Chapter II
II
Marin
He seems relaxed, considering we’re both at the same precipice, and it unnerves me.
The car suits him, which I consider mentioning as an insult but keep to myself.
I can already hear Sloane’s “What could you possibly mean by that?” He gives the impression he fantasizes about three-car garages and coaching a Little League team.
There’s a clear through line from his crush on her, the feat of American engineering he’s driving, and the handwritten note I spot on the dash.
Teddy’s the dream my dad had for me as a little girl, a “happy wife, happy life” guy.
He’s everything I’m trying to run away from, wrapped in a striped rugby shirt that fits him better than it should.
As Teddy climbs back into the car, I hug Sloane one last time.
I promise to call the second I get to my new home on East Eighty-Third Street—a parquet-floored two-bedroom apartment partitioned to accommodate my cousin, two of her theater friends, and now me.
“There’s no crying in baseball, Mar,” she whispers, wiping the tears from both of our eyes.
Our first Halloween together, we showed up to Donnelly’s in matching skirted baseball uniforms, an homage to A League of Their Own .
It was the first time we’d used our fake IDs, and memories of this truly inconsequential milestone make my throat feel tight.
Destabilized, I try to focus on one inhale, one exhale. Losing Sloane, or losing my proximity to Sloane, feels like a small death. And despite how avoidant we’ve been about this topic, it’s been on my mind constantly.
I sink into the bucket seat, and she squeezes my hand.
“Please take care of yourself. And try not to fall in love with Mr.All-American on the way to New York.” We turn to look at Teddy, who is spitting sunflower seeds into a red plastic cup.
Sloane raises her brows and shuts my door. It’s going to be a long ride.
We pull out of the parking lot, waving longer than Sloane can see us, as if to say our goodbyes not just to her but to all of it, before we merge onto I-80 East.
“I figured we’d spend the night outside of Chicago and finish the rest of the drive tomorrow,” Teddy says, his voice confident but quieter than I expect.
He holds the wheel with one hand and props his head against the other, his elbow lodged on the windowsill.
His certainty could read as arrogance, but I sense it’s just.
.. him. I try to give him the benefit of the doubt, as someone whose directness also sometimes reads as conceitedness.
The worn-in cotton of his purple-and-yellow rugby shirt tugs at his bicep, and my vantage point gives me a good angle on his jawline, sharp and angular.
Maybe Sloane should reconsider his obvious affection for her.
“Works for me,” I respond, ready to daydream in peace for a few hours, ideally to some music. “Do you mind if I turn on the radio?”
His eyes crinkle. “The radio’s shot. The AC, too. I assumed Sloane told you.” Nothing slips Sloane Bachman’s mind, especially not details as damning as these. “Sorry, it’s not exactly luxury travel.” He smiles slightly, and his eyes land on me long enough for it to feel deliberate.
“I can rough it.” I reach for my mints and turn my body toward the window.
I pictured my arrival in New York triumphant, or at least with modern amenities. There’s nothing filmic about the situation I’ve found myself in, or the silence that’s growing louder by the minute.
I lean back in the seat, watching the office parks and megachurches blur by.
In an instant, I’m an eight-year-old in Sunday school, accepting salvation at the altar for the fifteenth time.
I’m a ten-year-old trailing behind my dad at Bring Your Child to Work Day, carrying a pocketbook full of business cards he printed with my name.
I’m eighteen and hiding my acceptance letters to UC Berkeley and Columbia, convinced that picking a college near my sister is the most important thing.
All these Marins belong here, in Iowa. I’m ready for the start of a new self in New York, one without the grief or the impossible weight of always doing it right.
Around Geneseo, Illinois, I decide I’ve heard enough of Teddy’s sunflower seed spitting.
The car’s sticky, and I can see sweat drops gathering on his collarbone.
I can’t go on like this. “Let’s play a game,” I suggest with more enthusiasm than I actually feel.
He looks at me, left arm draped out the open window.
I catch a whiff of his scent—boy mixed with some cologne I can’t identify but don’t hate.
