Chapter 9 #2
“The way the author writes it… I don’t know. The landscape feels like it’s grieving with them, like the wind and the trees understand something.” She huffs a laugh. “It’s not just sad.” She pauses, thinking.
When she speaks again, I can barely hear her. “It’s that quiet kind of sadness where love and loss exist at the same time, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.” She shakes her head, looking out her side of the car. “His prose is just beautiful.”
Beautiful Annie Li. Open. Introspective.
Soft instead of jagged edges of steel meant to protect her more vulnerable insides.
I want to tell her this, but she thinks I’m prettier with my mouth shut, so I don’t.
This earns me a glance and another small smile, and it’s so beautiful it hurts.
It’s painful. It fucks me up. I keep my mouth shut about it, but something has unlocked.
Those were the most words Annie has said to me in fourteen years.
Pretty soon we pass a sign. I get an idea.
“Wanna see some beautifully sad nature shit in real life?” I ask.
She nods, and I make the turn onto the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Now, I’d like to think I’m a pretty easy guy. Science and math. I like to describe complex concepts in simple ways. Think it’s elegant that way.
I’ve driven through the Blue Ridge Mountains before, did while I was at Duke. Thought they were mad pretty.
Driving through them for the next few hours with beautiful, complex, intelligent, articulate Annie, though, is a whole new freakin’ experience.
She describes what we’re doing and seeing in that quiet, poetic voice of hers, forcing me to notice the elegance in the complexities of the world around us. Changes my whole worldview, shifts the narrative into something… beautiful.
The road winds through the mountains like a ribbon, rolling and dipping with the curves of the parkway.
Sunlight filters through the trees, casting golden patches onto the pavement, the world stretching out in all sorts of layers of deep evergreen and soft, smoky blue.
A different flavor of blue. This should be called Blue No.
1, not that artificial nonsense. The valleys below are hazy; the peaks above kissed by the last light of the afternoon.
She leans forward at one point, pointing at a hawk circling lazily overhead. I end up watching her more than the damn bird, though, the way her eyes light up, the way the wind through the open window makes the strands of her hair fly all over the place.
“I can see why you’re a writer,” I blurt out after we pass a break in the trees. It’s like the world opens up—a sheer drop to our right, an endless horizon of mountains stacked against each other.
“Like waves frozen in time,” Annie had said.
She looks at me now, then looks away. Doesn’t comment.
“I wish I could write like you,” I try again, but I really do. If I could write my cookbook in that voice of hers, making everything sound good—feel good? I’d be a millionaire twice over. “Would I be familiar with any of your work? Anything published?”
She drums her fingers on the handle of the door. “Maybe,” she finally says. “There’s some stuff out there, some of it big, but none of it under my name.”
“Don’t most writers have a pen—”
“I failed, Nico,” she cuts in softly, as the road twists some more, pulling us deeper into the heart of the mountains. Wildflowers dot the roadside—yellow, purple, white—tiny bursts of color against the deep emerald grass.
“Huh?”
“I’m…” she begins. “I’m just… not.”
“Not what?”
“Not anything.”
The vulnerability in her voice makes me glance over. And at the look on her face? I find the next overlook and pull the car over and turn it off.
“Let’s go be in the beautifully sad nature shit,” I say. “It’ll make us feel better.” We both get out of the car.
The two of us sit right down in the grass, looking beyond at the vast expanse of mountains rolling endlessly into the horizon.
Dusk is beginning to settle, painting the sky in soft pinks and oranges, the mountains shifting into the deep indigo of their name.
The air’s cooler now, tinged with the crisp scent of pine and the faint, distant smoke of a campfire somewhere.
Annie pulls her knees up, arms wrapped around them.
Her voice is quiet, like she’s talking to the wind.
“I think I’m learning that I’m just a costume.
One that doesn’t come off easily. And when you wear one long enough, you forget what’s underneath.
If there is anything underneath. And now I’m not a voice.
