AMELIA

He was driving angry, taking the turns too tight, overcompensating on the straightaways and allowing the car to meander from one lane to the other. The roads were empty—they had seen no one, not a single other car—but each time he swerved into the other lane, she gripped the door handle tighter and double-checked her seat belt. Beyond the fogged windows, countryside flashed by in swathes, blurs of green and white and black that she tried to follow with her eyes—trying to count the seconds, to see if she was right to be worried that the car was moving dangerously fast.

Luke had been silent, furious and stone-faced. He wouldn’t speak, only glared at her, until she felt afraid to move. The air in the car was full of invisible knives, all pointing at her, all ready to cut.

“Luke,” she said, for the fourth—fifth?—time. “If you’d just talk to me—”

“I don’t see what there is to discuss,” he snapped. His voice was taut and angry, but she sighed with relief anyway. He was talking, at least. Anything was better than the barbed silence.

“Well, us, for one,” she said. He eased off the accelerator, and she relaxed. Under her nervousness, there was still the sense of endless patience. Whatever he could dish out, she would be fine—she understood him, after all, and this wasn’t really about her. He was scared.

And maybe, she thought, I just don’t care.

There had been a time when she might have—early on, when she knew less about Luke’s moods and believed that every snappish moment must be somehow her fault, she had been hurt by his willingness to lash out. To take his stress and irritation out on whatever, or whoever, happened to be closest, especially when the closest thing was so often her. But then, as the months had passed, she had come to see it as something else. A cycle. Unstoppable, like the seasons, like the tides. Luke’s snappishness had no cause; like the weather turning cold or the slow decay of fallen leaves, it just happened.

And so she had stopped caring—or, at least, stopped worrying over it. Had stopped investing herself, had stopped trying to fix it, had simply stepped aside and waited for the storm to pass. But as he glared at her and struggled to speak, she found herself thinking that things had changed. Only a little. She had seen something better and bolder, had taken a step down an untested road and found something beautiful waiting for her. Luke, still on his own unquestioned track, seemed further away than he ever had before. She felt the sense of distance, felt that she was looking at him from a different perspective.

Tolerance might not be enough, she thought. Not any- more. He was being left behind. And he knew it.

“What do you want to talk about ‘us’ for,” he snapped, biting the words off as though each one was a punch to the gut. “I think you’ve talked enough for both of us, right? Just going off and applying to some . . . some ridiculous shit in Boston, without even telling me?!”

“I didn’t think you’d understand,” she said quietly. “And it seemed stupid to try, when I never thought I would get in. If Jacob—”

He cut her off.

“Didn’t think I’d understand?” he yelled. “I’ve been nothing but understanding! Jesus Christ, Amelia! You go off and drop your freaking classes, load up on all that crazy stuff taught by people nobody has ever even heard of, and then you start hanging around with those people all the time—”

“Those people?”

“—and I was nothing but supportive of you! I let you go off and do whatever the hell you wanted! Even when you started to change, I never said a godda—”

“Started to change?” she shouted, her voice so loud that the windows seemed to rattle.

Luke’s mouth dropped open, the rest of the words he’d intended to fling at her lost in the face of her anger.

She took a deep breath and looked out the window, watching the countryside pass, the yellow flash of a mile marker. She waited until it had disappeared, fading into the darkness behind them, before turning back.

“Wow, Luke. You really don’t understand me at all, do you,” she said.

It wasn’t a question.

She forced herself not to scream, looking back out the window instead as she said, “Don’t you get it? If I changed, it’s because I found something that matters to me. This is my life, don’t you see that? Before I found this—before the stage, before Jacob showed me that I had this inside of me—it was like nothing was real. I was just floating with the tide, doing what I was supposed to do, doing what everyone expected of me, because there was nothing else. Nothing that lit me up, nothing that made me feel alive like this. I thought you’d be happy for me!”

He scoffed. “So I was just something you were supposed to do, is that it?”