Teddy’s attractive, I decide, if you’re into the life-of-the-party, whole milk, Iowa suburbs type.
“Let’s go back and forth and tell each other what we know to be true about the other person. ”
Teddy laughs, and it’s the loudest sound I’ve heard him make so far. “This feels like freshman orientation. But I’m in. You start.”
And suddenly, as he nods in my direction, it hits me. We’ve met before.
I sit up taller and run my eyes over him as my brain sifts through memories.
The chill of football bleachers. The scent of corn during summers of detasseling.
Teddy’s somewhere, his face just out of recollection.
“Oh my god.” I laugh, a faint memory coming into focus in my mind.
“You went to Valley High School, didn’t you?
” Of course: Teddy McCarrel, whose little sister I played against in a tennis tournament senior year.
“Wait, are you from DesMoines?”
“I went to Sacred Heart. Plaid skirt and plastic babies for pro-life day.”
His laughter joins my own. “Is it true about those kids getting caught having sex in the confessional? That shit was lore at Valley.”
“Not only true, but not the first time. My dad always tried to tell people he was the first to do it in the ’80s.”
“Absolute legend. Please tell him I said so.”
My face falls, and my instinct is to blame myself for initiating conversation, as if Teddy and I could ride like monks for the better part of two days.
Lightheaded, I feel a familiar apprehension build: the one that precedes dropping the dead-parent bomb in a conversation.
Teddy and I have a long drive ahead of us.
And I have the sneaking suspicion he might have a very healthy relationship with two living parents.
Hands sweating, I respond as quickly as possible.
“Dead, or, sorry, he’s dead. He got sick when I was in high school. Did you ever see the parking lot painted in purple cancer ribbons?”
His head swivels toward me, making brief but direct eye contact before returning his gaze to the road.
“I’m so sorry, Marin.” He says it slowly and intentionally, with the kind of weight I don’t normally get in response to this disclosure.
It lands somewhere soft. And I suddenly feel safe.
“Of course I saw them. I was doing driver’s ed there when they went up and kept wondering who the local celebrity was. ”
“That was my dad. Wait, was Mr.Lichen your driver’s ed teacher?”
At this, Teddy throws back his head, laughing with his whole body, and reaches across the space between us, resting his hand on the headrest of my seat.
I expect to tense at the proximity, but there’s something settling about his presence there.
Mr.Lichen was an instructor that rich parents hired on the side to offer a not-totally-state-sanctioned course condensed into three weeks.
“I had to spend the summer campaigning for student council,” he offers. “What was your excuse?” I smile, wondering why it took us eighty miles to break the ice.
“Dead dad.” I shrug. “He was about to go into hospice, and my mom needed someone else to cart my sister around as soon as possible.” Teddy listens, eyes on the road, his hand still centimeters from my shoulder.
“I can’t imagine,” he whispers with a reverence I find refreshing from someone I wrote off as unserious. “He’d be proud of you, I’m sure.”
I nod, wordless in the way thinking about my dad often makes me. “We don’t have to keep talking about it. But thank you.”
He moves his hand to the back of my seat to change lanes and then to the wheel.
“So you must know my ex, then.” Teddy’s buzzing—clearly the kind of person powered by nostalgia, who loves a round of regional six degrees of separation.
“She’s the one who made the ‘Sacred Heart Girls Get On Their Knees’ T-shirts for our state semifinals against you guys in 2010. ”
I guffaw in response, then quickly gather myself.
Should I tell him? I don’t have to. I shift in my seat, and I can’t quite get comfortable—we’re careening toward unbridled honesty, and it feels awkward or maybe unfair to retreat now.
The sun is setting, we’re three hours in, and it’s not like I’ll ever see this guy again.
I suck in a deep breath as a mischievous smile spreads over my mouth.
Teddy
My mouth falls open, but I close it again and shake my head firmly. Being next to Marin makes me feel like I’m on my second espresso—nervous, excited, and without a clue as to where things will end up. “No, Maddie’s straight.”
