lived at Southridge full-time. I loved being outdoors in the piney air at the foot of the Allegheny Mountains, teaching people much older than me how to survive in the uncharted wilderness. All kinds of people passed through—packs of Boy Scouts and troubled foster kids, hipster folk intent on learning to garden organically and brew their own beer, paranoid survivalists seeking the skills to live off the grid when the people finally rose up against the government. I’d learned to cheerfully tolerate all kinds, and did my work so well that Dave—the head guy at the camp and, next to Cade, my favorite person in the world—had tried to persuade me to stay on through the fall and do my semester online. I’d had to patiently explain to him, again, that online classes aren’t an option for agriculture majors.
Later that very day—the one on which I had run down the road to greet Cade, loaded my stuff into the trunk of his Saturn and sped back toward College Park—he had taken me down into D.C. and proposed to me in the nighttime glow of the Jefferson Memorial. The bronze figure of Thomas Jefferson loomed overhead, his knee bent as if to take a step forward; the lettered quotes from the Declaration of Independence curved all around and above us, giving me a sense of vertigo, but beyond it the Tidal Basin lay blue and softly rippling. I knew what it meant that he had chosen this place: that he was drawing me into the pantheon of the things he loved most, showing me that nobody less than his personal hero would be called upon to witness it. Of course I accepted, even though I knew an actual wedding would be a long time coming. We were only twenty-one. We had all the time in the world.
On the day Elias came back, after Cade had dropped me off at my dorm and driven off with his brother for a night of revelry, I flicked on the TV and settled onto my bed with a bag of Starbursts to watch Lockup: Raleigh. My mother had been a huge fan of the show, a lurid reality program that followed six women held in a North Carolina prison for various violent offenses. Our favorite was a woman named Kendra, a former pill addict who had attacked her boyfriend with both ends of a rake. Kendra wore one side of her hair in cornrows most of the time and used expressions like “be breezy” and “tell me what’s poppin’” and “life ain’t all peaches and cream.” I think my mother liked the show so much because the women were a caricature of what she might have become had she not joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and like most successful twelve-steppers she took a dim view of people who wanted to hold their old lifestyle close to their hearts. Kendra was an easy target. As a gentle reminder of how good I had it, when I complained about the pressures of school and SATs, my mother would sometimes pat my hand and say, deadpan, “Just remember, Jill. Life ain’t all peaches and cream.”
Midway through the program, the door swung open and my roommate waltzed in. I chewed a candy and braced myself for the inevitable comments. Erica and I had been living together only since September, and already she had a finely honed skill for needling me at any tender spot she could identify. As she stuffed her makeup into its little quilted bag, she looked over at me with one arched eyebrow. “How can you eat that stuff?”
“They’re Starbursts. Who doesn’t like Starbursts?”
“They’re pure sugar.”
“Yes. I know.”
She squeezed the makeup bag into her purse and turned toward the TV. “What is this, White Trash Wonderland again?”
“Lockup: Raleigh.”
“Is your boyfriend still at the office?”
“Nope. He went out with his brother.”
She smiled tightly. Her face was a mask of makeup. “Well, have a great Saturday night.”
I sighed through my nose as she left the room, failing to let the door close all the way. As I got up to shut it myself, I scanned the room and tried not to see it through her eyes: the small, chattering TV; the crumpled bag of candy on the bed; my phone, plugged in to its charger because I had no use for it tonight. Before self-pity could creep in, I picked up the landline phone and called Dave.
“It’s Blackbird,” I said as soon as he answered with a hearty “Dave Robinson