“It’s okay,” Peter said with a grin, holding up his sweatshirt. “This top-quality half-polyester, half-cotton garment more than makes up for it.”
“Only the best for you,” she said as she opened the door and slipped into the car. Peter stood there a moment, not quite ready to be on the move again. The air had already lost the spongy quality from earlier in the day, shedding the mugginess of the city as they pushed farther into the mountains. There was a coolness here that pinched at his lungs and made his eyes water as he yawned and stretched and squinted out at the glancing sun and the needle-like pines. He felt suddenly happy, and he could tell Emma was too, as if the cure to the blues were always to be found here in this run-down husk of a gas station, and they only ever had to come here to discover it.
The dog was lying on his back in the car, blinking lazily up at the sun, and he scrambled to his feet with a little grunt as they rejoined him. Just beyond the mini-mart the road took an upward swing, and the car bucked and surged as Peter coaxed it along, winding through the dense woods and up toward the campground. Emma was holding her new sweatshirt in her lap, tracing a finger along the edges of the star, and Peter’s mind crept toward nightfall, nudging aside reality—against his better judgment—to consider the kinds of scenes found only in the movies: scenic overlooks and parked cars, a lanky teenager with his arm slung over some girl’s shoulders, the confidence of the lean-in, the big kiss backlit by the hazy white moon.
Whenever he imagined trying to kiss Emma, the idea seemed depressingly laughable; the sheer mechanics of the thing—the subtlety of reaching over, the complicated logistics of leaning and veering and lining things up—completely impossible. Peter had never kissed a girl before, and he had great admiration for those who did it so casually. To him it seemed a feat more difficult than jumping out of an airplane or sailing around the world. Those things required nerve and daring and perhaps a little bit of stupidity. But at least they didn’t involve the possibility of complete and utter rejection, or maybe even worse, a miscalculation of aim that could result in bumping heads or clinking teeth with the girl you were meant to be kissing.
He looked miserably over at Emma, who was busy sorting through the bag of provisions for the evening. The sky ahead of them was marbled with clouds, and the wind picked up as they neared the summit, passing scattered groups of picnic tables and fire pits set along the edges of the woods. To their left the city of Roanoke stretched out in a clumsy pattern of smokestacks and buildings, and Peter remembered the giant star that glowed out across it at night and felt suddenly hopeful. Maybe the answer to all of his problems was nothing more than a darkened sky and a glittering city, a lofty perch above the world below. It seemed entirely possible that it was all just a matter of setting and location, and Peter wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. After all, he understood better than anyone the importance of geography.
chapter nineteen
In the gray pocket of time between daylight and dusk they set off from the campsite to collect wood for the fire.
“Why don’t you grab some of these little twigs?” Peter told her, snapping a branch with the heel of his shoe and holding it up for her to see. He squared his shoulders and puffed out his chest a bit. “I can handle the bigger ones.”
It took a lot for Emma to refrain from rolling her eyes as she watched him struggle with an enormous limb, half dragging it along the dirt path as the dog loped ahead. The woods smelled of pine needles and smoke, and they could hear other campers in the distance, the thin voices of a few girls singing, the beery sounds of men’s laughter. There was a thin haze that hung just above the ground, hugging the trunks of the trees and causing the dog to reappear every so often like an unbalanced ghost.
When Peter seemed satisfied with their haul, they carted the wood back toward the fire pit. The dog took off with one of the branches Emma dropped, and by the time they caught up, he’d reduced it to a neat pile of splinters. Peter returned to the car, which was parked just beyond a nearby picnic table, and rummaged through for some scrap paper, something to use as kindling to get the fire going. But when he couldn’t find anything, he returned with one of his maps instead, and Emma scrambled to her feet, gaping at him.
“You’re going to use that?” she asked, surprised that he’d be willing to part with it, though she hadn’t once seen him refer to any of them. He had both hands poised to rip it down the center, a half smile on his face, and when Emma looked closer, she realized it was a map of North Carolina. “That’s the only one we actually need!”
Peter shrugged. “I already know the way.”
“But what if we get lost?” she said. “Why not tear up Madagascar or something?”
But he was already shredding it into small pieces, tucking them between the twigs set up like teepees in the charred circle of ash: first Durham, then Wilmington, then Hendersonville, the little scraps of the towns straining in the wind as if reluctant to be sacrificed.
“Once you’ve been somewhere, you know it,” he said. “So you don’t need a map anymore.”
“That’s great,” Emma said. “Except we haven’t technically been there yet. We’re still a state short.”
“I know,” he said with a grin. “But it’s symbolic.”
Peter pulled the blue lighter out of his back pocket. “There are worse things than wandering.”
“Well, if we end up wandering around Virginia for the next few days …”
“Like getting lost?”
He shrugged, his face wide open and serious. “I felt a lot more lost at home than I do here. I just never realized it. But things seem different now, you know?”
