Sylvie
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Not that it’s a big deal or anything.”
I’m not sure I want to do this. “Sure I said ‘Cal’? Not, like, ‘can’? For all you know I was dreaming about dancing the cancan.”
“You weren’t wiggling enough for that.”
“The cancan is a wiggle, huh?”
“I honestly have no idea what a cancan looks like.”
“That’s why God created YouTube. Add it to the list.”
“What list?” Knox asks.
“The list of things we need to look up when we’re not driving. Here, you can start a note in my Notes app.” I tell him how to do it. “What else should be on there? Maybe you need to see the Avatar sequels. Oh! Have you ever played Pac-Man? Maybe we can find an arcade!”
He’s quiet for a minute. “You don’t want to talk about it, huh.”
“What?”
“Cal.”
I try not to squirm. “Knox, I say this with a lot of love in my heart—”
“It’s usually not a good sign when people start sentences like that.”
“—but it’s sort of weird that you think you get to have an opinion on my not telling you things about my life.
Because you’ve been Houdini-ing your way out of every attempt I’ve made to ask about yours.
” I stare doggedly ahead. The highway’s gone to six lanes across, and every one of those six lanes is lousy with semitrucks. I-90 is hell.
“Okay. That’s fair.”
“So basically, I think we have three options here.”
“Lay ’em out.”
“The first option is that you and I can go on keeping our secrets behind lock and key for the next however many days until we get you to North Carolina, and in the meantime we talk about oatmeal, and The Kite Runner, and we make dad jokes, and you—you sleep in your tent wherever we end up camping and if you do get that phone you probably don’t text me a whole bunch after you get to your grandma’s unless it’s, like, to tell me you’ve finally seen a bad movie I mentioned in passing. ”
Knox lets the silence stretch out, and I refuse to let it make me nervous.
Not when all I’m doing is making the subtext into text.
And maybe it’s a test I’m giving him. Maybe I’m waiting to see if he reacts the way Cal would to something like that—well I think it’s unfair that you think you have the right to dictate the terms of our relationship—essentially railroading me until I cave and let him take control instead.
My hands tense on the wheel. Am I a terrible person for thinking like this about the dead? No question.
“The second option,” I say, making myself continue, “is that I tell you everything about Cal and everything about why I was in, like, a nonfunctional state when I met you, and you tell me everything about this ‘unschooling’ thing that sounds like a cover for either a fundamentalist log-cabin cult or, like, something Manson Family–ish but without all the murders—I mean, I hope without all the murders—and then after all our cards are on the table, we can go ahead and have a healthy rela—friendship.
“But we’re not going to do that.”
“We’re not?” When I glance over at Knox, he’s trying to hide a smile.
“No. Because I think we both have reasons for keeping that stuff to ourselves. Or we would’ve talked about it already.”
“Okay,” he says. “What’s option three?”
“One for one.”
“I need more than that.”
“I tell you something,” I say, “something I feel comfortable telling you, something about—Cal, or whatever, and you give me something in return. But here’s the deal. If I don’t think the thing you’ve given me is significant enough, that you’re trying to winkle out juicy stuff—”
“Winkle?”
“—winkle out stuff without giving me equal stuff in return, the game stops. And the same goes for me.”
“These are our only three options.”
“Yep,” I say, squinting at the blue amenities sign ahead of us. Then I turn on my blinker. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
Knox sighs. It’s the sound of someone gently dropping something they didn’t want to carry anymore. “You’re not wrong. Is it weird that this kind of reminds me of strip poker?”
“You played a lot of strip poker?”
“Do we need gas? Is that why we’re pulling off the highway?”
“Because I’ve never played strip poker.”
“. . . we’re passing the gas station.”
“We’re getting Starbucks,” I tell him. “Do you want a coffee drink with caramel on the top and caramel on the bottom?”
“Oh,” he says. “Hell yes.”
A LITTLE LATER
“Did you just pay for that with your phone?”
“Triple Star Day,” I tell him, pulling out of the drive-thru. “I just got a boatload of points for those iced macchiatos. And the muffins.”
His eyebrows go up, then fall. “Triple Star Day,” he says. “Got it. I thought we were kind of low on cash.”
“I charged it to like a hundred dollars’ worth of Starbucks credit that my mom has loaded into her account.” I start to play it off, make it clear I think it’s frivolous and stupid, but also I’m aware that this silly coffee drink is making me genuinely happy. “You like it?”
He takes an experimental sip. “So much caramel.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I special order the extra layer. It must taste insanely sweet.”
“It kinda does.” He sips again. “I like it? I like it. I think I just need to drink it slowly.”
We’re quiet until we get back on the highway, following the route that skirts us around Chicago.
“My mom woke me up in the middle of the night,” he says, finally.
“When I was a kid. She put me in the back seat, and we left. We didn’t tell my dad we were going.
” Knox frowns. “Could’ve been she left a note.
I guess I never asked her. My dad died a couple years after my mom left him and took me.
We found out just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah.
We were going to a rave festival thing in the desert.
My mom checked her email, which she did maybe once a week, and got the message from my mamaw.
And, yeah, I really miss him. We left behind my dog Bilbo and I miss him too.
I guess he’s probably also gone. I never heard. ”
“Oh.”
He looks at me. “You see,” he says, gently, “why I didn’t really want to tell you a lot of this.”
“If it’s painful—”
“I’ve had a long time to grieve. But I can tell that you don’t know what to say now.” He takes another cautious sip of his drink.
What I want to say is that I feel really bad for forcing Knox into this confession. That I didn’t think the rules of this all the way through. “How do you want me to react?”
“Don’t let me put that on you.”
“No, for real,” I say. “Do you want me to be curious? Ask questions? Because I can definitely do that. Do you want me to tell you that I can’t imagine how much that sucked?
Because it sounds like it did. Or do you want me to make a noncommittal sound and then share my secret, because I feel like you’ve more than earned it? ”