Sylvie
“When you said you’d never see me again—”
“Is this Taylor Swift?” Knox asks, reaching for the volume.
“Don’t you wish. It’s Noah Kahan. That is clearly a man singing.”
“Oh.”
I hit the power button. “For real. When you said—”
“Sylvie,” Knox says. “Can I ask you something?”
“Okay.”
“I know that the Cal stuff is painful to think about, and probably more painful to talk about. I know you’ve been through the wringer in the last few months. But still. Why didn’t you tell me?” He’s asking with genuine curiosity, and so I try for a genuine answer.
“I don’t know,” I say. “The reasons you just gave, maybe.”
He’s looking at my hands on the wheel. “Can I take a shot at it?”
“My motivations?”
“Yeah. I won’t if it’ll make you feel bad. But I think—I think I have an idea why.”
“Been in any fatal car accidents lately?” It doesn’t come out kindly. “Sorry.”
“No, I haven’t. But I have thought, hey, if I don’t ever bring this up, this—invisible anchor I’m carrying around on my shoulder, then maybe it’ll be like it never happened.
Maybe when people look at me, they won’t see it.
Nobody will rearrange their opinion of me to make this awful thing fit, make it make sense. Nobody will leave me high and dry.”
“I never thought you’d leave me high and dry,” I say, and I’m realizing what I feel as I’m saying it.
“But can we be realistic? You broke your arm. You’re short on cash.
Let’s set aside the fact that I wanted to give you a ride, okay?
I was your best option, maybe your only option.
You’re not getting a restaurant job with that cast on.
And if”—I am not going to cry—“if you looked at me and thought, this girl here, this girl I can’t get rid of, that I’m relying on now, this girl went on vacation in a Mercedes days after her boyfriend’s funeral, this girl who’s driving me hours and hours who killed the last person who kissed her—I didn’t want you to feel trapped.
I didn’t want to have to see me through your eyes. ”
“What do you mean?”
“You know when a new friend walks into your bedroom and suddenly all the Harry Styles posters tacked up to your ceiling look . . . weird? Childish? Kind of stalker-y? When the night before you really loved them and maybe even whispered a little good night to Harry before you fell asleep?”
“Yeah,” Knox says, dead serious. “I know that exact feeling.”
I shake my head. “Okay, okay. But what I mean is—before I met you I couldn’t be alone. And I also couldn’t leave my van. I couldn’t look in a mirror, knowing what I knew about myself. And if you knew it too . . . I’d see it in your face, when you looked at me. And I couldn’t handle that.”
“Remember how when we met in front of the showers for the first time and I said I saw you before?” Knox says.
“Yeah.”
“I kinda understated the extent to which I noticed you. You were barefoot, at your campsite, but your eyes were serious. You had these serious eyebrows, too, and all this wavy hair and Winslow was smiling next to you. I thought—I thought, there’s another beautiful girl I’m never gonna talk to.
There’s another door I won’t have a chance to knock at. But you know what?”
My skin is prickling. My face is hot. “What?”
“You do have serious eyebrows, but you’re funnier than I thought you’d be. You have these passionate opinions about everything, things I didn’t even know existed. And I can say anything to you, it feels like. Anything at all. And those things were true yesterday, and they’re true today, too.”
“But you said,” and it comes out small, “that you’d never see me again.”
“We’ll be in North Carolina in a day or two.
And after that—Where would I fit into your life?
” He fiddles with a frayed hole in his jeans.
“Would you want me coming to visit you in your college dorm? Anyway, if you’re going to school hours and hours away, I can’t get to you.
Bus would take too long, I’d never get that much time off work to do that more than once.
I don’t know. Maybe I could write you letters. ”
“Letters.”
“If you wanted.”
“I do. I want you to write me letters.”
He nods. “Then that’s decided.”