Where I End and You Begin (10 page)

Daniel looks up, frowning, as I stop myself in the doorway, hanging onto the door frame as though I’m afraid the house will fall apart without me here to hold it up.

I’m breathing hard. “We have to leave right now,” I say. The fear is welling up, turning into silver streaks of blind terror across my brain. Thoughts are interrupted, everything is put on hold. I am utterly derailed. “We have to
go.”

Daniel frowns. His sweet, stupid, beautiful, naïve face all
concern,
all
worry.
“What’s wrong?” he says.

Help me,
I think at him. I’m always
thinking
it, never saying it. I don’t know if I can. So I tell him the truth. “Get me out of here. Take me somewhere else, or I am going to run up those stairs and slam a whole bottle of whiskey down my throat.”

He rises from the couch, his body crouched and wary, as though I have turned into a tiger. “I thought...” He trails off. “I’m here to help you study,” he says.

I’m so frustrated I could scream. “If you’re so fucking fired up about saving a damsel in distress,” I say, “then get me out of here
right now.
You said you wanted to help, you said you didn’t get to choose how.
Help me.”

There. I said the words. I didn’t spontaneously combust. But I feel like I might as well have. My skin is hot, a full-body flush, bone-deep humiliation.

I’m so weak. I need to physically leave so I won’t hurt myself any more. I don’t know how to stop.
I don’t know how to stop running away from classes I should be throwing myself into. I don’t know how to stop fucking every guy I meet, hoping one of them will love me, even just for a little while. I don’t know how to stop trying to numb the pain. If it wasn’t alcohol, it’d be something else. Pot, or Percocet, or heroin.

My life has run away from me, and I know it. An afternoon spent studying for midterms isn’t going to change that. It’s like slapping a Band-Aid on cancer.

I will never catch up if I don’t leave,
right now.

Daniel stares at me for another moment, then straightens, something in his eyes hardening. “You’re right,” he says. “You’re absolutely right. Let’s go.”

My heart is fluttering so fast in my chest I think it’s about to take flight, carrying me with it. I am as light as a balloon, and just as hollow. It would be nothing for me to float into the air.

Then Daniel passes me, takes one look at my face, and grabs my hand.

“Come on,” he says, and then he’s towing me out of the lounge, out of the hall, out of the house into the cold autumn air. My breath is coming so fast I see spots blacking out my vision, and I hear Daniel talking to me, somewhere far away.

Then he’s guiding me into his car. I sit down and stuff my head between my knees. My door slams. Then the car dips as he gets in on the other side, and I am suddenly hit with a wave of déjà vu.

All of this has happened before,
I think.
Reset, record, rewind.

Then the car roars to life, and we are peeling out of the parking lot and into the unknown.

I
know all about fate.

Some people believe that you will meet the same souls over and over again in each life because you were born together from the ether, and will travel together until enlightenment—or to the end of time. They say that this is why you meet people in this life, and they seem so familiar to you. It is because you have known them since time began.

In Japan, they say there’s a red thread of fate that binds people who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. It may tangle, it may knot, it may stretch or fray, but it will never break. It is a future as indelible as the past.

I hope that isn’t true. I pity anyone destined to meet me.

W
e drive north, out of the town and toward Nompton. It only takes a few minutes for me to get my breathing under control, and now that the distance between myself and my temptation is growing I am starting to feel sillier and sillier.

“I’m an idiot,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Daniel says. “You needed to get out of there. So we’re out of there.”

I watch the landscape rolling by. “Where are we going?”

He doesn’t answer for a moment. “I don’t know. Where do you want to go?”

I shake my head. “I have no idea.”

Silence comes between us. Then:

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I swallow. I don’t want to talk about it. I mean, I could... but how can I explain that there’s no words for it? The words needed to explain myself haven’t been invented yet. “I don’t know,” I say, because I don’t want him to turn around. “I can’t... It can’t be just you asking me questions. We have to have a conversation.”

