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sy when she comes. I didn’t know people were that noisy outside of movies.
This scene is a parody, a terrible movie I can’t turn off.
Gravel clatters. West getting to his feet. He must see the interior of the truck illuminated by the screen of my phone. Her, too, now that her eyes are open.
The sounds they’re making probably mean something.
I’m supposed to care.
I’m supposed to say something when West opens the truck door and looks at me with nothing in his expression like surprise.
Looks at me with a blazing sort of pride, an arrogant tilt to his eyebrows that tells me he knew.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
I don’t say anything. Not even when he calls me by name. “Caroline,” he says—my whole name, which he hardly ever uses.
I refuse to speak even when he takes me by the shoulder and shakes me, “Fucking say something,” and Mrs. Tomlinson’s making soothing noises, “West, West.”
I’m sinking, and I don’t have to talk to him.
I don’t have to do anything.
He drives me to the airport in the morning.
Up the mountain. Down the mountain. Wordless.
It’s not until I see a sign that says we’re twenty miles from Eugene that I start thinking how this is it.
I mean, this is really it.
When West left Putnam last year, I took him to the airport, and I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again. It was horrible, but not as horrible as this silent car ride, because what I didn’t understand last year is that everything about that departure was outlined in hope.
I didn’t know if I’d see West again, but I hoped I would.
He didn’t know if he’d ever get back to Putnam, but I know he hoped, too.
We hoped we could be friends. We hoped we could be more.
And the slow death of hope—the suffocation of a future—that’s hard to live through. It’s no wonder he couldn’t take it.
It’s no wonder he told me he’d met someone, just to give himself a reason to stop calling. To give me a reason to stop waiting for the phone to ring.
All of that was hard.
It’s not as hard as this.
This is the wasteland after a volcanic eruption—everything hot and black, covered in sulfur, the sky the color of ash. There’s nothing for hope to feed on in this car. He took it all.
He killed it on purpose.
“I know what you did,” I say into the silence.
His hands tighten on the wheel. “Say what you need to say, Caro.”
“You’re hoping I’ll yell. I bet it would be easier if you could remember me that way. You could think about how it ended, and then you wouldn’t have to remember the rest of it.”
He’s quiet.
