Her eyes narrowed. “Working how?”
“Don’t know exactly, but Mr. Howe asked if I’d be interested in being his assistant for the year. It pays. Not a lot, but you know. Better than bagging groceries.”
“What do you know about orienteering?”
My cheeks warmed. The fact was, I’d been reading all I could on the topic, because what I actually knew was nothing. “I’m learning.”
“And your mom’s letting you do this?”
“Yeah, well, we need the money. She can’t exactly say no.”
Rose nodded but looked bored. I was sweating again and asked if we could go outside for some fresh air. She brought her coffee with her, and we stood on the back porch that cantilevered over the river. Our shoulders touched, but I didn’t feel any closer to her than I had when she’d been in a different hemisphere.
“Don’t you ever wonder what the point of all this is?” she asked me.
I stared at the water below, at the way it went around some of the rocks but ran over the tops of others. “The point of what?”
“Our lives. The things we do.”
“You and me?”
“No. I mean everything. All the things we’re meant to accomplish. Going to school. Finding a job. Falling in love. I mean, we’re supposed to do these things just because some other people did them first, but what if they’re not the things that will make us happy?”
“Well, what would make you happy?” I asked, although what I wanted to say was, haven’t you already fallen in love?
“That’s just it,” Rose said. “I don’t know. But I don’t want to close any doors before I’ve had a chance to walk through them.”
I flashed a smile. “You can’t walk through them all, you know. Not everything’s a choice.”
“That’s depressing, Ben.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s more than depressing. Thinking like that makes me want to die already and get it over with.”
“Sounds like you’ve been spending too much time with Tomás,” I said, which was an attempt to make her laugh. Rose’s brother had been in my English class the year prior, and he was the dreariest thing, prone to idolizing all those soppy dead poets, like Thomas Chatterton, who’d killed himself when he was seventeen by swilling arsenic. I had no clue what Tomás saw in him, whether he felt a kinship with the guy’s name or his morbid gloom or the fact that he was a fraud, but on more than one occasion, I’d caught him scribbling down some of Chatterton’s worst lines in his notebook. I mean, just awful stuff, like “the sickness of my soul declare.”
Rose turned then and grabbed for my tie, pulling me closer in the process, which seemed to catch her off guard. Her fingers stroked silk before letting me go. “You know, Ben,” she said. “If anything happened between you and anyone else while I was gone, it’s fine. You can tell me. I’ll forgive you.”
This startled me, to say the least. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Yeah, well, nothing happened,” I said, and that was the truth. Nothing had even come close to happening. My summer had been one long drift of dissocial malaise; endless nights spent streaming porn, reading Murakami; days spent oversleeping, forgetting to eat, and doing my best to lose my mother’s Vicodin prescription. I mean, I hadn’t even talked to any girls my age, much less hooked up with one.
Rose sighed at my response, a sad sigh, and perhaps I was meant to tell her that if she’d done anything while she’d been in Peru, I’d forgive her, too. But I didn’t.
We kept standing there. The sun abandoned the sky, leaving behind nothing but a glimmer of blue and purple, a hint of bruising along the tree line, and I wanted to hold Rose or kiss her or make her laugh, but it was like I’d forgotten how.
The earrings, I remembered. I should give her those. I reached in my pocket just as Rose knocked her coffee mug off the deck railing. It shattered at her feet. I bent to pick up the ceramic shards, and when I stood again, Rose pointed at my hand. I looked; blood was dripping everywhere—I’d sliced myself good on a piece of the mug—and I stared wide-eyed at the wound, unable to tear my gaze from the way my skin was just kind of hanging open, letting everything inside slip out.
The strangest thing happened then: The longer I stared at the blood rushing to leave my body, the more I grew light-headed and hot all over. It felt like I was melting or on the verge of bursting into flames. But before I could say anything or find a place to sit my melting ass down, my ears began to buzz, my vision went grainy, and I guess I passed out cold.
I woke to quite the scene. People were crowded around me. My tie was off, my shirt open, my bare chest exposed for all to see. A waiter was trying to pour water down my throat, and another wrapped a towel around my cut hand. Annoyed, I pushed them away and sat up. Rose had managed to drag a doctor she knew out of the dining room, although thank God no one called an ambulance or anything.
The doctor crouched beside me. She insisted on listening to my heart, feeling my pulse, and asking me questions about what medications I was taking and if I was prone to panic attacks. I answered honestly but must’ve been too much of a dick to deal with because as soon as she figured out I wasn’t dying, she stood again, started talking to Rose.
“I see this a lot, you know,” the doctor said. “People fainting at the sight of blood. It’s very common.”
“Hmm,” Rose said.
“Does your boyfriend have any underlying medical conditions?”
“He gets migraines from an accident he had as a kid. They’re pretty bad. And he said he was sick last night. Food poisoning.”
“All the more reason for resting. And water. If he’s not feeling better in a day or two, he should see someone.”
“Hmm,” Rose said again.
They talked more, but I tuned them out. The crowd drifted away, and I sat on that porch beneath the glowing late summer moon, and worked to regain my bearings. I’d been sick, yes, and was probably dehydrated. It was also true I got migraines and blood could make me queasy. But I knew for a fact those weren’t the reasons I’d lost consciousness. Because while I was sure there were plenty of guys out there eager for their girlfriends to absolve them of their sins, there was nothing in Rose’s offer of forgiveness that had felt anything like a gift.
Not at all.
Not to me.
4.