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Ezra borrows some of my clothes, and we head out into a chilly, sunny day together—like the last year never happened. We end up racing each another across the big student parking lot, Ezra running backwards, laughing. Then he spreads his arms out like he’s blocking me, but instead he catches me against his chest and whirls me around. After a while longer laughing, acting like romantics, we pick a spot right at the edge of the science building’s lawn, and I stand in between the road and Ezra as he digs a quick hole with a stick and does the deed.
“Did you really put them there?” I whisper.
“You want me to take them with me?” he asks, looking serious.
“No. Just put them there. I’m not going to dig them up.”
“You sure about that?”
I nod.
Ezra
Do Gooder. I think it suits him. I can tell, as I drive us toward Tuscaloosa, just how much it bothers him—the way his last year has gone. Somehow, band comes up, and he seems self-conscious as he explains that he’s not in band at Auburn.
“I don’t know why,” he says. “Actually that’s not true. I just didn’t feel it this year. Maybe later.”
It makes him sad. I don’t think I’d be able to read him so well if I hadn’t stalked him so hard on Instagram and Snapchat. But I know a lot of his expressions, and I feel like I have a solid understanding of his personality. I’m not shocked that he feels…maybe like a failure. Like he’s a little unmoored.
I ask him if he feels like he’s found his niche at college, and he laughs and squeezes my hand. “Nah, man. Not even a little. I don’t know what that means about me,” he adds wryly.
“I think it just means you’re normal.”
We talk a little about me and football. How it’s all I’ve had for years—the only anchor, “Except you.”
Mills tells me more about the months before he left for college. More about his car wreck.
“It was scary as fuck,” he says. “And I got in so much trouble. Plus, you know…the lost car.”
He says he tried to put up a good front for his mom and my dad so they’d let him leave for college, but they both felt pretty nervous.
"Rightfully so, I guess,” Mills admits. “I met Daniel and his friends, and…you saw my Snapchat. And when that didn't do the trick—" He takes a deep breath, blows it slowly out. "That’s when I found out how to get Xanax. Hydrocodone sometimes. Just dumb shit. And it's like...I knew it was dumb. But I was desperate, I guess.”
I squeeze his hand, feeling my throat tighten up.
“When school got going, it got worse and worse...a little bit at a time." He rubs his forehead, shutting his eyes.
“Did something set you off, the night you took too much stuff?” I manage, working hard to steady my voice. “What do you think happened?”
I’m asking so I can understand him. I don’t expect the deer-in-headlights look he gives me.
"You can tell me,” I urge. “Whatever it is, I can take it.”
Mills looks down at his lap, then back up at me. "It was when your mom said you went missing. My mom called.” He must mean when my mom tried to come visit me, but I’d gone to San Francisco. She went apeshit, reported me missing like a lost five-year-old. “I thought if you were having problems,” he says, “if you’d been in inpatient, which my mom told me that same day—and you still didn't want to talk to me at all—that what we had together had meant nothing. To you,” Josh whispers. “She told me to keep an eye out for you. That you left Tuscaloosa. And I felt helpless. And then you were 'found' or whatever. And I was not involved in any way. When, to me, the thing between us had been everything."
I change lanes smoothly, exiting and stopping at the next gas station. I slide into a parking spot and lean over, wrapping him the fuck up. “I just need to hold you,” I rasp. “Tell you I’m so sorry for what happened.”
Miller says, “It’s not your fault,” and I tell him, “I still feel sick about it.”
“Maybe you’re just hungry,” he jokes.
We walk inside and get some powdered donuts and split the pack. As I drive us toward Tuscaloosa, I tell him more about my lonely spring and strange amnesia summer and this fevered fall. And I feel sick for me, too.
I wish badly for a time machine. So I could go back and know that whole plan with my mom was shit. That ECT would steal my memory. That we would both suffer.
"Why do you think this shit happens?" he asks, looking discouraged.
I can’t help a soft laugh. "You think I know? You think I ever saw myself as fighting with a grown man, squeezing his throat until he has a stroke? Or getting dumped off by my mom at a psych hospital to do some ECT?"
