box he wants to get into.”
* * *
—
It’s thirty-five miles to Mary Grove. Instead of talking, we blast the music so loud that I can feel it entering my bloodstream, taking root in my bones. Saz drives with one arm out the window. She takes a corner too fast and we’re yelling along with the song, and I pull my hair back because it’s blowing and blowing and if I don’t hold it back I’ll swallow it whole. With my free hand I grab the vodka bottle and drink, and the burning and the bone-vibrating music make me feel alive. We reach Mary Grove in twenty minutes because Saz drives faster than anyone I know, even my dad.
In the glow of the dashboard, I study the inside of my arm, where the bruises are. The little bruises from the little pinches I gave myself sometime between this morning and right now, just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming this.
We turn into my neighborhood, following the curve and slope of the road.
I can still tell her.
We go down one hill.
I can tell her now.
Round a bend. Another.
I can open my mouth and let the words come out, and then she will know and she can help me make sense of this and I won’t be alone, and then it will all be real.
The car rolls to a stop in front of my house. We sit there a moment, the music still playing. I don’t want to go inside. I don’t want to see my parents.
But I can’t sit here forever, because Saz will want to know what’s going on, so I start to get out of the car. She leans over the seat and lays a hand on my arm, stopping me. “You realize this isn’t the end of us, right? Not just you going to New York and me to Chicago, but Yvonne and me? Falling in love wasn’t about you, Hen, or all the plans we had. It’s about this girl I really like and the right, I don’t know, moment. But there’ll never be an end of us.”
“I know.” But there’s an uneasy flickering in my heart. Saz broke a promise. Maybe it was a silly promise. An eight-year-old promise given by ten-year-olds. But more than the promise, it’s that Saz kept Yvonne a secret from me. We haven’t even graduated and left home yet. How many more secrets will there be once Saz is at Northwestern and I’m at Columbia and we’re not here, together, in Mary Grove? Sometimes things end, even if you don’t want them to.
Maybe none of it would bother me so much if I didn’t have a secret of my own, a secret belonging to my parents that they’ve now handed to me. A secret I don’t want.
I force myself to take her hand. I say, “I wish we were going to California.”
“Me too.”
Her eyes meet mine, dark and flashing. Saz usually looks as if she’s thinking a million exciting thoughts at once. But right now her eyes are quiet, and behind the happiness that’s there over Yvonne, I can see the worry and the sadness and maybe the fear that I’m upset with her.
I say, “I could never be mad at you. Especially not for following your heart.” Especially not when I’m keeping secrets too.
“Promise?” she says.
“Promise.”
I can see the relief in her face. She squeezes my hand. With the other hand she scoops up the vodka bottle. Takes a drink now that she’s so close to home.
She says, very low, “I really like her.”
And it feels almost like a death, like Old Saz and Old Claude are suddenly gone. I squeeze her hand this time, because if I don’t, I might burst into tears and lose it right here, right now. Then I hug her hard and long before climbing out of the car.
“Hey,” she says, leaning over the seat, eyes shining. “I love you more than Tootsie Rolls and Ariana Grande and summer.”
We’ve done I love you more than since we were ten, because we love each other beyond three words and needed to find a way to say it.
“I love you more than Kraft mac and cheese and Zelda Fitzgerald and spring.” But the words fall flat onto the ground around me. She holds up her hand and waves her pinkie, and I hook it with my own. Then I slam the door and run for the house.
6 DAYS TILL GRADUATION
When I wake up the next day,