Sylvie
We’re sitting knee to knee on the bed.
“I hit him. With my car.” The words are almost soundless. Mostly air.
“What? Who?”
“Cal. And I don’t know if I did it on purpose.”
“Sylvie, that’s—”
“Don’t tell me what’s impossible. Don’t do that.
This trip—it had been my idea, it was going to be my first real stab at independence, at being on my own, and then he attached himself to it and tried to take over and for the longest time I just let him.
Because I was a coward. I pushed down what I was feeling for so long that I turned into, like, a rage monster, and then one night I could feel the acid bubbling up inside of me and I couldn’t wait any longer.
I drove over to his house. To break up with him.
I took my mom’s car, I was speeding down the access road to his house—it had all these turns, and it was the country, there weren’t any streetlights—and we used to fight about what a bad driver I could be.
Cal and I. He said I’d daydream, that I’d let the car drift.
And it happened that night—that night, he was out there on the road. ”
Knox stares at me in profound sorrow.
“He was on his bike. Sometimes he rode out to his uncle’s house, it wasn’t far, his family had a compound out there and it’s where their mailboxes were.
” I shut my eyes. “He wasn’t wearing his helmet.
He never did. He didn’t have reflective tape on his bike.
But I mean, I didn’t have any on my bike, either, I’m not trying to blame him for this—”
“You’re just trying to explain,” he murmurs.
“I thought he was a deer.” My fingers are worrying a hole into my duvet. “All I saw was this . . . this blur. I clipped his bike, and he flew over the handlebars and he—he went headfirst into a tree.”
“Sylvie.”
I hear myself dredge it up, that thing always lurking at the bottom of the well, scaly and dark and afraid of the light. “I’d wanted him gone. I wanted that, Knox. What if some part of me did it on purpose?”
“Never,” he says, hard and sure. “You would never.”
“And now that’s the only thing you’ll see when you look at me.” I curl up into myself on the bed, put my face in my hands. “I’ll disappear. I’ll be the embodiment of what I’ve done.”
A hand on my hair, gentle. “Never,” he says again. “All I can see is you.”