That they might be the ones left behind with their grief and uncertainty and no idea where to start looking for the person they lost.
I find Roya’s car and lean against the hood. Roya drives a mint-green Subaru that she named Nathan after the guy who owned it before it was impounded and sold at police auction. It’s a good car for driving around in late at night with the windows down, listening to the wind and the crickets.
Last summer, right after she got the car, we all crammed our stuff in there and went on a camping trip a few hours away. I forgot my sleeping bag, so I slept in the backseat with the moonroof open. I woke up covered in dew, only to find Roya curled up in the passenger seat. She opened her eyes and looked right at me and smiled. When I asked what she was doing in the car, she said she hadn’t wanted me to be alone all night. She reached out a finger and tapped my nose, and my entire body felt warm, and then the dew was gone and she winked at me and left to wake up everyone else. I sat there in the backseat feeling the afterglow of the warmth she gave me. I watched her cross the campground, banging a spoon against a pot, and I felt like no one in the entire world had ever felt as happy as I did right then.
It’s a good car.
I nearly jump out of my skin when the car alarm starts going off. I leap away from the hood, looking around frantically as the horn honks an irregular STOP-THIEF rhythm. There’s a beep, and the honking stops, and I turn to see Roya doubled over with laughter. She’s got her hands braced on her thighs, and her hair falls in a thick black curtain around her face. When she throws her head back, the sun glints off her smile.
“That,” she gasps, “was hilarious. You looked like you were gonna pass out.”
“Yeah, it was great for everyone involved, asshole,” I say, trying to look pissed but failing to hold back a smile. She slings an arm around my shoulder and gives me a squeeze, then folds herself into the car. She immediately rolls down the windows and cranks the air-conditioning, then gets back out of the car.
“It’s like … a billion degrees in there,” she says, slipping off her blouse and tugging at the tank top she’s wearing underneath so it’ll lie straight. Since the new dress code was instituted, this is standard procedure for most of us—the second we’re beyond the reach of administration, we change into clothes that will keep us from dying of heat exhaustion. I’ve already got my shirt and jacket stuffed into the top of my backpack.
I don’t watch her tug at her tank top. Best friends don’t stare at each other as they adjust their clothes. I wouldn’t ever think to notice something like the way the scooped neck of her shirt moves across her skin as she pulls on the straps. I don’t notice anything like that at all.
“Hey, let’s get going. You’re contributing to global warming,” I say in that way that’s half teasing, half previous-generations-have-left-us-a-planet-in-crisis. Roya shrugs, then reaches an arm into the car to see if it’s livable in there yet. She climbs in a moment later, and I get into the passenger seat, and neither of us buckles our seat belts because the metal is still too hot to touch. The air-conditioning isn’t cold yet—it’s like standing in front of a giant’s mouth and letting him breathe on you. We leave the windows down as she starts to drive. The wind whips Roya’s hair back and lifts it into wild, twisting tentacles. She leans her head toward the window and lets the breeze hit her full in the face. She’s glowing—not magic-glowing, just. Happy-glowing.
“What?” she says.
“What?”
“You’re looking at me.”
“Nah,” I say, and she grins. I rest an arm on the windowsill and then snatch it back, rubbing the spot where the metal burned my skin. “So how did things go with your mom?”
“Eh, shitty,” she says. “Could be worse. She’s pissed about the party, but not as bad as I would have thought, to be honest.”
“For real? I thought she’d freak out.” Roya’s mom is a decent-enough person, but she’s high-strung and incredibly strict. She raised Roya to be fierce and independent, and I know she’s really proud of how Roya turned out, but they go head-to-head a lot. Some nights the group text lights up with Roya’s fury at her mom’s rules; other nights she needs a place to stay so they can both cool off.
It’s not that her mom is mean or abusive or anything like that. She’s never raised a hand or even her voice to either of her kids. She tries her best not to bring her work home, but the way Roya explains it, her mom sees the worst of people. She wants to protect her family however she can.
But sometimes that protectiveness makes her hold on to Roya and her little brother with too tight a grip. Roya bucks against it, hard and often. Her brother usually just ducks his head and gets quiet, which makes Roya even angrier.
“Yeah, it’s kind of weird,” she says. “I thought she’d freak out too. I already knew that I was gonna tell her I was at the party,” she adds, darting a glance at me out of the corner of her eye. “I mean … she was going to find out sooner or later. But I put it off until today because I figured, you know.”
“You figured she’d be so pissed that you’d have to camp out at my house for the rest of the week?”
“Pretty much,” she says. “But I told her why I lied about it, and I told her that I didn’t regret anything, and she kind of cooled off right away.”
“Wow.” We turn off the main road and onto a two-lane, oak-shaded stretch of asphalt that winds around the hill up to the reservoir. The leaves turn the bright summer heat into dappled shade. I reach forward and turn off the struggling air conditioner, and the car fills with the green-smell of the trees that line the road.
“Yeah,” she says. “I think she understood. She wasn’t happy, but … she seemed to get it.”
We’re quiet for the rest of the drive to the reservoir. Roya pushes her sunglasses up on top of her head. She accelerates into each curve, one hand gripping the shifting knob even though the car’s an automatic. There’s no one else on the road—we’re alone out here, just us and the trees, and it’s another one of those perfect moments. I try to hang on to it, try to tell myself I’ll never forget this. I know that eventually it’ll blend into whatever picture of summer-in-high-school I’ll have when I’m old, but for now, it’s high-res. Roya’s hair tangling in the wind. The tree branches arching overhead. Her fingers drumming on the steering wheel. The birds that wait on the road until what feels like the last possible second before flying out of the way of the car. Her smile when she glances over and catches me staring.
It’s a perfect moment, and it almost doesn’t feel like I killed a boy, and I want to bottle it. But then we pull into the parking lot for the reservoir, and it’s over, and the tide of guilt starts rising again. My fault, my fault, my fault.
The reservoir used to be a gravel quarry. It’s weird to think of a whole quarry just for gravel. I kind of always figured gravel was just … around. But I guess it wasn’t just around fifty years ago, so some company came and used dynamite to core the hillside like an apple. And then they let it fill up with water and told kids to swim in it. Instead of calling it what it is, which is a hole in the hill, we call it a reservoir. We call it that even though nobody is ever going to use the water in it for anything other than swimming and telling scary stories about bodies being dumped in there by the mafia.