“No, Luke,” she said evenly. “I loved you.” She paused, realizing that she had used the past tense. He didn’t seem to notice. She cleared her throat. “You know I care about you. But I can’t be counting on another person to create a life for me. I have to do that, I have to find what makes me happy and do it, and this . . .”

“It’s a pipe dream,” he snapped.

Incredibly, she laughed. Lightly, like she was genuinely amused, like she had just never realized how funny he really was.

“Now you’re joking,” she said. He glared back at her, and she returned the look with a smile. “This is a serious program, for serious people. The fact that I got in, it means . . . Christ, do you think I’d commit to something like this if I didn’t think it was real? If I didn’t have anything less than a great chance of making it happen?” She shook her head, and began laughing even harder. “I majored in business! Business!”

He pushed the accelerator to the floor again, furious in the face of her flippancy, and the motor roared. Feeling the surge of the car as it began to speed, fifty miles per hour, then sixty, then seventy, she swallowed her laughter and turned back to him with her mouth set in a grim line.

“I love you, Luke,” she said. “I do. But I won’t give this up.”

Minutes passed. Outside, the darkened countryside flew past them, the stars becoming a blur overhead. She stopped waiting for an answer, cracked the window and listened as the wind howled its way in, drawing her hair away from her neck and making it dance in the slipstream overhead. The car barreled between a copse of trees, faster now, around a long curve and met with the merging Y of a new road. A green rectangular sign that read 128 flashed momentarily in the darkness and then was lost behind them. The trees overhead thinned, then disappeared entirely, giving way to a wide-open blackness that must be a field. The harsh whipping of the tall grasses that lined the road rose and fell, like urgent whispers.

She opened the window farther, pressed her face into the gaping space, opening her mouth to taste the air and wondering whether she should just ask him to pull over now, to let her out. She could find her own way back, and anything was better than this—the car full of angry silence, bitterness sitting thickly between them, Luke’s infuriating inability to see her as anything but a vessel for his own banal dreams of a yuppie future.

“I can’t help noticing that you keep mentioning Jacob.”

She lifted her head away from the window and looked at him carefully.

His voice was different, hollower, with none of the previous whining petulance of a scorned little boy. He took another turn too fast, and the wheel touched dangerously close to the grit that lay at the roadside, spinning briefly before finding purchase again on the asphalt.

“Luke, please slow down.”

“Don’t try to change the subject,” he said, and pressed the accelerator harder. “I can’t believe I never noticed it before. So obvious, right? I mean, you and Jacob—”

“What? That’s ridiculous! He’s my professor!”

“I didn’t call any of my professors by their first names,” he sneered.

She stared at him.

“But maybe I should have,” he said, and the cruelty in his voice shocked her. “Maybe if I did, I’d be on my way to some sort of masters program instead of an entry-level job pushing papers, right?”

“You’re being disgusting,” she spat. “You know better than that.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Amelia,” he retorted, and the snide tone began to drip with ugly bitterness, and she wondered how she could have missed this. This petty, sneering, self-involved brat, who she had thought—had actually thought!—could be part of her future. He was looking at her.

He was looking at her too long.

“Luke, please watch the road.”

“What, you’re not going to answer my question?”

He was toying with her now. The motor roared louder as he pushed the pedal harder, watching her get scared, liking how she looked with worry and fear painted so openly across her face.

“Luke—”

“C’mon, why don’t you tell me? Just tell me! What’ve you got to hide?”

“Luke, please—”

“Is that why you like it rough now, huh? Is that how he likes it?”

Her voice was growing panicked now, and she looked frantically down the road, and her hands began to shake, and—

“Luke, please—OH MY GOD!”

He looked up and his eyes widened.

Ahead, so close, too close, were two copper-colored disks. The blazing eyes of a tawny doe, a four-legged ghost standing dead center in the road.

He wrenched the wheel, and the tires squealed, and the road disappeared behind them as the car veered into the yawning blackness.