Sylvie
“Can we wait until we’re back in the van?” I ask him.
“Yeah,” he says. “Of course.”
Outside, Winslow is wagging away at the window. I’m his favorite person. Should that thought be comforting? Because it isn’t. When I get in, he nudges his way under my hand for a scratch, his head between the seats.
My phone is buzzing nonstop in my pocket. I don’t look. I don’t look at Knox. I just put my hands at ten and two and keep my eyes straight ahead. “I have to tell you something and you can’t hate me after.”
“I don’t think that I could hate you,” he begins, but I cut him off.
“It’s not just that.” My phone buzzes again. I am trying so hard not to cry. “I need you to not just not hate me, I need you to keep feeling the same way you feel about me now. I need you to still like me. I need that to not change.”
He’s quiet.
I keep talking. I can’t stop. “Because the version of me that you met, this girl who drives through states that have waterfalls and mountains and volcanoes and rivers and who doesn’t stop to see any of them, who parks her fancy van so she can pull the curtains to do nothing, talk to no one, read no books, think of nobody but herself and how miserable she is—I still can’t believe that you like that girl. She’s not . . . me.”
He’s still quiet. Winslow pads off to the back seat.
“That’s not who I am, not really.” I am trying not to cry and I am not succeeding.
“Knox, I don’t want to be this girl anymore.
She sucks. She’s the worst.” Wordlessly, he pulls a napkin out of the glove compartment and hands it to me.
“And you’re so patient, and so obviously good, a good person, and the most impossible thing in the world is that someone like you looks at me the way you do, and”—he’s looking now too, turned in his seat to watch me, and if I meet his eyes I’m going to break open—“this will be the thing that ends it.”
“Sylvie,” he says low.
“No.” I shake my head. “That’s why I haven’t told you. Everything else is so out of my control. But I can control this.”
“Sylvie, look at me.”
“Looking at you is the whole problem.”
His hand brushes my shoulder. “Sylvie,” he says again, and this time I turn, and he’s right there, tan and warm and inches away, his fingers on my chin, and when he kisses me it feels like betrayal, it feels like sunlight.
“Sylvie,” he says, his forehead against mine, “I could never hate you,” and he’s so sure that it breaks my heart.
“The funeral was for my ex-boyfriend, Cal. And I was the one who killed him.”
Knox pulls back, hard.
“I was right,” I say. “See? I was right.” My phone is ringing, ringing, ringing.
What do I have to lose? “Hi, Mom,” I say, and my voice sounds so calm it’s miraculous.
“Yeah. Spur-of-the-moment thing. You know me, spontaneous! Sure. Yeah. Let’s meet at Quinoa’s, half an hour?
I have Winslow, so get a table outside.”