Before & After Seventeen Years Old, Tennessee In Lieu of College
Before & After
Seventeen Years Old, Tennessee
Not ten minutes pass before we’re loading Isaiah’s bag into the Jetta’s trunk.
Marjorie sees us off from the driveway, partially obscured by an umbrella.
She wasn’t thrilled about the idea of Isaiah leaving town, but she heard him out. Then she went to the kitchen to pack a bag with snacks and bottles of water. She hugged him in the foyer, tucking a folded bundle of cash into his jacket pocket.
“Just in case,” she said, kissing his cheek, then mine.
I drive the first leg. Isaiah’s quiet, gazing out the window as the blustery night flies by. I don’t have the energy to carry a conversation. I keep thinking about the last time I traveled this road, east-to-west. How despondent I’d been, but how sure I was of my next steps. Now the reverse is true: I’m optimistic—genuinely happy, a lot of the time—but my future presents like a black hole: vast, mysterious, and terrifying. And so music fills the quiet, thanks to a playlist Paloma curated after I texted her about my impromptu trip and apologized for missing out on meeting Liam during the first few days of his visit.
Just past Knoxville, we stop for gas. The air is briskly cold and uncomfortably damp. There are some shady characters loitering around the pumps. I run inside to pee, then pick up packages of gummy worms and wintergreen gum. Swiping my debit card at the register, I glance out the window and spot Isaiah leaning on the trunk of my car, arms crossed against the wind, waiting as the Jetta’s tank fills. His dark hair’s tousled, and his jacket is unzipped, baring the ERHS basketball sweatshirt he wears beneath. He must sense me watching because he lifts his chin to peer into the fluorescently lit gas station. Our eyes meet and, despite his day’s events, he smiles.
He’s an exemplary human. A lionhearted hero.
My heart swells.
It takes a second but then…
… a word to label the emotion: love .
Pocketing our snacks, I hurry outside, rounding my car to where he stands. He gives me an inquisitive look before I barrel into him, sneaking my arms inside his jacket to circle around him. He laughs, wrapping me into a burrito hug, keeping me close even after the gas pump clicks to signal a full tank.
I spent my whole life loving Beck. It was involuntarily, like the way I breathe. The way I blink. With Isaiah, it’s different. My feelings are considered and conscious, but no less special.
My heart’s leaving before to make a faith-testing leap into after.
“All good?” he asks, soft against my ear.
I nod, reluctantly pulling away.
He gets behind the wheel, letting me recline in the passenger seat. I pass him gummies as he navigates I-40, then I-80.
“You doing okay?” I ask as one song fades into the next.
“Yeah. Glad to be with you.”
“But…everything else?”
He shrugs. “It’s a hurdle. I’ll clear it.”
“You’re a badass, you know that, right?”
He flashes me a smile, then turns his attention back to the road. He drives with his hands at ten and two, the way my dad showed me. As soon as he took the wheel, he turned the music down. He’s vigilant, maybe because of the weather, maybe because he doesn’t drive every day, maybe because he cares about his cargo. Whatever the case, I’ve never felt safer.
“You should sleep,” he says near Kingsport.
“I have too much energy to sleep.”
“This trip…pretty big deal, huh?”
Back in his room, I explained about Connor’s retirement as he threw clothes and shoes and a travel toothbrush into a duffel. He didn’t ask a lot of questions, but I got the sense he understood that my journey is about more than applauding a family friend who’s making a career change.
“When we moved last summer,” I say, “it was sudden. I mean, it wasn’t—I’d known for months that we were going to Tennessee—but when I look back, I was living in Virginia and then I was in the car with my parents, going that way,” I say, hitching my thumb in the direction opposite the one we’re traveling. “I skipped out on major goodbyes. Left a lot of things unsaid. Burned some bridges, probably,” I admit, thinking of Macy. “I had myself convinced that I was doing the right thing, cutting ties quickly and cleanly. Making it simple for everyone. But I’ve started to realize that I left the way I did because that’s what was easiest for me. I hadn’t even thought of anyone else.”
“Hindsight’s a real bitch.”
“Yeah,” I say with a melancholy sigh. “She’s been riding my ass a lot lately.”
“Because you get stuck in your head, reliving the good, obsessing over the bad. You and I are alike that way. The first time we kissed? It was all I could think about for weeks.”
I pull up the hood of my sweatshirt to hide my blush. “Do I want to know whether that qualified as good or bad?”
He reaches for my hand. “Good, Lia. Really fucking good.”
I feel like a traitor giving voice to this question, but I have to ask, “Have you ever been so sure about a decision, and then, out of nowhere, you start to wonder if you’re making the biggest mistake of your life?”
“You’re not sure you want to go to CVU,” Isaiah says, like he’s spent the last few minutes swimming through my head. “And…what? You don’t want to disappoint your parents?”