Emma watched as he got the fire started, touching the lit state of North Carolina—which was quickly collapsing in on itself—from one branch to the next, coaxing the flames to life and blowing on the kindling until the whole thing began to burn in earnest. She was never sure how to respond to this kind of honesty, though she felt much the same way. All her life she’d been hiding or walking away, doing her best to fade into the background. But things were different now. She could feel it the same as Peter, though she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it just yet.
Peter stood back to admire his work, leaving a sooty handprint across the back of the white dog, who had ambled over to join him.
“‘It is not down in any map,’” he said grandly, taking a seat on one of the flattened logs that was angled toward the fire. “‘True places never are.’”
“Who said that?”
“Herman Melville,” he said. “ Moby Dick.”
“My dad’s favorite.”
“Mine, too. After I read it for the first time, I asked my dad to throw me a whale-themed birthday party. I’ve never seen him so happy. He thought I’d finally gotten into fishing.”
“I don’t think I actually remember any of your birthday parties.”
“That’s because there weren’t any,” Peter said simply. “I always liked planning them out, but they never ended up happening. My dad isn’t great on follow-through. Not that anyone would’ve come, anyway.”
“I might have.”
Peter buried his hands in the pocket of his sweatshirt and smiled. “It’s just as well. I’m not a big fan of birthday parties. It’s like anything where you have high expectations.” He raised his eyes to hers, giving her a long and searching look. “You’re just asking to be disappointed.”
Emma shifted around on the log, feeling suddenly too visible. The fire was spitting now, an orange glow pushing back the corners of darkness, and her cheeks burned from the heat. But it was more than that too. Peter was watching her with such undisguised longing, such wild hope, that it was all she could do not to bolt from the log.
It wasn’t like she was blind. She knew that he liked her, had known it since the moment he pulled up to the rest stop in the blue convertible and she realized just what she’d asked of him. She thought maybe she’d even known it before he did. But until now it had seemed more of a
n annoyance than anything else, an added complication to the million other complications on this trip, like a bug she was forced to continually swat away.
But lately the evidence had become increasingly hard to ignore: suspicious leaning and hand-brushing, awkwardness above and beyond the usual levels of stuttering and trailing off, of blushing and blustering. Whenever boys had liked her before, Emma had either ignored them or humored them, never quite letting herself care enough to find it anything more than amusing. She’d always felt a sort of detached interest in the process, a bemused fascination with the way these things played themselves out: waiting for James Nicholson to work up the courage to put an arm around her in the movie theater, or guessing how many days it would be until Gavin Sourgen tried to hold her hand on the walk home from school. It had never been much of a problem to faze them out when they got too attached; as with everything else in her life, Emma simply took a giant step backward.
But with Peter it was different.
Emma knew she could be distant and cagey and abrupt. She knew she was wired differently from most people, that she wasn’t often understood and was even less often inclined to try to understand others. But in spite of this she’d come to rely on Peter in a way she’d never allowed herself to do with anyone before. He was easy to talk to, hard to get rid of, and one of the few people who had the nerve to point out when she was being stupidly stubborn or just plain rude. Somehow he’d become the one constant in this whole uneven chapter of her life, and the idea that that could change was unsettling.
Now Peter stood up to poke at the fire with a stick. The flame made the world around it seem small; everything beyond it was dark except for the hazy glow of the giant star in the distance, which shone through the spindly trees with all the subtlety of a UFO.
“You probably would’ve loved the birthday parties my parents always had for me,” Emma said, and when Peter glanced over at her, she could see the fire reflected in his glasses. “Their idea of a fun night is a good game of chess and an old bottle of wine, so you can imagine their version of an appropriate celebration for an eight-year-old.”
“It can’t be worse than the year my dad made me go kayaking and I got hit in the head with the paddle.”
“Trust me, it was.”
“I broke my nose,” he said, raising an eyebrow, and Emma laughed.
“Well, they made me write a poem about what I wanted for my birthday, then had me get up and recite it at one of my dad’s poetry readings in New York City. I told a roomful of literary scholars that I wanted ‘stickers that sparkle, and a dog that barkles.’”
Peter laughed so hard he began to cough, shaking his head and pounding at his chest, his eyes tearing from the smoke. “I bet they saw a lot of potential in you,” he said between gasps, and Emma couldn’t help laughing too; for all the miserable birthdays between them, all the misunderstandings and disasters and disappointments they’d each suffered, it seemed suddenly easier not to care, now that they were together.
“If you could do anything for your birthday,” she asked, once she’d caught her breath, “what would it be?”
Peter smiled at her. “This.”
When he sat down again, it was on the same log as Emma, which seemed a bit closer than necessary in a circle meant for eight to ten people. She watched him lift and then drop his hand twice, as if deciding whether or not to reach for hers, and then—with a kind of slow-dawning horror—she realized he was leaning over to kiss her. His eyes were closed, and his lips were pressed together so tightly he might have been trying to avoid the dentist, but still Emma understood where this was going, and she felt such a mixture of pity and annoyance and sadness all at once that she found she’d scooted all the way to the far end of the log almost before realizing she’d planned to do it.
