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Ethan
When I open my eyes, he’s sitting against the back wheel of the VW in the sharp, gold light of sunrise, smoking. For someone who doesn’t smoke, he’s sure been doing it a lot.
My muscles scream as I stand up and stretch. I hear a sound on the other side of the stone wall, and when I climb up to look there’s a goat from God knows where trying to pull apart a thick tuft of grass.
“Hey there,” I coo, holding out my hand. When it glares at me and runs away, Victor snorts softly. We’re so far from the main road I can’t hear a whisper of traffic. There isn’t a single house that I can see in any direction.
“It’s time for you to explain why the hell we’re out here chasing goats instead of eating breakfast at our luxury hotel,” I complain.
Victor exhales smoke, squinting at nothing, the sun turning his lashes white.
Victor
I wake up without words.
When I was younger, even though I was in hell, I used to be able to smile and say whatever people wanted to hear. Now I’m too weak to fight that hard.
I’d be dead this morning if Ethan hadn’t taken the wheel. I don’t know if it would have been intentional or a drunk accident, but that doesn’t change the results. This sun would be rising on a sea cliff with a broken safety railing, warming the water over my head.
Ethan sits on the hood of the car and opens his atlas. If we don’t know where we are, we can’t know where we’re going. I close my eyes and let the world come to me in pieces—gravel crunching under my ass, the burn of smoke in my lungs, my dry mouth and pounding headache. My life is no more, no less, than this.
“Let’s go,” Ethan says. “I have a plan.”
I shake my head.
“We’re going the opposite direction from Naples, just for a little bit.” That gets my attention. I point at the map. “No, it didn’t help. Get in.”
Who needs Xanax when you have an earnest, demanding Ethan bossing you around?
I stay seated, watching him until he widens his eyes at me impatiently. “Let’s go. I have a plan.”
We bump back down the lane to the main road. Beyond a row of bleached-looking olive trees and the canvas top of a fruit stand, I can see the glint of water on the horizon. My skin aches for it.
Ethan parks across the road and gets out. I stay in the car and watch him buy two apples and two oranges and two bottles of water. He dumps it all in my lap and keeps driving. As we pull into a real village, a cluster of sunbaked houses with fishing nets stacked outside, I scrape an orange rind with my thumbnail and smell it.
He parks in an empty lot off the central plaza and shakes one of the water bottles in my face. “This had better be half empty when I get back.”
I throw the water in the back seat and frown at him as he walks around the car and up to a group of teens. They talk for a long time. I think through all the ways he could be setting up a trap, waiting to betray me and take me back to Gray. Or Coach. But he’s never been able to lie to me.
I don’t understand what he’s doing, and I hate things that I don’t understand.
When I don’t get out of the car, he comes around and opens my door. “We’re going to see a Roman ruin.”
The fuck?I raise my eyebrow, but he ignores me, pointing east of the village. “It’s up there.”
Scrunching deeper into my seat, I point west, toward the sea I can’t hear anymore.
“We’ll get there eventually, I promise.”
Everything sways a little when I stand up, but then I feel better. I follow him back to the plaza, warm stone under my feet. If he looks bad, clothes wrinkled, hair standing up, stubble on his chin, I must look worse.
I’m too tired to do anything but plod after him, watching my legs get dusty as we follow a chalky shoulder of the road out of the village and into the countryside. Ten minutes later, I can see a field dotted with broken pillars and arches. Dirt paths weave into the distance among half-fallen walls and informational placards and grass laced with patches of dandelion. It’s so hushed, just a few elderly people wandering around.
I don’t like thinking about the past. They’re all dead. For someone who wants to die, I’m awfully afraid of being dead.
The cramped, chilly visitor center creeps me out, but Ethan marches inside and I can’t let him out of my sight. While he talks to the employees at the counter, I stare at a map on the wall, trying to figure out if there’s anywhere to swim nearby.
I jump when he hangs something around my neck from behind. When he sees my glare, he looks sorry.
