“You’re not fine,” I reply, reaching for him. He fends me off with both hands.
“I was just drying,” he slurs, breathing hard. His brows furrow, like he knows that last word wasn’t the one he meant. “With the music . . . and the songs.”
“You mean dancing.”
“Fitz,” Lewis declares. “You always have the big words.”
Rolling my eyes, I direct us through the campus and toward the hill back to the bed-and-breakfast. It’s a miracle I hold Lewis upright the entire trip, but the miracle doesn’t extend to him holding on to the contents of his stomach. Three bushes bear the consequences.
By the time we’ve returned to the room, I’m thoroughly through with this night. In the doorway, Lewis awkwardly shoves me off. “I’m good,” he says heatedly, his words heavy. “I can take care of myself.”
“Really?” I snap. I don’t know why I don’t hold in my resentment the way I usually do. I guess Lewis’s drunken lack of inhibition is rubbing off on me, or maybe I just know he won’t remember this in the morning. “Did you not notice me carrying you here?” I drop my jacket on the bed. “Thanks for a wonderful first taste of college.”
“No problem.” He waves emptily in my direction and stumbles toward the bathroom. I shake my head, blood pounding in my face. I don’t know what I expected him to say. I don’t know why I expected him to care. If he’d cared, we wouldn’t be in this position in the first place.
Lewis clumsily half closes the bathroom door. “Just one night. I just wanted one night,” I hear him mumble under his breath.
One night for what? I kick off my shoes, not caring where they fall. One night to forget his girlfriend? One night to force me to watch his total drunken thoughtlessness? One night to ignore the problems that weigh me down whenever I don’t have the wherewithal to distract myself? That’s every night for Lewis. He does whatever he wants, no matter who it hurts.
I lie on the bed and try to tune out the sound of Lewis retching over the toilet. Willing myself to fall asleep, I close my eyes and wish. If I had Juniper’s memory, it wouldn’t just be me in this unfamiliar hotel with my inebriated brother. I’d be recalling every word we exchanged on the rooftop over Providence.
But I do my best. Halcyon. Bucolic. Propinquity. I hold on to every syllable, hoping they turn into dreams.
Fitz
WHEN I WAKE up, I’m alone in the room. On the pillow next to me, I find a note written on the bed-and-breakfast’s stationery. In hasty handwriting Lewis has explained he’s gone to grab food. I’m stunned he’s awake, what with his penchant for sleeping in late and his extended stay in the bathroom last night.
I lie in bed, squinting in the uncomfortable sunlight. I don’t want to heave myself out from under the covers. Really, I don’t want to face the fact that last night is over.
It feels like a dream, close enough to impossible, like I really could have just conjured the entire evening with Juniper in my head. In the morning light, the wonder of the night feels nearly unreachable. Fugacious. Fleeting, with the tendency to disappear. I know with every passing minute and mile, it’ll be harder to imagine it was ever real.
I remember the dictionary—trading the book back and forth, underlining the words we read to each other. I reach over to the nightstand where I left the Dictionary of Unusual Usages before I went to bed, feeling a rush of gratitude I have the pages and the ink to tie me tangibly to the night with Juniper. Proof it was real.
I thumb open the book, reading the underlines. Lissome. Desuetude. Embrocate, which we only underlined because Juniper found it funny that the stately, flowery word means “rubbing on lotion.” I’m close to the end of the dictionary when my fingers catch on something. My breath catches with them.
There’s a dog-eared page. I never dog-ear pages. I kind of resent the practice, and in other circumstances, the defacement of my dictionary would