The suggestion—well, the claim—is that Marin and Maddie hooked up in the back of Marin’s Jetta after a homecoming game.
I mean, Maddie and I weren’t a perfect match, but.
.. I watch Marin’s face for clues and try not to calculate how much she’s drifted toward the center console, unsure whether it’s mere observation or wishful thinking.
“No, no. She’s a full-send lesbian.” Marin can barely get the words out between laughing. Her smile cracks open, and fuck . My palms go sweaty, and I drop one hand out the window just to try to dry it off.
Marin folds a leg under her and angles her body toward me. “She went to Smith. Teddy, she had a mullet in high school .” We laugh—her with abandon, me with nervous realization.
“Well, thanks for putting a nail in the coffin of any dream I ever had of marrying my high school sweetheart.”
Marin scrunches her nose, like I’ve said something distasteful.
No, I did not think Maddie and I might end up together at this point, but I always liked the idea that maybe I’d have a young-love story like my parents.
The picture-perfect marriage that my dad almost ruined when he cheated with his secretary, Carter’s aunt, during my junior year of high school.
But we’re Midwestern. We cried on the sofa and swept it under the rug, and things have been fine ever since.
Not that I’m going to mention it to Marin.
“Ok, my turn,” I say, changing the subject. “What I know about you is that your best friend is the smartest, most interesting woman at the University of Iowa.”
A cop siren sounds to our left. Marin rolls her eyes and manages to explicitly direct this gesture at me. “In this case, Teddy, she’s not gay, but it’s just never going to happen.” It’s not really news to me, but I sulk a little anyway.
Marin dismisses my sullen expression with a flick of her wrist, and it feels almost like we’re bantering.
“Here’s what is going to happen: Sloane’s going to write an Oscar-winning movie, and then we’ll go on a thirty-day trip to Japan and renovate brownstones across the street from each other in Brooklyn.
” It’s funny to hear her talk like this.
To witness her so excited about a future that’s not all that distinct from the one Carter and I picture—just different settings, different trappings.
Marin’s glowing in the passenger seat, like she’s trying to suppress the sunniness Sloane brings out in her but can’t.
“It sounds like I might not be the only one in love with Sloane Bachman.”
Another eye roll. “I’m sure you’re too lost in the mire of masculinity to understand a concept like a best friend, but she’s mine. So in that sense, she’s the love of my life, but I’m not trying to marry her. Or sleep with her, for that matter.”
“‘The mire of masculinity’?” I crack back. “I’ll have you know that my best friend Carter is the love of my life too. And I’m not trying to sleep with him either.”
She reaches for her bag of snacks, smirking. “I like that you think you had to tell me you’re straight.”
I go silent, unsure if I have an opening to ask the question that’s been rattling around since she slid into my car: Is Marin only into girls?
She’s wearing patent loafers and ribbed socks for a cross-country road trip, which feels like it might be my answer, but I don’t want to come across as offensively straight.
And besides, this is just a curiosity triggered by forced proximity and a lack of soundtrack, nothing more. Maybe I just need to leave it alone.
“Tell me a Sloane story,” I say instead, navigating past a sputtering semi.
Marin recounts the time Sloane attempted to learn “Edelweiss” on a harp she found at the Iowa City Goodwill the week before a talent show, and I get a chance to take her in.
The way she speaks, with her whole body, it’s like the words are electricity running through her fingertips.
The Diane Keaton comparison was rash. She’s languid and boyish, but as I glance over my shoulder to change lanes, I notice a black lace bra beneath her barely buttoned striped oxford.
Her hair, a nothing color between brown and blond, seemed unremarkable at first, but the way it falls, framing her face, only for her to push it behind her ears when she’s about to make the punch line, delights me.
“And that was when I knew I would grow old with her.” Exhausted, she leans back into her seat, doing the hair-behind-her-ears thing again.
“How romantic.” I laugh, noticing a sign for a motel in four miles. I hadn’t wanted to interrupt her to make a plan, but the piecey sunset has given way to darkness. We have to sleep somewhere.