Join us for an open house! the email from Harcourt’s admissions office read. Angela scrolled down to look for the date and suddenly heard the loudness of a car horn. She’d almost walked into Owen’s car as he was backing out of his parking space. She glanced around quickly to check if anyone else had seen but the parking lot was almost empty.
“Sorry!” she called to him as he rolled down the window. He looked concerned but slightly annoyed. “So you got your car fixed?”
“Well, for now. There’s always something wrong with it. I bought it from my neighbor. I thought he was being nice and trying to give me a good deal but now I think he just wanted to get rid of it.” He paused, looking hesitant now. “I’m going to get coffee and try to do some homework before the meeting. Want to come?”
“Sure.” She’d been planning on going home before the Tricentennial Committee met today but in the moment, this seemed like a better alternative. She looked around again, then got into the car. The inside was uncluttered and he was listening to music, soft and mellow.
“So what was so interesting back there?” Owen asked as he turned left out of the parking lot. His driving was slow, almost cautious. It made Angela impatient.
“Just an email from a college.”
He smiled. “Walcott?”
“No, Harcourt College.”
The words sounded defensive. She knew that this was how every college-related conversation with people in Westview would go, commencing with the assumption that she was going to Walcott. That knowing smile, like there wasn’t a possibility of her wanting to look anywhere else. People just expected her to stay here. She’d been thinking about that more and more since that night in the city with her parents, picturing herself away from here. The chance to be someone else, somewhere else.
“That’s in Cherwell, right? Have you visited yet?”
“Not yet. I love the city, though.” She hesitated. She didn’t know why she was telling him this when she couldn’t even tell her friends. Something seemed safe about Owen. This town was full of people judging each other, but it felt like he didn’t judge her in the same ways that everyone else did, at least. “My parents don’t know yet. They want me to go to Walcott. Everyone in my family has gone there.”
“They’re both good schools,” said Owen, turning down the music, so quiet now it was barely audible.
“I know.” Angela looked at her phone again. The email was still bright on the screen. She’d received a similar one from Walcott yesterday, filled with images of smiling students. She’d studied that message in the silence of her bedroom as nighttime sprawled over the neighborhood but she couldn’t see herself at Walcott, couldn’t place herself in those pictures.
They sat in silence the rest of the way to a coffee shop on the corner of a small string of stores. It felt like they were in the middle of nowhere. The coffee shop had dark red windowpanes, and a wooden sign with the name Gracie’s painted in the same color.
“Have you been here before?” Owen asked as they got out of the car. Despite the afternoon’s sunbeams, the sky had slowly turned gray and it was starting to drizzle.
“No.” As small as Westview was, Angela had never been to this area before. She wasn’t even entirely sure where she was.
“They have the best coffee in town. But don’t tell anyone I said that because my friend’s stepsister owns a different coffee shop here and she will never forgive me if she finds out they’re not my favorite.”
He held the door open for her and she walked into the dimly lit, coffee-scented room. The floors were scratched, the furniture old and mismatched, everything cozy. They took a table by the window and Angela looked around again. She recognized the young woman working behind the pastry-filled glass case—she had graduated from Westview High School several years ago. She still looked the same, with large glasses and her hair pulled back into a mahogany ponytail.
“What do you want? It’s on me,” Owen offered, standing up.
“Thanks,” she said, smiling. “Any kind of tea is fine.”
Angela looked out the window while Owen went to the counter to place their order. Across the street a woman wearing high heels carried a stack of envelopes into the post office, white paper kisses sent far away. Angela watched her walk out a moment later, then disappear into the blue-doored travel agency next door. She wondered where the woman was planning to go, and wished that she, too, could fly far away from here right now and land somewhere exciting, anywhere else.
On the wall facing her was a gallery of framed photographs, stolen moments snapped everywhere around the world, taken by someone who she imagined preferred wings over roots. Cobbled streets and flag-strung mountains and towers touching blue-drenched skies. Silhouettes of famous buildings and monuments she’d learned about in school. People and places with lives that seemed so much bigger and brighter and more complex than anything here. Angela wondered how people could sit here, gazing at these frozen windows into other places, and want to stay in Westview.
Owen returned, clutching two ceramic mugs, and placed the tea in front of her.
“Thanks,” she said again.
“No problem.”
She studied Owen as he ripped open a packet of sugar and stirred it into his coffee. She wished she could figure him out. She usually knew when people in Westview wanted something from her, but with him, she couldn’t tell.
“Did you know that you were one of the first people I met in this town?” Owen asked, saving her from having to think of something to say. She wondered if silence would have been better than this conversation, though. She didn’t want to dive into the past with him.
“That was a nice summer,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say. She didn’t want to tell him that the details of it were no longer perfectly painted in her mind but blurred together with other halcyon summers, or that she’d had better summers since. It seemed like their friendship still meant something to him, although she didn’t know why. His eyes met hers, and she remembered how blue they used to be, bright with laughter as they splashed each other in a plastic pool.
