“You’re a rule person,” he said.
“My sister was a cheater. It sort of became necessary.”
“She cheated at this game?”
“She cheated at everything,” I said. “When we played Monopoly, she always insisted on being banker, then helped herself to multiple loans and ‘service fees’ for every real estate transaction. I was, like, ten or eleven before I played at someone else’s house and they told me you couldn’t do that.”
He laughed, the sound seeming loud in all the quiet. I felt myself smiling, remembering.
“During staring contests,” I said, “she always blinked. Always. But then she’d swear up and down she hadn’t, and make you go again, and again. And when we played Truth, she lied. Blatantly.”
“Truth?” he said, glancing over his shoulder as something— another owl, I hoped—hooted behind us. “What’s that?”
I looked at him. “You never played Truth, either?” I asked. “God, what did you guys do on long car trips?”
“We,” he said, “discussed politics and current events and engaged in scintillating discourse.”
“Oh.”
“I’m kidding,” he said, smiling. “We usually read comics and beat the crap out of each other until my dad threatened to pull over and ‘settle things once and for all.’ Then, when it was just my mom, we sang folk songs.”
“You sang folk songs,” I said, clarifying. Somehow I couldn’t picture this.
“I didn’t have a choice. It was like the lentil loaf, no other options.” He sighed. “I know the entire Woody Guthrie catalog.”
“Sing something for me,” I said, nudging him with my elbow. “You know you want to.”
“No,” he said flatly.
“Come on. I bet you have a lovely singing voice.”
“I don’t.”
“Wes,” I said, my voice serious.
“Macy,” he replied, equally serious. “No.”
For a minute we walked in silence. Far, far off in the distance, I saw headlights, but a second later they turned off in another direction, disappearing. Wes exhaled, shaking his head, and I wondered how far we’d walked already.
“Okay, so Truth,” he said. “How do you play?”
“Is this because you can’t think up another I food?” I asked.
“No,” he said indignantly. Then, “Maybe. How do you play?”
“We can’t play Truth,” I told him, as we crested a small hill, and a fence began on one side of the road.
“Why not?”
“Because,” I said, “it can get really ugly.”
“How so?”
“It just can. You have to tell the truth, even if you don’t want to.”
“I can handle that,” he said.
“You can’t even think of an I food,” I said.
“Can you?”
“Ice milk,” I said. “Italian sausage.”
“Okay, fine. Point proved. Now tell me how to play.”
“All right,” I said. “But you asked for it.”
He just looked at me. Okay, I thought. Here we go.
“In Truth,” I said, “there are no rules other than you have to tell the truth.”
“How do you win?” he asked.
“That,” I said, “is such a boy question.”
“What, girls don’t like to win?” He snorted. “Please. You’re the one who got all rule driven on me claiming Instant Breakfast isn’t a food.”
“It’s not,” I told him. “It’s a beverage.”
He rolled his eyes. I can’t believe this, I thought. A week or two ago putting a full sentence together in front of Wes was a challenge. Now we were arguing about liquids.
“Okay,” he said, “back to Truth. You were saying?”
I took in a breath. “To win, one person has to refuse to answer a question,” I said. “So, for example, let’s say I ask you a question and you don’t answer it. Then you get to ask me a question, and if I answer it, I win.”
“But that’s too simple,” he said. “What if I ask you something easy?”
“You wouldn’t,” I told him. “It has to be a really hard question, because you don’t want me to win.”
“Ahhh,” he said, nodding. Then, after mulling it for a second he said, “Man. This is diabolical.”
“It’s a girl’s game,” I explained, tilting my head back and looking up at the stars. “Always good for a little drama at the slumber party. I told you, you don’t want to play.”
“No. I do.” He squared his shoulders. “I can handle it.”
“You think?”
“Yup. Hit me.”
I thought for a second. We were walking down the center yellow line of the road, the moonlight slanting across us. “Okay,” I said. “What’s your favorite color?”
He looked at me. “Don’t coddle,” he said. “It’s insulting.”
“I’m trying to ease you in,” I said.
“Don’t ease. Ask something real.”
I rolled my eyes. “Okay,” I said. And then, without even really thinking about it, I said, “Why’d you get sent to Myers School?”
For a second, he was quiet, and I was sure I’d overstepped. But then he said, “I broke into a house. With a couple of guys I used to hang out with. We didn’t take anything, just drank a couple of beers, but a neighbor saw us and called the cops. We ran but they caught us.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“What, run?”
“No,” I said, although I had to admit I was curious about that, too. “Break in.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. These guys I was friends with, they’d done it a couple of times, but I never had before. I was there, so I went along.” He ran a hand through his hair. “It was my first offense, my only offense, but the county was on this whole thing where they were punishing right off, to scare you out of doing more, so I got sent away. Six months, let out after four.”
“My boyfriend,” I said, then, feeling the need to correct myself, added, “sort-of boyfriend, he used to tutor there.”
“Really.”
I nodded. “Yup.”
“So what’s the deal with that,” he asked. “The boyfriend.”
