FOR THE REST OF THE WEEK, I couldn’t sleep. Friday came, and with it rumors of a massive house party in Wildwood, but I didn’t much feel like partying. I stayed home and watched Teen Mom 2, then climbed into bed and opened up A Farewell to Arms. When I turned to the first chapter, a little slip of paper fluttered out from between the pages. I picked it up and my heart quickened. Tino had written his name in neat black letters, and beneath it, his phone number. Grinning like an idiot, I programmed the number into my phone, just in case I ever worked up the nerve to actually call him. Then I picked up the book and began to read. As far as I could tell, it was just a lot of descriptions about rocks and trees and rivers and troops. There were soldiers drinking and talking about things I didn’t understand. There was no mention of Catherine Barkley. I wanted to text Tino and ask, Does it get better? But of course I didn’t have the guts. I gave up at the end of the second chapter and went to sleep. I slept for ten hours, but in the morning when my alarm went off and I dragged myself out of bed to get ready for work, I still felt exhausted. When I got to the deli, I made myself a piece of warm buttered bread with plum jam, my favorite, but could barely eat two bites. My stomach was in knots. My head pounded. My legs shook. I knew what it was: My guilt about Alexis’s violin was starting to make me physically sick.
At the end of my shift, I climbed into Red Rocket, drove to the bank, and deposited my paycheck into my college savings account as I always did on payday. I got back into the car, turned on the ignition, and sat there for a minute staring at the flashing neon sign for the Vape Emporium next to the bank. It was a gray day and the sky was clogged with heavy, inert clouds, the kind that threaten rain but never deliver. The faces of the people walking down the street were washed out and exhausted, everybody dreaming of summer.
I turned off the ignition. With a determined sigh, I climbed back out of Red Rocket, retraced my steps across the parking lot, into the bank, and back up to the teller’s counter.
“Did you forget something, ma’am?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to make a withdrawal.” I filled out the withdrawal slip and slid it across the counter. The teller looked at the number, raised an eyebrow, and opened her drawer. She counted out the bills in hundreds and fifties, put them in an envelope, and handed it to me.
“Would you like our security guard to escort you out to your car?” she asked. “That’s a lot of money to be carrying around with you.”
“No, thanks,” I said, suddenly unable to control a smile. “I got this.”
I sat in front of Alexis’s house with the car running and the fog steaming up the front windshield. It had been a long time since I’d been to that yellow brick bungalow on Menard Avenue, but everything was exactly as I remembered: the sour cherry tree in the middle of the front lawn, whose inedible fruit we had once picked and smashed into a red paint that we smeared into our palms because we wanted to make a blood oath of eternal friendship but were too scared to cut ourselves and draw real blood. I remembered the line of ferns that waved in the wind beneath her front window. When we played cops and robbers—I was always the cop, so I could be like my dad, and she was always the robber because it was the only role left—the ferns were always the place she hid, and when I asked her once why she didn’t hide somewhere new she said, “Because I always want you to be able to find me.”
I was hoping for some sort of sign that would make me change my mind. After all, what I was about to do was stupid and foolish and completely illogical. But as I sat in Red Rocket in front of Alexis’s house, these flooding memories only made me more determined. At last, I took the envelope containing $3,304.75—my entire college savings—and in careful block lettering so she wouldn’t recognize the handwriting, I wrote: ALEXIS NICHOLS VIOLIN FUND across the flap. Then, leaving the car running, I pulled my hood around my face, hurried up the walkway to her front door, dropped it in her mail slot and drove away before anyone could see me.