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“You got it, too. You got that same spark in you. You just got to being afraid to show it. You said you wanted to know what life would be like if you just tore up the map and went anywhere ... just left all of this behind.” Dame walked toward me and then he was right in front of me. Mr. Green was behind him and Evan was standing behind me. “We can do that together,” Dame said, and even though I saw not one tear in his eyes, there was a sadness, a desperation there. “We can go wherever you want. We can leave everything and start something new. Just you and me. But you have to come with me.”
Face to face with Dame, my heart was steadily breaking. I trembled in the absoluteness of my aching. While I’d just realized it then, the man I’d fallen in love with was in front of me. But still, the man I’d always loved was behind me. It was an impossible moment for me to manage with any clarity.
I smiled at Dame remembering my words, my dreams. He was so right, and I wanted so much to just believe in this idea we’d shared. But I just knew it wasn’t right. It couldn’t be right like this. With my whole life just out in the road being tortured. There had to be another way.
My eyes brimming with tears I cupped his face with my hands so gently, just to feel him.
“I can’t,” I said.
Chapter Twenty-one
When I was a little girl and I got what my brothers and I called “in trouble,” and my parents came like a jury to my bedroom to convict and sentence me, “trouble” almost always came out to be easier than I’d expected ... or could remember. While I was afraid and shaking with dread, the older I got, the less painful and disturbing my parents’ whippings and rants seemed. In fact, after a while, “trouble” became an acceptable consequence to something I fully intended to do in spite of the possibility of getting caught. I’d wear my mother’s pearl earrings to school, sneak the cordless phone into my bedroom after bedtime to talk to Billie all night about some boy who had a crush on her, or read one of my naughty romance books, thinking every second how I was sure to get “in trouble” and be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
The trouble I was in with Evan after I followed him back to our house from the Throat was so much easier than any trouble I’d ever been in that it was somehow the worst.
Evan headed to the house with ease. He’d been wearing one of his gym suits, the one that was on the chair beside our bed when I woke up, and when he got out of the car, I saw that he’d zipped up the jacket and had his hands in the pockets. He looked cool. As if he was coming home from a jog and heading to the shower. He said not one word. Kept his stride and didn’t turn to be sure I was following him.
The moon was gone now and the sun was awake. I looked up at the orange thing that was still fighting with some clouds and searched for some kind of strength. Some kind of energy. But it only sat there. Just stared down at me and threatened to come out soon to burn me. I was in the dark just a few minutes ago, but now the light wasn’t pretending to play games. It was time to get up.
In the house, Evan was moving fast. He was packing his bag for work. He had laid out his suit on the bed and then he started to take the sweats off to get in the shower. I just sat on the bed unmoving and in fear like a child. His silence was deafening.
“You need to get ready for work,” he directed me. “You’re already late. You can’t miss work.”
“Yes,” I said. I looked around the room contemplating how I could get moving like Evan. Get ready. Evan kept zipping past me. In his towel. He got his cufflinks. His watch. His socks. Where could I start? In this room now, my room, I felt like a stranger, a prisoner, an intruder all at once. It was like I didn’t belong anymore, but I had to stay. And I had no one else to blame for this feeling. I’d done it. I’d broken this place. I needed Evan to at least recognize this. What I’d done. I started crying, weeping, wailing. But Evan kept preparing.
“Say something to me,” I sobbed.
“Get ready.”
“No,” I said.
He walked toward the bathroom and stood right in the doorframe in front of me. He stopped then and turned around to me.
“What are you crying for?” he asked. “You did this. You fucking did this and now you’re crying?” He came closer to me and I held myself in fear. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to keep moving, Journey, because I assume this is what you want. Right? For me to just pretend this isn’t happening. Let you do whatever you want to do.”
“No,” I said, choking on my saliva, “this is not what I want. I’m so sorry.... I’m just so sorry.”
“You’re not sorr y,” he said. “I told you ... I warned you to stay away from him. I knew this was going to happen.”
“You knew?”
“The way you looked at him that day at the school,” he shouted, grabbing my chin hard with his hand. “It was all over your face. You fucking measured us up against each other. And I didn’t know what to think about it. I thought you were stronger than that. That there was no way you’d be so stupid. But when I asked you about him at your parents’ house ... I knew ... I knew what was coming.”
He released my chin in disgust and stepped back with his hand over his mouth.
“How could you risk everything we have to be with that boy?” he asked. “Don’t you know how this is going to end? He’s a kid. He’s going to get tired of you and throw you out into the street like some groupie.”
“He’s not like that.”
“You don’t know a damn thing about him. Does he have any diseases? Does he have a criminal record? Does he have a fucking bank account? Can he count any of that money he has?”
I didn’t know the answers to any of these questions.
“He’s a fucking high school dropout!” Evan bellowed as I cried. He closed his eyes and winced as if he was trying to control his anger. Carefully, he came and sat next to me on the bed.
“Did you have sex with him?”
“Evan—”