I laugh dryly. “My parents would be thrilled if I ditched CVU.”
“Then what’s keeping you locked in?”
“Well, I applied early decision.”
“So? They’re not gonna throw you in jail because you don’t show up to freshman orientation.”
“Still. There are consequences.”
“Yeah, and there are consequences to living out a future you don’t want. What else?”
I swallow, my throat dry. “Beck.”
He lets go of my hand to grip the steering wheel. Because the rain’s picked up? Or because he doesn’t want to touch me while I speak of my first love?
The night Beck passed, Mom and I stayed at the Byrnes’ with Norah and Mae, who were asleep when we arrived.
Just after midnight, Connor called to tell us he was gone. That’s when I slipped into a scary sort of shock, something akin to being buried alive.
Darkness, aloneness, hopelessness.
Mom offered comfort in all the ways she could, but I was inconsolable.
I ended up going down to Beck’s room. The lights were off, and I left them that way. My eyes adjusted quickly. The duvet was smooth. The desk was clear. The nightstand had been dusted. The air smelled of Tide, of him.
I fell onto the bed, pressing my face into his pillow. I tugged the duvet up to cover my head. My whole body hurt, but the pain was most excruciating in the cavern behind my ribs. Desperate, I tried to imagine that he was with me, breathing into my hair, whispering that he loved me, wanted me, couldn’t fathom a world without me. I cried silently, that torturous, convulsive crying that leads to clenched muscles and pounding headaches. Finally, close to dawn, I exhausted myself, sinking into a nightmarish sleep that ended abruptly, with the sound of footsteps descending the stairs.
I shot to sitting, rubbing my eyes, clearing my throat.
Anguish sat heavy on my chest.
The light sneaking through the drawn shades signaled morning, though I wanted to crawl back under the covers and sink into my suffering.
Little hands banged on the door.
Norah and Mae.
Detangling myself from the sheets, I made my feet carry me across the room. On the other side of the door, I found two identical faces framed in strawberry-blond curls. They were wearing matching pajamas, bearing twin smiles. I swallowed hard, thinking about how their expressions would fall when they learned about their brother.
“Here you are,” Norah said, as if they’d been looking for me.
“Why is your mommy asleep on the couch?” Mae asked.
I molded my features into a mask of calm. “She must be tired.”
“Why does your voice sound like that?” Norah asked.
I cleared the scratchiness from my throat. “Maybe I’m catching a cold.”
Mae lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “You’re not supposed to be in Beck’s room with the door closed.”
I walked back to the bed and sat on the rumpled duvet. “That’s only if Beck’s with me.”
“Did you sleep in here?” Norah asked.
“I did, yeah. I’m not supposed to do that, either, I know, but what if we all lay down together for a little while?”
Mae frowned. “Beck doesn’t like when we come into his room when he’s not home.”
I whispered, “I don’t think he’d mind.”
They looked at one another, communicating in the special, silent way they often do, then clambered onto the bed. They curled up on either side of me, and I combed my fingers through their curls, tears streaming down my face.
I, too, wanted to fall asleep and never wake up.
“Beck went to CVU,” I tell Isaiah over the sound of rain and windshield wipers. “He asked me to join him after I graduated. Charlottesville was going to be the beginning of our life together. Even after he died, I thought CVU was where I was meant to be. I thought I owed it to him to carry out our plan, even though it hadn’t always been my plan. I realize now…that girl who applied to CVU, and only CVU? She was chasing a ghost.”
He’s quiet, pensively absorbing my confession. Uncomfortable in the silence, I study his profile: smooth forehead, imperfect nose, full mouth, strong chin.
A warrior’s face.
Finally he replies, using carefully chosen, thoughtfully delivered words. “Maybe you’re not chasing a ghost. Maybe you’re chasing the person you were when you were with him.”
That Lia—the Lia of before—is gone. Dead and buried, like her first love, her best friend.
“Maybe,” I say, noncommittal.
“What if you don’t go to CVU?”
“Then I don’t go to college.”
I say this as if it’s the most epic of fails.
“Okay,” Isaiah says, like, Who cares? “So you skip college next semester. Next year, even. Let’s say you take a gap year. What would you do with it?”
“I’ve honestly never thought about it.”
He glances over at me, eyes sparking in the meager light. “Maybe it’s time you start.”
In Lieu of College
volunteer
backpack abroad (intimidating!)
vocational school (for what vocation?)
trade school (for what? cosmetology?)
an internship
work retail
au pair (okay, maybe?)
write…something
apprenticeship (different than an internship?)
realtor license (lucrative, college degree not
required!)
tutor
enlist (what would Dad say?)
dole out fortunes (*laugh sob*)