I’m someone else’s voice. It’s easy to be someone else when you’re nothing at all. ”
I glance over. Her face, at first glance, seems neutral. No tears. No theatrics. But I’m getting better at reading her, and it reads silent devastation.
And it does something to me. Cracks something open. The look on her face and the fact that I knew what it was.
I lie back in the grass, hands behind my head, and stare up at the sky, letting the silence stretch for several minutes.
“I get it,” I say finally.
Her eyes flick over to me. I’m not too sure but it seems like she inches closer.
“I’m hiding, too. I’ve done shit I’m not proud of,” I continue. “Things I never thought I’d do. Things that make it really hard to look people in the eye sometimes. Especially the ones who think they know me.”
She scoffs. “Look at you, Dr. Nico. There’s no way you’ve done worse than I have.”
“My mom is one of those people I can’t look in the eye, Annie.”
She pauses. “Well, you can’t tell your mom anything.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Mrs. Giannuzzi is a saint.”
A smile cracks out of my face. “You remember my mom?”
She looks at the ground. “Of course I remember your mom. She was a chaperone on that field trip to Six Flags and stayed with me in the bathroom while I puked my brains out.”
“You got sick?” I think I spent that trip on a bench reading about astronauts.
She shifts, staring at something in the distance. “I rode that huge roller coaster three times in a row.”
“The one with all the loops and flips?”
“Obviously.”
Obviously. “That’s funny you remember that.”
“It’s because she called me brave,” she says in a small voice. “Instead of getting pissed that I was puking because I rode the roller coaster so many times like an idiot, she told me that no one else in our class was brave enough to ride it except for me.”
I grin at this. “She was right. I spent that trip parked on a bench reading about NASA scientists.”
Another soft smile.
“Anyway, here’s the thing,” I say, sitting up again. “You’re not a nobody, Annie.”
She lets out a bitter scoff, but I shake my head.
“I mean it. You walk into a room and rearrange the air. Ever since we were kids. Like some sort of volatile reaction—change the temperature, shift the pressure, and suddenly nothing around you is the same. Something lights on fire. And yeah, maybe you fucked up. Maybe you lost yourself for a while. But that doesn’t make you nothing. ”
I meet her gaze, steady now.
“You’re definitely something. You’re Annie Li.”
A pause.
“Which is, frankly, my worst fuckin’ nightmare. But impressive and terrifying as hell.”
She laughs, choked and surprised.
Annie stands suddenly, like she can’t help it, like she needs to move, like she’s finally uncomfortable in this costume she’s wearing.
I stand with her. We both keep looking out, the wind the only sound besides the steady rhythm of our breathing and the quiet, unspoken understanding that something is happening here.
Something bigger than the road, bigger than the mountains, bigger than our hatred for one another.
Bigger than high school. Something is different.
Something is complicated. Something has unlocked.
It’s right now—it’s Annie Li, the beautiful, grouchy writer, and Nico Giannuzzi, the porn star chemist, a coupla smart, weirdo kids from Bensonhurst who only sort of hate each other.
She hugs herself against the breeze, and without thinking, I shrug off my hoodie and jam it over her head, my hands brushing over the soft silk of her ponytail. She looks up at me, surprised, and for a moment, neither of us says anything.
We stand side by side, the silence between us thick with that weird unspoken thing.
The wind tugs at her hair, and I look down.
I hear her breath catch. I search her eyes.
She doesn’t move. I don’t either. The world seems to narrow, the vastness of the mountains disappearing into the space between us, the only sound being the rustling leaves and the distant chirp of crickets.
Then, she exhales—a soft, shaky breath—and looks away, breaking the spell.
It’s for the best, but it kills me to do it, and I step back just slightly, enough for the moment to slip away.
She smiles, small and knowing, her shoulders loose and languid.
The sky darkens, the first stars flickering to life, and without a word, we turn back toward the car.
Complex? Or complicated? Too much of either is not what I need right now, anyway. But I get it now, I do, after this drive. Something so beautifully complex that it makes me want to cry.