“Oh my god, you have no idea how happy this makes me. I know you won’t mess up, Soph. Look out for yourself, okay, kid? You don’t need to do anything for anyone ever again. Just take care of yourself.” I hugged her again.
“Yeah, I guess whatever you said really got to Mrs. Keller. Thanks, friend.”
“It wasn’t me. They love you, okay? They just have a hard time showing it. Mrs. Keller was crying when I went in to confront her. I promise you, it was nothing I said. They want you to be here with them. They just have too much pride in their rules.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. But what about you?”
“I’m San Francisco–bound.” I smiled, even though I knew it was a lie. I had to play the part.
“Wow, that’s fantastic!”
“Yeah, I have an aunt there and she’s some big-time college professor. Probably loaded. I’m sure I’ll get a car and stuff.”
“That’s great, Emmy. We are so lucky.”
“We are lucky, aren’t we?” Sophia was too young to understand the irony. It was better that way.
I said good night to Sophia, and we hugged. I didn’t let her know it would be for the last time.
At twelve fifty, I took my small suitcase, left through the back door, and wheeled it a half mile down the road to the main highway. Jackson pulled up in Junior’s truck right on time, and I hopped in.
“Hi,” I said.
He looked exhausted, but he smiled anyway. “Hi, beautiful.”
“Hardly. I feel like I’ve been run over.”
“You’re with me. You’re okay now. We have to go by Carter’s and then Cal Junior will take us home. My mom’s working tonight.”
“Does she know?”
He pulled up to a stop sign and looked over at me. “No, Em, she can’t know. She’s crazy. She thinks you’re going to ruin my life. Pretty bold coming from her, huh?”
I still remembered the pain we all felt when Brian died. How could Leila think I would do anything to hurt Jax? “How would I ruin your life?” It hurt me to say those words.
“She doesn’t want anyone taking her meal ticket from her.”
“What does that even mean?”
“She’s knows I’ll get a scholarship. She knows I’ll do something with my life. My grades are perfect. I’ve already gotten a near-perfect score on the PSAT. She’s going to want me to take care of her.”
It occurred to me that asking Jax to help me run away could jeopardize everything for him. Maybe Leila wasn’t being as selfish as he thought. Maybe she was looking out for him. Maybe I should too.
“Someone will catch on. Paula will go to your house . . .” I told him.
“You really think Paula is gonna go searching past the tree line for you?”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“It’s just that teenagers go missing all the time and people stop looking. Remember my brother’s girlfriend? She lived in a fucking storm drain.” He reached over and grabbed my hand. “Everything is going to be fine.”
“I don’t want to live in a storm drain, Jackson.”
“Not even with me?” He laughed.
“It’s not funny, and no, not even with you!”
“You won’t, and we won’t. Everything will be fine. You are too fucking smart, Em. Hell, I’m too fucking smart, and we work too fucking hard for this shitty life. It won’t happen.”
“Swear to me.” My voice was tiny.
“I swear on your life,” he said, and I believed him. “But right now I’m kidnapping you in some loser’s truck so I can hide you in my backyard. Let’s just hope we can get past this part. I don’t think colleges will look too fondly at a juvenile record.”
I didn’t say anything, but the weight of what we were doing struck me. There was no way to quantify the impact of our actions at that point. It seemed like if I went to San Francisco I would die without him—literally wilt and turn into dust. But if I stayed, I could be putting his future on the line, and my own. How could I measure the consequences of choosing love at fifteen?
People call teenage relationships puppy love, but what Jackson and I had was far beyond that. We had a lifetime of moments that were meaningful, spiritual, and transcendent. We refused to reduce our love to some flippant expression based on our age. We were mature enough to know that our actions, in that moment, were selfish. He didn’t say it, but the impending doom was palpable for both of us. And he was right: we were smart for our age. We both knew that one of us would have to make a sacrifice.