“Okay,” he says. “Any particular reason why?”

“Too much therapy,” I tell him. “I can’t stand it when someone’s just sitting there listening to me and my stupid problems.”

“It’s pretty clear your problems are not stupid. They are very real.”

I shrug. “But it feels like a waste on me. It’s not going to get better. You should try to help someone who can be helped.”

He inhales sharply at that, and see him stiffen from the corner of my eye. I have touched a raw nerve, though I’m not sure how.

“I think you can be helped,” he says, but he doesn’t sound sure. “Anyway. If it has to be a conversation, that’s fine.

I bite my lips. “I mean it. You have to, like, tell me shit about yourself.”

Daniel is quiet, his eyes watching the road. “That’s... unprofessional,” he says.

“I bet.” I know it’s unprofessional. I know it. I don’t want him to be professional with me, though. Even if we don’t ever make contact, don’t ever kiss or touch beyond hugs and handshakes, I want to
connect.
That’s all I really want. I need to connect, even as I run away from it.

He swallows. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat, and I note that he already has a little bit of stubble growing on his skin. It makes him look a little unkempt, even though he’s still impeccably dressed as always.

“On the other hand,” he says suddenly, “you aren’t paying me, as you pointed out. It’s not like I’m a professional. It seems... inappropriate...”

I sigh with exasperation. “Why?” I say. “You’re twenty-four, I’m nineteen, almost twenty. There’s nothing inappropriate about it. You’re in grad school, I’m in college. I have friends older than you.”

His full lips purse. “Friends.”

I want to roll my eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those douchebags who thinks men and women can’t be friends.”

He shakes his head. “No, quite the opposite, actually.”

I narrow my eyes. What did he mean by that? Perhaps he’s gay.

Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s fine. “I just feel like... I could open up to a friend.”

“Why not one of your existing friends?”

I look out the window. “Because I’d feel bad about it. No one wants to hear you bitch and moan about your dumb problems.”

“But you wouldn’t feel bad unloading them on me?” The words are accusatory, but his voice is wry, and I have to let a small smile cross my face.

“Well, duh. Of course not. You already know I have problems. Big ones. That’s how you flipping met me.” Which makes me think of something. “And if you have problems, I can listen, too. I can try to help
you.
Sort of a quid pro quo thing.”

I can see he’s thinking about this,
really
thinking about it. I realize that he gives a lot of thought to what he says and what he agrees to. Daniel is a thoughtful person. I like that about him. I want to be like that.

“All right,” he says at last. “Let’s go somewhere and talk. Maybe you’ll be able to study after you unload a little.”

I nod. “Sounds good.”

He keeps driving. Fifteen minutes later we’re in Nompton, and to my surprise he pulls off the highway and straight into the old residential neighborhood I parked in yesterday.

“Are we going back to the hospital?” I ask.

He gives me a rueful little smile. “How about we just walk and see where our feet take us?”

I nod. “Okay.”

We get out. Daniel is wearing a sweater and a jacket, but I’m just in a t-shirt and jeans. Daniel pops his trunk and fishes out a sweatshirt, this one with his old Alma Mater on it, or so I assume. MassArt. Some art school in Massachusetts. Photography. Makes sense. I put it on, Daniel locks the car, and we start to walk.

For a while, neither of us says anything. We just stroll. Somewhere, someone is burning autumn leaves, and the air is pungent with them. I inhale deeply, and finally, as we cross the broken, cracked pavement, I find myself calming completely.

I watch the concrete pass beneath my feet, and try to think of something to say, something that will be meaningful, but not too revealing.

“So,” I say at last. “I have issues with alcohol.” I don’t look at Daniel when I say it. It sounds weird to say it out loud.

He snorts a little. “You do? I wouldn’t have guessed.”

I give him a little punch on the arm. “Don’t be an ass,” I say.

“Sorry. But I guessed. Any particular reason you drink so much?”

