Well, that and who am I kidding? I left without a fight because every single place I go, I feel alone.
And with them, with my favorites, I feel even lonelier.
Because they are my people.
And they were up there on that mountain.
And they don’t get it.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes and sit in the front seat while Dad mumbles some sort of half-hearted apology that’s really just apologizing for Reuben’s terrible behavior, when let’s be real—it’s not really about Reuben. It was always about my dad and everyone’s too afraid of him to say anything about it.
I keep my mouth shut while he guns for approval and continue to dig my hands hard enough into my eyeballs that I see those weird tie dye spots that don’t go away for five minutes even after your open your eyes, and finally, when we near the house and Dad is still talking, saying more to me than he has in the entire two weeks I’ve been home, I just . . . snap.
I snap.
I say, “Dad. I’m sorry. Why don’t you just fuck off?”
He jerks the car into park in the driveway. “Excuse me?”
“You’ve been the worst to Reuben our entire lives because he smoked too much weed growing up and you think he freeloads or whatever and you’re so much better and we’re so much better because we have money and he’s so irresponsible and wild and has to ask his parents for money sometimes—”
His nostrils are flaring and I think he’s angry, but more than that, he’s hurt. He looks desperate when he says, “You have no goddamn clue what you’re talking about; you weren’t there twenty years ago or five years ago when—”
“I don’t care,” I say. “CHRIST. Does anyone get it? That I just don’t—” I choke on a sob. “I don’t CARE.”
I jump out of the car and slam the door behind me and my dad says, “Young lady, you can’t speak to me that way.”
He’s trying for authority, but he feels betrayed that I would take his brother’s side over his. I can hear it.
It just feels so wrong and stupid and wasteful, I guess.
I stomp off to my dad yelling and chasing after me and I don’t care. I’ll care tomorrow probably when I’m grounded within an inch of my life, but right now, I’m in the kind of mood that gets a girl to tell her dad to fuck off and slam the door when she gets upstairs and just keep the door locked while he pounds on it.
I wait until he goes away.
I pull out my phone and scroll through Jonah’s Instagram again and again like that will get me some kind of connection to him, and then I close the app with fervor.
I feel so goddamn empty.
And alone.
And grateful to be alive.
Alone.
I blow out a breath.
I scroll to Jonah’s number in my phone, a number I was never supposed to have but got once when I was fourteen and never deleted in case it stayed his number.
And well, just on the off chance, I write Hey.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
JONAH WRITES BACK AT 2:00 a.m.
He says: Hey stranger
I say: wyd
I understand that that’s code for Do you want to fuck? But I don’t care. Maybe I do. Maybe I do want to fuck, maybe I want to talk, maybe I want to go back up to that cave where I felt close to anyone and anything and had plans for the next five minutes, because the next five minutes were all that mattered.
Where life wasn’t so wide open and impossible to organize.
He says: Nothing. Wanna smoke?
I don’t know if I want to smoke.
Like I said, maybe.
I say: Where can I meet you
He shoots off an address that’s about halfway between his side of town and mine—both considerate and sensible; maybe this is where he and Jaxon go to hang and be degenerate.
I don’t worry too much about being quiet when I leave the house. Mom and Dad go to bed at like 11:00, and I’m sure they’re deep into REM cycles by now.
I don’t slam the door or anything.
But at this point, even if they heard me leave, what’s the worst that happens?
I shrug to myself and hop in my dad’s car.
I drive off.
It’s so quiet at night on the roads. There’s no snow around, which is nice, no ice to worry about, which hardly ever happens around here in January, but small blessings. It is empty, just this wide, black stretch of road ahead of me, the occasional flash of headlights through the windshield.
I get to the address Jonah gave me, and it’s not a building; it’s a trail.
It’s thirteen freaking degrees outside but somehow that seems right.
It seems right that if we are meeting, it’s out here in the cold.
In the skeleton shadows of the trees.
I slip out of the car and lean against the hood, hugging my huge coat around me.
It’s not the one I brought to the mountain; that one is buried in the back of my closet because I couldn’t decide if I wanted to keep it forever or burn the thing.
It’s big and warm, though, and marigold yellow.
I’m surveying the dark trees ahead of us while my nose goes red and cold, lost in a thousand quiet things, when the quiet rumble of a truck engine makes me jump.
Jonah pulls up beside me, Rage Against the Machine blasting through the doors.
He turns off the ignition and opens the door and the music quiets and it’s back to the sounds of the woods— which is to say, almost nothing.
The woods in Colorado are quiet, always. Almost eerily so.
But there are a couple crickets. An owl somewhere. Breeze rustling the twiggy fingers of the leaflorn aspens.
It’s quiet, still, when Jonah gets out.
He takes a couple steps over to me, hands shoved deep into his jeans.
“Aren’t you cold?” I say, nodding to his hoodie.
He shrugs. Then he tips his head toward the trail and I follow him to the entrance.
“It’s closed,” I say, but even as I vocalize it, I know it’s not a real protest.
“So?” he says.
He hops the thigh-high closed gate, totally ignoring the sign that lets hikers know that it’s closed after sundown, and I hop it after him.
After . . . everything, I guess he’s right. Trespassing on a little walking trail in the middle of the night is nothing.
He walks ahead of me, and I’m struggling just a little to keep up with his huge, long legs. My muscles are burning a couple minutes in, because this is apparently the most physical activity I’ve engaged in since the mountain.
Which honestly feels like it should be bolded and capitalized or something at this point.
Like . . . The Flood. The Shot Heard ’Round the World. The War to End All Wars.
THE MOUNTAIN™
Hallie Jacob (PTSD Pictures, Coming to a Theater Near You)
Anyway, my muscles hurt, and my lungs feel a little overworked, a little dry, like they did here before everything happened.
I’m glad I’m far enough behind Jonah that he probably doesn’t notice.
Well, kind of. Except that ostensibly, the reason we showed up here wasn’t exactly to hike; it was to . . . to what?
I don’t know.
Wow, I guess I really have no idea.
Maybe he doesn’t know either or maybe he does, but if he does, he ought to share it with the class, because god, I’m drowning.