A week later, I got a letter from the University of Texas, San Antonio.
My Dara,
All I want to do is throw college and everything else away and grab your hand and run and run until we are someplace no one will find us. I love you so much. I feel as if I’m never going to be able to get to sleep again without you here. But I’ll have to. It’s just what has to happen in the world. I hate the world. I hate the world almost as much as I love you.
The preacher was terrible, but I got through it. My mother didn’t look at me during the whole drive here, and my father didn’t ask why. It was all so terrible. But again, I got through it. Now I’m just left with these feelings of missing you.
Please write me, and tell me where to send you mail at that awful prison. My brother said it’s the talk of the town—you going away.
I will love you forever.
Rhodie
I put the letter in the front of my coveralls and headed out to the egg store as everything inside me drained away. I was the definition of hopeless. There was no point to anything, really, because the love I felt could never find root anywhere and flower. This beautiful, living thing would wither away in the darkness inside me.
To help me keep my resolve not to go to her, I hung the picture she drew for me on the wall right beside my bed. I reminded myself that I didn’t want to be that black circle with another black circle. I vowed not to be who I was, come hell or high water—or both.
Rhodie’s letter stayed on my person at all times, even when I slept, for fear someone might find it. I must’ve read it twenty times a day—about the same number of times I looked over at the picture she’d drawn for me to remind myself what it told me.
I wrote Rhodie twice a day, every day. Each time I finished a letter, I burned it down by the creek. I burned those letters and cried, wanting so badly to have all the emotions I’d written in them go up in those flames too. I knew it would damn near kill her, not hearing from me, but a terrible part of me blamed her for making me be this way. Another part of me made myself believe that it was easier for her to be brave out there. Another part even hated her. And it’s tricky when you hate what you love. It can cause you to do mean things—callous and spineless mean things, like cutting yourself off from someone who’s waiting for you.
Rhodie wrote me several times a week, as any best friend might. I burned them all, too, unopened. I sat there with the sounds of the creek and the crickets—me fat and sad and empty, watching her hand-drawn hearts and bullfrogs and the words “love” crinkle away in the orange flames until the paper turned black and blew away.