I frown, thinking about this. “I suppose it’s an escape,” I say. “It’s like taking a vacation from being Bianca. I don’t think it’s just drinking, though. If I didn’t have that, I’d still want to take a vacation from being me.”

I catch his surprised glance. “You don’t like who you are?” he says.

I shrug. “I like who I am,” I say, “but I fall pretty short in a lot of areas.”

“Everyone does.”

“No, I mean, like, in important areas.”

He seems to think about this for a minute. “What kind of areas? Do you murder people?”

I almost stop, shocked. “What? No!”

“Then you torture small animals.”

“No, that’s sick!”

“Then what about stealing? Lying? Adultery?”

I clamp my mouth shut. “Everyone lies,” I say. “And I’m not even sure what adultery is.”

“You don’t know what adultery is?”

“Well, I do. My mom made me go to church and they were always talking about it and how bad it was, and my mom said it was sex before marriage, and someone else just said it was sex outside of marriage, but I don’t know if that means you have to be, like, already married, or what...” I trail off. “Well, either way, I’m not pure as the driven snow, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Yeah, but no one is.”

I look slyly up at him. “Not even you?” I say.

He coughs and looks embarrassed. “No,” he says.

I wait for him to elaborate, and when he doesn’t I grin. “So which of the sins is it? Sloth, Wrath, Lust... er... Avarice... Doc, Grumpy, and Dopey?”

“Gluttony, Pride, and Envy,” Daniel finishes for me. “I don’t know. Probably... pride?”

“Whoah,” I say. “Not lust? A strapping young lad like you?”

To my utter shock, his face grows beet red. “I suppose Lust, too,” he admits.

I slap his back and laugh. “Oh, come on, that’s like the most common sin. Everyone’s got it. It’s like the penny of sins. You can have a lot of them, but they don’t really add up to much.”

“You don’t think so?”

I shake my head. “I don’t. I don’t know, there’s a lot of stuff worse than those sins.”

“Like what?” he asks me.

“Betrayal,” I say. “Dishonesty. That sort of thing.” And worse than that, much, much worse, but it would be crude to bring such things up so I don’t.

Daniel is nodding. “The lowest circle of hell is for betrayers,” he says.

“I remember that,” I say. “We read about it in high school. Dante’s Inferno.” I feel my face falling.

“What’s wrong?” Daniel asks.

I shake my head. “I just... I just remember that Satan’s in the lowest part of hell, and he’s crying.”

“He rebelled against God,” Daniel says. “It makes sense that he should be down there.”

I wrap my arms around myself. “I don’t care. He cries. It freaked me out when I was a sophomore. I actually had a nightmare about it.”

Daniel doesn’t say anything for a moment. “I was raised in the Catholic church,” he says finally. “I don’t think it would have occurred to me to feel sorry for Satan.”

“No sympathy for the devil? Anyway, I don’t know if I feel sorry for him,” I say. “I just understand him.”

He stops. “What?” he says. “What do you mean?”

Embarrassed, I shake my head. “It’s nothing.”

But his intense brown eyes are studying me, and I suddenly feel uncomfortable beneath his gaze. Not the way I usually feel uncomfortable when guys stare at me, but as though he is weighing my soul against some standard.

Uneasy, I look around, seeing where we’ve come, and to my delight I see we are walking behind the row of businesses that line the highway. Small towns are full of interesting shit, little snippets of the past. Some of them seem stuck in the fifties, some seem stuck in the thirties. It’s crazy.

I study the backs of the buildings, wondering if any of them are abandoned. It’s weird, but though the hospital freaked me out yesterday, I want to do it again. I want to feel that thrill. I want to be a little scared, a little in danger. Danger that’s up close and personal, not the crazy danger of the real world. Out in the real world, it’s all institutions and social expectations and a slow grinding of your dignity and self worth into a fine paste. It’s wars and famines and sudden deaths. It’s all randomized, all out of my hands. It’s hard to fight against that sort of thing.

A treacherous floor? At least it gives me a fighting chance.

