situation might still be saved, that Charles might yet be convinced it was all a
joke. Tears streamed from my eyes—my big toe was broken—but I kept
cackling. Shawn stood in the doorway looking awkward.
“Are you okay?” Charles kept saying.
“Of course I am! Shawn is so, so, so—funny.” My voice strangled on the
last word as I put weight on my foot and a wave of pain swept through me.
Charles tried to carry me but I pushed him off and walked on the break,
grinding my teeth to stop myself from crying out, while I slapped playfully at
my brother.
Charles didn’t stay for supper. He fled to his jeep and I didn’t hear from
him for several hours, then he called and asked me to meet him at the church.
He wouldn’t come to Buck’s Peak. We sat in his jeep in the dark, empty
parking lot. He was crying.
“You didn’t see what you thought you saw,” I said.
If someone had asked me, I’d have said Charles was the most important
thing in the world to me. But he wasn’t. And I would prove it to him. What
was important to me wasn’t love or friendship, but my ability to lie
convincingly to myself: to believe I was strong. I could never forgive Charles
for knowing I wasn’t.
I became erratic, demanding, hostile. I devised a bizarre and ever-evolving
rubric by which I measured his love for me, and when he failed to meet it, I
became paranoid. I surrendered to rages, venting all my savage anger, every
fearful resentment I’d ever felt toward Dad or Shawn, at him, this bewildered
bystander who’d only ever helped me. When we argued, I screamed that I
never wanted to see him again, and I screamed it so many times that one
night, when I called to change my mind, like I always did, he wouldn’t let
me.
We met one final time, in a field off the highway. Buck’s Peak loomed
over us. He said he loved me but this was over his head. He couldn’t save me.
Only I could.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
Winter covered campus in thick snow. I stayed indoors, memorizing
algebraic equations, trying to live as I had before—to imagine my life at the
university as disconnected from my life on Buck’s Peak. The wall separating
the two had been impregnable. Charles was a hole in it.