Bells clattered and a gust of misty air swirled in as the door opened. Grateful for a reason to look away, Angela glanced over at the newcomer. He was tall, with flaxen hair and tired brown eyes. He’d graduated several years ago, she remembered. She recalled him playing his guitar in the hallways every morning before the start of class. And then she looked around yet again, realizing that she recognized every person here. She could feel panic rising in her throat at the thought that they might recognize her, too.
Days like this, she really felt how small Westview was, almost stifling to the point of dizziness. She used to love that feeling, the knowledge that wherever she went in town, people would know who she was. It used to make her feel important. Now she just felt like they were watching her. Judging, waiting to prove that she wasn’t perfect.
She reminded herself that she’d gotten better at their game than anyone else. Even if someone did say something about seeing her here with Owen, she could find a way to make it untrue.
“Do you know what you’re doing next year?” she asked, looking again at all the pictures on the wall.
Owen hesitated for almost too long. “I’ve narrowed it down to a few schools that I want to apply to. Enfield College and Lenox University both look like good options.”
It sounded like a practiced answer, one he’d use politely on people because he thought it was what they wanted to hear. Confident and practical. She wondered what words were between the lines of his patient tone and almost-fake smile.
“Do you know what you want to study?”
“History,” Owen answered immediately, and she knew he was sincere this time. “I want to be a teacher. What about you?”
It was the first time anyone had asked her that and she almost laughed. I know what my parents want me to do, she almost said.
“I don’t know,” she lied.
Owen looked at her thoughtfully. “What do you like to do?”
“I like photography. I don’t think I’d want to make a career out of it, though. It’s more for fun.” Angela took a sip of tea, stalling for a moment before trying out the words she’d never told anyone. “Actually, Harcourt has a good fashion design program that I’m really interested in. I’ve been practicing designing and making clothes—”
“You know how to make clothes?” Owen looked impressed, which made her relax a little.
She nodded.
“Did you make that?” He indicated the dress she had on now.
“No. I don’t wear them.”
“Why?”
She shrugged, suddenly wishing she hadn’t told him. Her stomach tightened as she thought of all the times she’d stood in front of her bedroom mirror wearing the clothes she’d made. Designs she loved and was proud of, but the moment she wore them out of the house, they’d belong to other people’s eyes and all she could think was that everyone would hate them, even if they didn’t know she’d made them. So every time, she changed her mind, changed into the outfits she’d already planned. She took another sip of tea so that she didn’t have to say anything.
Owen had that thoughtful expression on his face again and Angela felt a swoop of fear that he somehow had her all figured out, which wasn’t supposed to happen.
“Anyway, like I said, my parents are set on me going to Walcott,” she said quickly. “But it would be nice to get out of here. It’s so sad that people never leave.”
The words sounded strange, like they weren’t supposed to be spoken in her voice and the expression on Owen’s face almost made her regret it.
“What are you talking about? Plenty of people leave.”
The few people in her family’s social circle who’d left had ended up back here, like something in Westview was magnetic. There was only one person she knew of who’d left for good.
“Most people I know go to Walcott,” she said.
Annoyance flashed across Owen’s face. “Not everyone can afford that option,” he said quietly, his voice suddenly a lot less friendly, edged with irritation. “There’s a lot more to this town than you realize.”
“I know how Westview works,” she said coldly. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t still be at the top.
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean that people exist outside your bubble. Some people stay because they want to, some people don’t have a choice. Not everyone can afford to go to schools like Walcott, and people do leave, for a lot of different reasons. If you just pay attention…”
Angela stared at the photographs on the wall beyond tables with all those familiar faces. Sterling cities on the water and castles bathed in sunsets. She could feel all the air disappearing from her lungs because she could see her future here so clearly: too intertwined in the town’s life to ever break free, the same way her parents were. A neighborhood of white houses and stone facades, full of people she’d known her whole life. Forever defined by her family, by what she did and who she was in high school.
She stood up. “You don’t know anything about me,” she said. “I don’t care that we used to be friends. We’re different people now, or at least I am.”
The bells clanged loudly against the wooden door as it slammed behind her. Outside, she texted Dillon, remembering how every time it felt like this town was out of air, he made it easier to breathe, or at least he used to. She waited in the rain for him to pick her up while Owen sat inside with cold coffee. As Dillon drove to his house, Angela glared at Westview through the windows. This place was only beautiful on sunny days, she thought. On days like today, it was just a gloomy stretch of winding roads and fenced-off water.
***
“Do you ever want to leave Westview?” Angela blurted against Dillon’s lips. She should have been at the Tricentennial Committee meeting twenty minutes ago, but instead she was here in Dillon’s room, the rest of the house empty, and she couldn’t stop thinking about how mad she was at Owen, how she needed someone to tell her she was right.
Dillon moved away and Angela’s vision was filled with the whiteness of the ceiling. Constellations of spackle, daylit stars.
He laced his fingers through hers. She looked at them. His nails were round, clean, hers pointed and painted the palest pink. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Next year,” Angela said hesitantly. “Have you ever thought about going somewhere else?”
“I’m going to Walcott. I already started my application,” he said, and her heart sank because he wasn’t going to tell her the things she wanted to hear.