“What?”
“I get to ask a question now,” he said. “That’s how the game goes, correct?”
“Um,” I said. “Yes. I guess.”
He waved his hand at me in a take-it-away sort of motion. Great, I thought, scanning the horizon for headlights. No such luck.
“I’m waiting,” Wes said. “Does this mean you pass?”
“No,” I snapped. “I mean, no. I’m answering. I’m just collecting my response.”
Another few seconds passed.
“Is there a time limit for this?” he asked. I shot him a look. “Just wondering.”
“Fine,” I said, taking a breath. “We’ve been dating for about a year and a half. And he’s just, you know, a genius. Really smart, and driven. He went away for the summer, and I was just, you know, being a little too clingy or something I guess, and it sort of freaked him out. He’s very independent.”
“Define clingy,” he said.
“You don’t know what clingy is?”
“I know what it means to me,” he said. “But it’s different for different people.”
“Well,” I said, then stopped, not sure how to explain. “First, he was upset that I wasn’t taking my job, which had been his job, more seriously. And then, I said I loved him in an email, and that made him a little skittish.”
“Skittish?”
“Do you need a definition of that, too?” I said.
“Nope. Know it.” He tipped his head back, looking up at the moon. “So things went sour because you said those three words, and because you weren’t as serious about the library as he wanted you to be.”
“Right,” I said. Again, it sounded stupid, but of course everything does when you’re just getting the bare bones facts, only the basics, without—and then it hit me
. “Wait,” I said. I stopped walking. “I never said anything about the library.”
“Yeah, you did,” he said. “You—”
“Nope.” I was sure of it. “I didn’t.”
For a second we just stood there.
“Kristy,” I said finally.
“Not exactly. I just heard you guys talking that night, out at the clearing.”
I started walking again. “Well, now you’ve heard it twice. Although I think you should be penalized in some way, because you asked a question you already knew the answer to, and that is totally against the rules.”
“I thought the only rule was you had to tell the truth.”
I made a face at him. “Okay, so there are two rules.”
He snorted. “Next you’ll tell me there are service charges, too.”
“What is your problem?” I asked.
“All I’m saying,” he said, shrugging, “is that I vote that the second one be done away with.”
“You don’t get to vote,” I said. “This is an established game.”
“Clearly it isn’t.” He was so freaking stubborn, or so I was noticing. “You seem to be making up rules as you go.”
“I am not,” I said indignantly. He just looked at me, obviously not believing this, so I said, “Fine. If you’re proposing a rule change, you have to at least present a case for it.”
“That is so student council,” he said with a laugh.
I was pretty sure this was an insult. “I’m waiting,” I told him.
“You should be allowed to occasionally ask a question you know the answer to,” he said, as I reflected how it was so like a guy to change the rules when he’d only just started playing, “so that you can be sure the other person is telling the truth.”
And then we both saw it: headlights, in the distance. They came closer, even closer, and then finally swung left, disappearing down a side road. So close, and yet so far.
Wes sighed, shaking his head, then looked at me. “Okay, forget it,” he said. “I drop my case. We tell the truth, or else. Okay?”
I nodded. “Fine with me.”
“Go ahead then,” he said. “It’s your turn.”
I thought for a second, really wanting to come up with something good. Finally I said, “Okay, fair’s fair. What was the story with your last girlfriend?”
“My last girlfriend,” he said, “or the girlfriend I have now?”
I had to admit I was surprised. Not just surprised, I realized, gauging the sudden drop in my stomach, but disappointed. But only for a second. Of course a boy like him had a girlfriend.
“The current girlfriend,” I said. “What’s the story there?”
“Well,” he said. “To begin with, she’s incarcerated.”
I looked at him. “You’re dating a prisoner?”
“Rehab.” He said this so easily, the way I’d told people Jason was at Brain Camp, as if it was just that normal. “I met her at Myers. She was in for shoplifting, but since then she got busted with some pot, so now she’s at Evergreen Care Center. At least until her dad’s insurance runs out.”
“What’s her name?”
“Becky.”
Becky. Becky the shoplifting pothead, I thought, and then immediately told myself I was being petty. “So it’s serious,” I said.
He shrugged. “She’s been in and out of trouble for the last year, so we’ve hardly gotten to see each other. She says she hates for me to see her at Evergreen, so we’re sort of waiting until she gets out to see what happens.”
“And when’s that?” I asked.
“End of the summer.” He kicked at a rock, sending it skittering across the pavement. “Until then, everything’s just sort of on hold.”
“That’s me, too,” I said. “We’re supposed to get together in August, when we’ll know better whether we want the same things, or if it’s best to make this break permanent.”
He winced, listening to this. “That sounds verbatim.”
I sighed. “It is. Right off the email he sent me.”
“Ouch.”
“I know.”
So there we were, me and Wes, still walking, in the dark, on a break. It was weird, I thought, how much you could have in common with someone and, from a distance, never even know it. That first night at my mom’s he’d just been a good-looking boy, one I figured I’d never see again. I wondered what he’d thought of me.