I spot a small lot with a broken down chain link fence around it. I point. “Let’s go over there,” I say.

“I don’t know,” Daniel says, but I ignore him and move toward it, cutting across a parking lot so broken up by the movement of the soil that it’s half-grass. As I get closer, I see that the place was a restaurant, but the sign out front is missing. Definitely abandoned.

“Let’s see if we can get inside,” I say.

For a moment, Daniel hesitates. Then he nods, and we walk along the perimeter, trying to look casual. We’re close to the highway here, and there are a few people out and about, though it’s Saturday morning and all smart people are still in bed. Which explains why I’m not still in bed.

We reach the corner of the fence, curiously close to a little cluster of trees, and I spot a hole. “There,” I say. Sucking my breath in, I slip between the wires, then sprint to the back of the restaurant. Daniel follows.

“How should we get in?” he asks. The back door is made of steel, and the building itself is solid brick. I frown at the squat, mostly square structure, and move toward the trees again.

Just as I thought, the place is a diner. The windows are all broken and boarded up, but given how many there are it’s not hard to find one that’s fallen away.

With a glance at the highway, I listen to make sure no cars are coming, then put a hand out and grab the window frame and haul myself inside.

There’s a table directly under the window, and I put my foot down on it. Glass crunches beneath my shoe. The table creaks under my weight, but holds, and I clamber over to the booth.

Daniel comes in behind me, and then we are both slipping to the floor, brushing our clothes off and taking it in.

The diner is cleaner than the hospital was. It must have only closed down a few years ago. The structure doesn’t look like it’s about to collapse, at least, and there’s less dust and dirt on the black and white checkered floor. At our backs are the windows and a long line of booths, and stretching in front of us is a lunch counter. Old rotating stools stand in a row, their red pleather seats dusty and faded into a gray-pink. A huge mirror lines the wall behind the counter, the mounted shelves empty. An old cash register sits at one end, an order window half-closed by a metal curtain sits at the other, and the fans and fixtures hang from the ceiling, looking ready to burst into illumination at any moment if it weren’t for the shrouds of cobwebs covering them.

“I wonder if this is what the whole world will look like after the apocalypse,” I say.

Daniel steps forward and surveys the ruin. “I wish I’d brought my camera,” he says, then sucks air through his teeth, as though some terrible thought has just occurred to him.

“What is it?” I say.

He sighs and crouches down. “Dead bird,” he tells me.

I walk over to him and crouch down next to him. Sure enough there is the corpse of a bird on the floor. It looks freshly dead, as though we had arrived just a moment too late to save it.

“It must have got in here,” Daniel says, “and wasn’t able to find its way out.” He frowns. “Maybe if we were here yesterday we could have let it out.”

The thought makes me sad. Missed connections. Lives that slip away by the accidents of fate.

“They say God marks the fall of a sparrow,” Daniel says.

I hate that saying. “Yeah,” I say. “Well, thanks for noticing, asshole.”

The venom in my voice startles even me, and I stand quickly. Turning away, I stuff my anger down and try to think of something to say, something innocuous.

I shuffle across the floor, kicking small bits of debris out of the way, and something comes to me. “This place reminds me of the restaurant I worked in when I was in high school.”

He turns to me. “You worked in a restaurant?”

I make a face and start poking around, looking for somewhere to sit down. The stroll we took and the fight with the fear has left me drained. The stools look a little gross, but the booths look even grosser, all cracked pleather and decaying stuffing leaking from their wounds. I finally decide that a stool is probably my best bet.

“I was a hostess,” I say as I select one that looks mostly intact. “At this little waffle house that wanted to be IHOP but was never anything like IHOP. It sucked, but at least it paid money.” I put my hand out and wipe it over the surface of the stool. Great, thick mounds of dust gather before my fingers into small mountain ranges, and when they tip over the edge of the seat they crumble, falling to the floor. The pleather isn’t quite as faded as I’d thought; my hands leave pink paths through the gray.