It took Peter a few seemingly endless moments to catch on, his eyes fluttering open in confusion. When it finally registered what had happened, he leaned back stiffly and focused his attention on his shoes. Emma swallowed hard, frozen in place on the other end of the log. She couldn’t look up, because that would mean seeing the hurt on Peter’s face, and so she stared at the fire until her eyes began to water, anxious for one of them to say something, to begin the conversation that would inevitably follow. But she couldn’t for the life of her imagine how to begin.
The fire made the surrounding trees bend and loom like reflections in a fun-house mirror, and the dog curled up with a yawn, his bad leg pulled tight to his chest and his ears swiveling back and forth. But still they just sat there. It seemed to Emma that this was the world’s longest silence, a yawning gap between them that would never end. Even the air seemed to have changed, clotted and spoiled by what had happened, and she understood that something had been tipped by her reaction. And that no matter who had been the one to lean in, no matter who had closed their eyes and reached for the other, it was still somehow her fault, and always would be.
Peter was the first to clear his throat, looking desperate to strike up a conversation, any conversation, and Emma was almost disproportionately grateful to him for being the one to do it.
“My dad would’ve loved this kind of thing,” he said, and his voice seemed to strain with the effort. “He goes camping with his buddies all the time.”
“Upstate?” Emma croaked, pleased to find that her voice still worked.
“Yeah.”
“Does he ever take you?”
Peter shook his head but said nothing.
“Well, it’s nice he goes out and does stuff,” she said, jerking her chin toward the fire pit. “My dad has this one poem about fire, and—”
“I know it,” Peter said, cutting her off. “It’s one of his best.”
Emma snorted. “Yeah, well. He just writes about stuff like this. He turns it into stanzas and couplets. And my mom, she analyzes things until they stop meaning anything. ‘The fire represents life and the ashes represent death.’ It’s all just words.” There was a kind of momentum to the conversation now, and Emma felt herself being swept up by it, happy to focus on something other than what had just happened. “Sometimes, I feel like they don’t actually experience anything. Like they’re not living so much as studying life.”
“Yeah, but that’s how you experience things,” Peter said, sitting forward, his eyes now bright behind his glasses, the wounded look replaced by a kind of determination. “By digging deeper, not just accepting them for what they are. Your parents are brilliant. Look at my dad. He just sort of plods through life, drinking with his friends, going to work every morning, always the same thing. That’s no way to live.”
Emma stared at him. “Your dad’s a policeman. He saves lives. He protects people. How can you think that’s less important than the way my parents hole themselves away with their books?”
Peter stood abruptly and grabbed the bag of marshmallows from among their things. She could tell he was angry, though she wasn’t sure if it was because of the failed kiss or the discussion at hand. He jabbed one onto a stick so hard it skidded halfway down, then considered it a moment before adding two more. It looked like a great sticky shish kebab, and he thrust the whole thing over the fire with a frown, all the while shaking his head.
“What happened to dinner?” Emma asked, watching as the marshmallows caught fire, the soft shells turning a gritty black in the flame.
Peter spun the stick in slow circles, letting it burn. “Don’t you know how lucky you are?” he asked, still not looking at her, still shaking his head. “You were born lucky. You grew up lucky.”
“ Lucky?”
“Yes,” he said, swiveling to face her. One of the half-melted marshmallows dripped off the stick and into the fire. “You’re surrounded by some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met, and you’re completely ungrateful for it. You have no idea how good you’ve got it.”
“It’s because I’m not like them,” Emma said, nearly spitting the words. “What am I supposed to do? Pretend to be good at math? Pretend to care ab
out the stupid Civil War?”
Peter slashed at the fire with his stick, the smoke twisting up into the dark. “So, what? You act all mysterious to seem more interesting?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re always wandering off or running away,” he said. “But you’re a lot more interesting when you’re just being yourself, you know. When you’re actually here.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Emma said coldly. “Where else would I be?”
“You know what I mean,” he said, a rough edge to his voice. “It’s like you’re so busy trying not to act like your family that you’ve never even stopped to consider that it might not be such a bad thing.”
“Well, what about you?” she shot back, aware of the bitterness in her words. “You complain about your dad not wanting you around, and then you complain when he wants you to stay home for school. You can’t have it both ways.”
Peter dropped the stick, his lips parted just slightly. “Well, neither can you,” he said. “You can’t keep everyone at arm’s length and then expect them to be there for you when you need them.”
“I don’t,” Emma said.
“You do.”
“Don’t act like you know me just because you want to be like my parents,” she said, suddenly furious. “And just because you’d rather hang out with them doesn’t mean everyone would. Not everyone finds them so damn fascinating. Not everyone’s as weird as you are.”
Emma realized they were rapidly entering the territory of things that could not be taken back, and she knew she should feel guilty. But all she could muster was a small pit of anger. Because what good did it do to feel horrible about this, when she already felt horrible about so many other things? She’d never yelled at her parents, never railed against her siblings; she’d just retreated further into herself, and now it felt good to finally take it out on somebody. Suddenly, all she wanted to do was scream at the top of her lungs and pound her fists on the ground and yell because it hurt—because it had always hurt, and she was only just now realizing how much.