Jax glanced over at me, as if he knew what I was thinking. He grabbed my hand. “Em, just be here in the moment with me for now, okay?”
I smiled back at him, my eyes already watering. “Don’t make me cry, please. We were laughing just two minutes ago.”
We rode the rest of the way in silence.
8. Saying Good-bye
I was breathing hard as I lay the book on my chest, right over my throbbing heart. I remembered that moment when everything started crumbling down around us. There was nothing we could do; we were just a couple of powerless, poor kids, so desperate to find a way to be together . . .
It was the middle of the night by that point, and I was too frustrated to keep going. I didn’t want to wake Cara, so I took a bath, got back into bed, and texted Trevor, but he was already asleep. I went into Cara’s room to see if maybe she was burning the midnight oil on her next story, but she was sound asleep as well. I wasn’t ready to go back to the book, so I spent the next three hours lying in bed, thinking.
When I was eighteen, I saw a therapist who convinced me to go back to Ohio to look for Jase and see where we grew up to try to work through some of my issues. Cyndi and Sharon, being the amazing women that they were, dropped everything to take me there. We found the dirt road right at the five-point-five-mile marker, right where it had always been. There were just two lone wooden posts and a memory of the battered mailboxes. We couldn’t drive down the road because there was a locked gate and a sign that said NO TRESPASSING, but that didn’t stop Cyndi. Sharon had tried to talk her out of it, but Cyndi insisted that we climb the fence and make the half-mile journey down the road to where the two dilapidated houses once stood.
When we arrived at the end of the road, there was nothing. The houses had been torn down. All that was left were two concrete foundations and a couple of wooden beams. I was happy they were gone.
“Say good-bye, Emiline,” Sharon said. “Say good-bye to the horrible things that happened here.”
I cried and cried in Cyndi’s arms. Echoes of Jase were everywhere. I could see a twelve-year-old Jase as he stood on a rock with his arms in the air. Look at me, Em, I’m the king of the world! And there I was, a skinny mess of a kid with my arms crossed, laughing. Well, you’re no Leonardo DiCaprio, that’s for sure.
I laughed through my tears as Cyndi asked, “Are you having a good memory or a bad one?”
I smiled. “This one’s a good one.”
We walked past the gravel toward the tree line and spotted the small structure still standing in the distance. It was the toolshed-turned-fort that Jase and I had made our own.
“Is this it?” Sharon asked. I only nodded.
We tried to pry open the plywood door, but it was so weathered and warped that it was jammed shut. Sharon, a fairly petite woman, came at it with the broad end of a thick wooden stump.
“Watch out!” she yelled as she pummeled the door, busting it open.
After the dust settled, Cyndi patted my back. “You go. We’ll be right here if you need us.”
I stepped in, legs shaking, heart pounding. It was empty except for a few twigs and a lot of dust. On the back of the door, I could still make out the fading orange paint where Jase had written the rules of the fort when we were eleven.
NO PARENTS
NO HOMEWORK
NO FIGHTING
Somehow, those three rules had meant heaven. I looked around, remembering our last night there. Beyond the window, I could see t
he tree line, more sparse than I remembered it. I could almost make out the little dock on the creek, where we used to swing ourselves off and into the water. An image of Jason’s brother, Jeff’s floating body popped into my head uninvited. That’s when I knew it was time to go.
Managing to hold it together, I found Cyndi and Sharon outside and said, “I’ve had enough, I’m ready.”
We left Ohio and never spoke of my childhood again. Jase was long gone. I didn’t know where to look, and he hadn’t left me any clues, so I filed him away, like everything else. I thought I had gone back there to say good-bye to my mother and father and to find Jase, but none of those things happened. Instead, I said good-bye to Jase that day because he hadn’t come to find me like he said he would. It was the hardest thing I had ever done.
IT FELT LIKE ten minutes later, but it was morning when Cara shook me awake. “Did you finish the book?”
I yawned dramatically. “No, not even close.” Every page was sending me on a long emotional journey that felt both painful and necessary.
