AllFreeNovel
Share Us
So I endured one more day and checked out at nine the next morning. When I got home my car was in the garage. Adrian greeted me at the door with a kiss.
“Did you have a good time in Atlanta?”
“No,” I said.
“I know. I’m just trying to be nice. Why don’t you come with me to pick up Frisky?”
“Why don’t we just leave him there.”
“Right. Come on.”
“Seriously,” I said, “do we need him anymore?”
“No,” he said.
The heaviness of that one word settled over us. I began to cry.
“But,” he continued, softly, “we’re going to get him because he’s our dog. Our pet. Come on.”
“Can we talk about what happened? What did you do?” I whispered.
“I’m going on my own then. I’ll be home soon.”
“No, I want to come with you.”
We rode along without saying anything for a few minutes and then Adrian said, “You need to trust that I would never intentionally hurt anyone unless I had to. He would have killed us.”
“Why couldn’t you have gone to the police? What kind of people are we? I feel like I‘m living someone else’s life. I don’t even know you!”
“That’s not fair! I just put my life on the line for us! You have no idea what I went through these last few days! I have had two hours of sleep in three days! And that’s just the beginning of it. Do you think I ever saw my life going this way? Hell no! But sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to do until you do it. Now I need to be able to trust you. Can I trust you?”
“Yes.”
“The police aren’t God. There’s no reason to get them involved. It’s too late for that.”
He looked at me hard. And we were both afraid of what the other could be capable of.
Chapter 52
My high school graduation was a no-frills affair. My parents came to it and then took me out for dinner afterwards at an Italian restaurant called Francesca’s. There was no party. Who besides relatives would we invite? Alex Wescott had broken up with me so he could go off to college and become gay for real. So it was fine with me to bypass having a party. My parents gave me a gift, though: A brand new computer for college. That was a pretty big deal. They were also paying for me to go to the UW. Honestly, both were more than I ever expected. I don’t think I even would have gotten into Madison, but to my surprise, Dave Douglas wrote a really nice letter of recommendation for me.
I drove myself there and moved myself in, which turned out to be a weird thing to do. All the other students had their parents and families with them. I thought back to my parents helping Valencia and Van move into their dorms. “Your parents aged thirty years when Valencia and Van died,” my Grandmother told me once. Which made them older than her. So when I looked at it like that, it made sense that they couldn’t be there with me. They were practically eighty!
For the first time I thought about all the things Valencia and Van left in their dorms. Why couldn’t I remember how we got their possessions back? Did other students ransack their dressers and closets? I considered asking my mom about it, but what was the point?
It was 1993, and I was as old as they were when they died. I envied them for starting college with all their dreams planted in the future, believing in the power of their four years of work to sow a life of plenty. I envied them for their hope. They had been clean, vast expanses of promise, looking forever forward instead of dwelling in the past.
I, on the other hand, felt like a person with an infected, stinking wound. I resigned myself to a life of bloodstained bandages and flies swarming around me. I’d given up on being somebody. Being average, having a few friends, would have been good enough. But I was continually reminded of how damaged I was by the way nearly everyone avoided me.
My mother would have slapped me if she’d heard me say how I envied them. Then I remembered that, finally, I didn’t live under my parents’ control anymore.
I was nervous to have a roommate. When I got to my room she was nowhere to be seen, but I saw that she had already begun to move in. The bed closer to the door had luggage
and boxes on it. I took the other bed but felt like this mystery girl might get mad at me. What if she had just set her stuff on the first bed because it was closer, but wanted the far bed? I paced the tiny room, hoping she would come back so I could avoid making an important decision like where we would each sleep for the entire year. The minutes ticked by.
I paced around some more. “Please don’t let her be a J or a K girl,” I whispered to God. A toilet flushed in the distance, as if in response, and I frowned.
My roommate and I had exchanged one letter apiece over the summer but hers had been, literally, five sentences long without a photo (that gave me hope; A Jenni or a Keeli would probably send about ten pictures, half in swimwear). I knew her name was Sara Murdock and she was from Boise, Idaho. That was all. The boxes on her side of the room were just cardboard boxes and I wasn’t about to poke inside to get a better idea, so I fidgeted with my purse, waiting for her to return. After nearly an hour of thumbing through a magazine, waiting for the door to open, I gave up.
