each other, Saz says, “First, I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“Always. I mean it. I don’t want you to ever think for a minute that my love is going away. Second, fuck him. I’m not surprised, but fuck him.”
What does she mean, “I’m not surprised”? The part of me that loves my dad because he’s my dad wants to tell her to fuck off, but I can’t go around protecting him forever. So I echo: “Fuck him.” And a fraction of my heart chips off and falls away as I say it, because the words feel like a betrayal.
“Third, we need to get you out of there.”
And the idea of this makes me sit up a little straighter, and then I’m brushing the tears away because I want them off my face so I can concentrate on what she’s saying.
“What’s halfway between here and there? If I can get to…Hold on….” She goes quiet for a few seconds. “If I can get my ass to maybe Greenville, can you meet me? Can you, I don’t know, steal a car or get on a plane or something? I can be there tomorrow.”
I pull up the map on my phone, and it keeps glitching because the service is shit, but finally I’m studying the route, and my heart is skipping faster and faster, just imagining running away, far from here.
“I don’t want to go back there,” I say. Even though I miss my room with its green walls and my dog and my house and my friends. Things I’ve taken for granted all my life.
“Of course not. We could hit the road. Just us. Thelma and Louise. A couple of outlaws. One last trip before college. You and me, wild and free. Maybe Asheville. We can find that sanitarium where Zelda Fitzgerald burned to death.”
And I can see it, the two of us. Claude and Saz. Saz and Claude. The way it’s always been and always will be. Stopping at every tacky tourist site between North or South Carolina and California. Because that’s where we’ll go. The West Coast. Los Angeles. No more winter. No more cold. Just sunshine and bright skies and city as far as the eye can see. We’ll lose ourselves and find ourselves.
Then Saz says, “Hold on.” And I can hear her talking to someone. And then laughing. And then saying something else. And then, to me, into the phone: “I’m back. Sorry. Yvonne’s ordering pizza and we can’t ever agree on what to get. I’m like, Pepperoni, extra peppers, and she’s all, Ham and pineapple. Which is so completely disgusting.” She practically shouts this, and I know it’s for Yvonne’s benefit, not mine.
“Am I on speaker?”
“What?”
“Am. I. On. Speaker?”
“Yes….”
“Take me off it now.”
Because I wasn’t calling SazandYvonne, I was calling Saz.
“Okay. It’s off. Sorry. It’s just you and me. Yvonne can’t hear you.”
It’s the way she says Yvonne, like they have secrets between them. Ordering pizza and having sex and falling in love, while I’m on the outside, 843 miles away.
“So let’s meet in Asheville,” she says.
“Is it serious? You and Yvonne?”
“She broke up with Leah.” And waits for me to say something. When I don’t, she goes, “Hen?”
“Sorry. I wasn’t sure if you were talking to me or her.” And it’s there in my voice, the hurt I’m feeling. “Did she do it for you?”
“She says she didn’t, but this was, like, last Thursday, and we’ve been together ever since. She deflowered me again. And again.” And she laughs and laughs. “Oh, wait, hold on….” And she is gone again, and then back, gone and then back, over and over.
Each time she comes back, she apologizes, but I can feel myself shrinking. The island and its ruins and humidity and horses and wild hogs are closing in on me until I’m the size of an ant. For as long as I’ve known her, Saz has never felt like her parents really get her. They don’t begin to understand her sexuality or her sense of humor, but they are sweet and well meaning, and they try. Her dad goes to marches with her and wears Pride shirts and lets her decorate his car with rainbow bumper stickers, and every night he tells her he loves her, no matter what. Which is why she can’t possibly understand what I’m going through. Also, she’s being really fucking rude.
I suddenly want to hang up. I want to say, In the past four weeks, my entire world has fallen