“Okay,” he said, as we started up a hill lined by trees, “my turn.”
I slid my hands in my pockets. “Okay, shoot.”
“Why’d you really stop running?”
I felt myself take in a breath, like this had hit me in my gut: it was that unexpected. Questions about Jason I could handle, but this was something else. Something more. But we were playing Truth, and so far he’d played fair. It was dark and quiet, and we were alone. And suddenly, I found myself answering.
“The morning my dad died,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road ahead, “he came into my room to wake me up for a run, and I was sleepy and lazy, so I waved him off and told him to go without me.”
This was the first time, ever, that I’d told this story aloud. I couldn’t even believe I was doing it.
“A few minutes later, though, I changed my mind.” I stopped, swallowing. I didn’t have to do this. I could pass, and if I lost, no big deal. But for some reason I kept going. “So I got up and went to catch up with him. I knew the route he’d take, it was the same one we always did. Out our neighborhood, a right on Willow, then another right onto McKinley.”
Wes wasn’t saying anything, but I knew he was listening. I could just tell.
“I was a little less than halfway into that first mile when I came over this ridge and saw him. He was lying on the sidewalk.”
I felt him look at me, but I knew if I turned to face him I’d stop. So I just kept talking. My footsteps, our footsteps, were so steady. Keep going, I thought. Keep going.
“At first,” I said, “it didn’t even compute, you know? I mean, my mind couldn’t put it together, even though it was right in front of my face.”
The words kept coming, almost too fast, tumbling over my tongue like they’d been held back for so long that now, finally free, nothing could stop them. Not even me.
“I started running faster. I mean, faster than I ever had. It was adrenaline, I guess. I’d never run that fast in my life. Never.”
All I could hear were our footsteps. And the quiet dark. And my voice.
“There was this man,” I went on. “He was just some random guy who’d been on his way to the store, and he’d stopped and was trying to give my dad CPR. But by the time I got to him, he’d already given up. The ambulance came, and we went to the hospital. But it was too late.”
And then it was done. Over. I could feel my breath coming quickly, through my teeth, and for a second I felt unsteady, as if with this story no longer held so closely against me, I’d lost my footing. Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, to how it holds you to a place.
“Macy,” he said quietly.
“Don’t,” I said, because I knew what came next, some form of I’m sorry, and I didn’t want to hear it, especially now, especially from him. “Please. Just—”
And then, suddenly, there was light. Bright yellow light, rising over the other side of the hill, splashing across us: instantly, we had shadows. We were both squinting, Wes raising one hand to shield his eyes. The car had a rumbling engine, and it seemed like it took forever to pull up beside us and slow to a stop.
“Hey.” A man’s voice came from behind the wheel. After all the brightness, I couldn’t make out his face. “You kids need a ride someplace? What you doing out here?”
“Ran out of gas,” Wes told him. “Where’s the nearest station?”
The man jerked his thumb in the opposite direction. “About three miles that way. Where’d you break down?”
“About two miles that way,” Wes told him.
?
??Well, get in then,” he said, reaching to unlock the back door. “I’ll run you up there. You about scared me to death, though, walking out here in the dark. Thought you were deer or something.”
Wes pulled open the door for me, holding it as I climbed in, then sliding in beside me. The car smelled like cigar smoke and motor oil, and as the man began to drive I could make out his profile: he had white hair and a crook nose, and drove slowly, almost as slowly as Bert. It was amazing we hadn’t seen him coming. He’d just appeared, as if he’d dropped out of the sky or something.
As I leaned back against the seat, my heart felt like it was shaking: I couldn’t believe what I’d just done. There was no way to take the story back, folding it neatly into the place I’d kept it all this time. No matter what else happened, from here on out, I would always remember Wes, because with this telling, he’d become part of that story, of my story, too.
“That you?” the man asked, glancing back at us in the rearview mirror as we passed the Wish van.
“Yes, sir,” Wes replied.
“Well, you had no way to know, I guess,” he said, and I wasn’t sure what he meant until about a minute later, when we crested a hill, took a corner, and there was a gas station, all lit up. The neon sign in the window said, almost cheerfully, OPEN. “Had no idea how close you were.”
“No,” Wes said. “I guess we didn’t.”
As we pulled up to the station I turned to look at him, to say something, but he was already pushing open the door and getting out of the car, walking around to the trunk, where the man had a gas can. I sat there, the fluorescent light flickering overhead, as the man went inside to buy cigarettes and Wes pumped gas, his back to me, eyes on the numbers as they clicked higher and higher.
I turned my head and saw he was looking at me. In this, my first true glimpse of his face in over an hour, I braced myself for what I might see. After all, with Jason, anytime I’d opened up, he’d pulled back. I was prepared, even expecting it to happen again.
But as I looked at Wes, I saw only those same familiar features, even more so now, that same half-smile. He motioned for me to roll down the window.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
I waited. What came next? I wondered. What words would he say to try and make this better? “I thought of one,” he said.