“Well, what are you waiting for? I want to take it to have him sign it.”
I grumbled, “Um, why?”
“Because I just want to,” she whined. “And I want you to go with me.”
“What time is the signing?”
Her face lit up. “Are you gonna go?”
“No. I just want to be able to give you the damn book so you can have it signed.”
“Come on.”
“I don’t think I’m going. If he wanted to see me, he would have contacted me by now,” I said.
“You. Read that.” She pointed to the book. “I’m going to play tennis. I’ll be back in an hour. The signing’s at three.” She looked at her watch. “You need to speed-read, but I’m pretty sure you can finish it in four hours.”
“Whatever, you can take it if I’m not done.”
“You guys grew up together and you obviously went through a lot. I’m not going to pretend I understand everything, Emi, but don’t you at least want to say hello?”
“We did go through a lot,” I said absently as I wondered again, for the hundredth time, why he hadn’t tried to get in touch with me.
“What part are you at?” she asked.
“When he comes to pick me up from the foster home.”
“It’s so weird to hear you say it like that.”
“Imagine how I feel reading my own thoughts that I didn’t write.”
“I could see how that would be strange. You must have shared a lot with him.”
“Everything.” It was true. In real life, we talked for hours at night while I was hiding up in that attic room of the foster home. I’d told him every detail like I was reading him a story.
“Well, get back to it,” Cara said, interrupting my thoughts.
Her ponytail bounced as she walked away. I knew it was my own issue, but her perkiness irritated me. I wasn’t ready to get back to the book, so I did the other thing I needed to do: I called Cyndi.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Aunt Cyndi.”
“How’s my girl?”
“I’m okay. So, um, I hate to spring this on you out of the blue, but . . . Jase wrote a book,” I said, coming down hard on that final consonant.
“Oh my goodness! Are you serious?” she said excitedly.
“Yeah. He wrote a freakin’ book about our childhood and got it published. And it’s a huge bestseller.”
“Oh dear god.” That was Cyndi’s expression for something catastrophic—she wasn’t even a smidge religious.
“Have you heard of All the Roads Between by J. Colby?”
“That book. Wow!” She cleared her throat. “I mean, yes, I’ve heard of it. It’s been criticized by some.” She always tried extremely hard to make me feel better in every situation. It was just one of the many things I loved about her.
“Oh, don’t give me that. Don’t think I haven’t googled every single article about this book. It got one bad national review. Otherwise, it’s a critical darling.”
I could hear Cyndi cover the mouthpiece and whisper-shout Sharon’s name. She came back on the line. “Okay, Emi, we’ll figure this out.”
I shook my head. “Hi, Sharon. I know you’re on the line.”
There was a pause, and then a “Hiiiii, sweetie. I’m so sorry you’re going through this, but try to think of it as a cathartic experience that you can use in your writing.” This was classic, sensible Sharon. “Have you read the book yet?”
“I’m reading it now. It’s basically a roman à clef, except that he wrote it from my point of view. Can you believe the nerve?”
I could hear them both sucking air through their teeth, and then there was more off-phone whispering. Cyndi came back on the line. “We’re taking tomorrow off. We’ll be in the car, on our way to you, in less than an hour. Expect us in the early evening. Our girl needs us.”
“No, you guys don’t have to come down for this.”
“You bet your ass we’re coming down, and we will all work through this together.”
I sighed—partially from resignation, partially from pure relief. “Thank you so much you guys.” I felt pathetic after I hung up, but there was no use fighting the combined forces of Cyndi and Sharon.
Five seconds later, Cara walked by my room on her way to the kitchen and yelled, “Keep reading!”
I looked at the book on my bed, grabbed it, and headed for the living room. I didn’t want to be alone for what I knew was coming next.
From All the Roads Between
We pulled into Carter’s egg ranch just after two a.m. Cal Junior was sitting on a wooden bench propped against one of the chicken barns, waiting for us.
