots, but I’ve never lived somewhere long enough to have a mailbox. I could use every part of the deer. I could fix up your van pretty much short of it being on fire—well, I’ve never worked on a German car so that could be false confidence—but I’ve never played on a sports team, or even been to a sports game. I didn’t run for, like, high school president—”

I try not to laugh. Unsuccessfully. “High school president?”

“Come on. You know what I mean.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not making fun of you! It was just an amazing visual. The Springfield High School Oval Office. Little freshman aides running papers in and out. Cabinet meetings full of crop tops and snapbacks.”

“How was I supposed to say it?” He still looks uncomfortable, and I feel bad now.

“Student council president, maybe? Or class president. You’re not missing anything with that one. It’s just a popularity contest, basically, with a side of promising your classmates stuff you can’t deliver, like getting them to put soda machines in the cafeteria.”

“Or like promising everyone A’s?”

“That would be less exciting than a Dr Pepper fountain drink option, I promise you.”

“I want to have done it,” he says in a rush. “I want to know, I want to have made the choice for myself. I had to teach myself trigonometry out of a textbook from 1972. I want to have had a math teacher! I want to . . .”

While he’s thinking, I signal and take the exit to Saugatuck.

“I wanted to say all that out loud,” he finishes. “I never have before.”

“That’s one thing to cross off your list, then.”

“So maybe let’s talk about what is possible. What I can want now. I want to see an eclipse. I want to go to Wisconsin. I want to take a girl on a date on a Friday night.”

The air between us shimmers.

“Well,” I say, “it’s almost Thursday. We better start looking for that girl.”

Sylvie Deflection