“Aren’t you?” he added when she didn’t answer. “Everyone does.”
There it was, that expectation, again. She was starting to regret coming here, trying to escape to him the way she wanted to run away to other places. She was mad at herself now, too, for lying to herself, pushing away everything she didn’t want to admit about him so that she could feel at home here again. For wishing for a version of them that was long-gone, or maybe had never really existed.
“I don’t know,” she said. The mattress was hard beneath her back, the pillows too soft. Angela felt like her head was sinking into them, feathers and navy fabric. She sat up. She could see herself across the room in Dillon’s mirror, makeup smudged dark around her eyes. Her hair was long, in messy waves. She felt lonely all over again, like she had that night driving back from Owen’s house and she wished she were someplace dark where she couldn’t feel the world moving.
She thought about summer. All her past summers had been miles of the bluest sky and bonfire sparks sending gold to the heavens. They were thunderstorms like dark watercolors. Ocean everywhere, sand stiff in her hair and dried in swirls on her skin. Those infinities between late night and early morning that smelled like spilled beer and firework smoke. This summer with Dillon had been perfect, because she needed it to be. It had to be everything, all those summers rolled into one. Something about that felt important, like the start of this school year signified a new reality and Angela just wanted summer in her veins.
For most of the summer, they’d stayed at his parents’ beach house, where the rest of the world faded away. She took naps on the roof, watched the sky move above her. Inhaled the sun and the silence. She collected seashells in a glass jar for her bedroom at home and admired the ocean-honed perfection of their white ridges and dusky spirals. In the late afternoons, conversations congregated at the island in the kitchen as everyone prepared dinner, which they ate around a long table with the windows open so that their laughter leaked into twilight, and it was in those moments that Angela felt like she was part of something that her own family had been missing for a long time. And later, at night, she’d sneak out with Dillon, watching harbor lights, drinking on the dark, empty beach with nothing around them but the rhythm of waves. She’d been almost in love with him then.
“I guess I’d never thought about leaving before. Like, as something that I could really do,” she continued without looking directly at Dillon. She could feel him watching her profile as he traced the outline of her fingers.
“Why would you, though? This town is in your blood.”
That was exactly the problem, Angela thought. She imagined Westview’s twisted roads as her veins, dark through her skin, all those lives moving and flowing inside the lines her family drew. She shuddered.
“Do you ever feel trapped here?”
She wanted him to understand. She could feel it burning in her lungs. Someone else had to feel this way, lost in a place they knew by heart. Alone when they were always surrounded by people who wanted their attention.
Dillon shook his head. “I like living here.”
Their world was so small. Maybe they were different in a town ruled by a reservoir instead of saltwater tides. Because ever since they’d returned to Westview, she’d noticed a shift. When they went places together now, it felt like a performance for everyone else, Dillon all pretentiously polished and preppy, laughing with people Angela had been friends with first as she smiled along to hide her sadness. It made her wonder if she’d made a mistake. If Dillon was just another boy who liked the idea of her, the status of her, and for the first time, she’d let herself get too close, forgetting that playing this game required her to stay far enough away that she couldn’t get hurt.
She was afraid her heart had read it all wrong, saw an anchor when he was really just a warning sign. If he knew almost everything about her, almost all her thoughts inside-out, she wondered what it meant if that wasn’t the version of her he liked. If all he wanted was the Angela that everyone else in this town saw. She didn’t understand how it had taken her so long to notice, how she could have fallen for him.
“Walcott will be fun,” he was saying now, looking up at her with those eyes that made her wish for nights on starlit marinas and the euphoria of saltwater all over them as they jumped off docks, laughing. He ran his fingers through her hair, almost combing it. Turning her into the perfect girl she was supposed to be. “Like now, but better.”
And for so long, that was how Angela thought her life was supposed to go. Until today, no one had ever asked her what she wanted to do. They just assumed she wanted Westview. That it was the only option. It was so much easier when she loved this town, when it felt like everything she needed was here.
But now that wasn’t enough, not since she’d realized what she could have in Cherwell, where she could be part of something bigger than herself. All those city lights, art and inspiration everywhere, the freedom to discover the person she could be. Everything in constant motion, constant change, a place where stories weren’t just written in high school. In Cherwell, if you listened to the rush of traffic the right way it almost sounded like the ocean.
The thought of breaking up with Dillon hurt more than it should. It meant running away, untangling herself from the strands of him that wrapped themselves around her words and thoughts and heart the heavy way sand-laced seaweed choked their toes on shorelines. So instead she kept running back to him, disappointed in herself every time.
He was still looking at her, pulling her back toward him now. She flinched away.
He sighed and reached over for his laptop to resume the TV show they’d been watching earlier and Angela stayed where she was for a moment, sitting up, glancing at the girl in the mirror. Her chest aching, sadness stinging beneath her skin because neither of them could be what the other wished for.
Dillon smelled like summer. Like the color green and the sea. Angela closed her eyes, sank back into the pillows. She was drowning, drowning in her thoughts and his arms and miles of trees planted to protect the broken parts of small towns.