“Don’t talk to him, okay?” Jackson said as he parked the truck.
“Why?”
“Just don’t. He’s a fucking bully.”
Cal Junior walked over to the passenger door and opened it. He brushed his greasy hair from his eyes and smiled a crooked-toothed grin. “Scoot to the middle, princess. We’ll let Jax here drive so we can get reacquainted with each other.”
Jax held up his hand to stop Cal from getting in. “No, you’re not gonna touch her.”
“Calm down. I ain’t gonna bite.” He scooted in next to me, stinking like cigarettes and manure.
“Like I’d let him?” I said.
“I told you, don’t talk,” Jax barked.
I swallowed and then nervously moved over as close to Jackson as I could get. He put his right arm over my legs for the rest of the trip. It was only two miles to our road, but it felt like forever. Occasionally, Cal Junior burst into laughter at nothing at all, like a lunatic.
We drove down to the end of El Monte Road. I looked over and saw caution tape and yellow signs nailed to the outside of my father’s dark, desolate house.
Cal Junior got out and walked around to the driver’s side. As Jackson stepped out of the truck, Cal slapped him hard on the back. “See you tomorrow, kid! You owe me.”
Jackson took my hand and pulled me through his house to the back door, through the weeds, to the fort. Our fort. When he lit the camping lamp, I noticed that he had added blankets and pillows to the cot and laid out some bottled water and snacks on the bedside table, as well as a stack of books I hadn’t read before.
“Leila’s shift is over in two hours. You can leave your bag here and take a shower in the house.” We were standing near the wooden door. I realized Jax looked like a giant inside of our fort.
“Will you sit with me for a sec?” I asked.
He hesitated and then sat on the cot. I sat next to him and rubbed my hand down his thigh.
“Have you been working extra hours at the egg ranch? Is that why Junior lets you drive his truck?”
He swallowed and then nodded.
“Jackson?”
He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees and dropped his head into his hands.
“Look at me, Jackson.”
When he turned his neck to l
ook up at me, I could see tears in his eyes. I put my hand on his back and rubbed up and down. “What have you been doing for Cal Junior? When he said you owed him, what did he mean?” My voice was getting higher, almost frantic, and my heart was beating out of my chest with a sense of dread.
His face was back in his hands. He made a sound that fell somewhere between a sob and groan. “Em . . . I . . .”
I pulled him toward me and took him in my arms. “Tell me. I won’t judge you.”
He shook his head no.
“Tell me.”
He pushed me away, sat up, and wiped his hands down his face, as if to erase the sadness and anger. He was impassive now, sitting perfectly upright and staring at the door when he finally spoke. “I sell weed for him at school.” His voice was phlegmatic. “He wants me to sell other stuff, like meth . . . to kids.” He looked in my eyes, expecting disappointment in my own, like I would think less of him . . . but I could never.
“You won’t do it anymore, Jackson. You don’t have to.” I knew the drug thing tore him apart because of its impact on his mother and the still-painful rumors about his brother’s death. Jackson hated drugs. I wanted to say that I was sorry. It was all my fault that Jackson felt like he had to do something as unconscionable as selling drugs to kids. I rubbed his back and tried desperately to soothe him.
Through tears, he fumbled over his words. “I feel like such a hypocrite. Junior started talking about Carter’s and how it was going under. He said he and his dad had been making meth for years. It’s how they kept the family business going. It’s so fucked up. That money we earned growing up was drug money. Tainted.”
I took his face in my hands and forced him to look at me. His eyes were fixed on the wall behind me. “Look at me now, Jackson. We were just kids, collecting eggs. We earned that money and we didn’t know any better. And what choice did we really have in a town like this? Look at us. We’re stuck now. I don’t want to be stuck anymore, and I don’t want you selling drugs so you can pay some asshole to use his truck. You will not go back there—I won’t let you.” I was crying too now.