“I think I want to go to Colorado after Christmas. Maybe you can go to California without me and we could meet up after.”
“Breckenridge?” I ask her.
Her face pales a little. “I do it every year,” she tells me, setting the lid back on the pot.
“You don’t want me with you?”
“Oh, no.” She looks up, her eyes wide and round and…wanting. “That’s not it. I just—”
“You think I’d leave you on your own?”
I wrap my arms around her from behind and press her up against me. “Pig. We’ll go there first and California later. It doesn’t matter. Kellan doesn’t care.”
She nods, turning to me. “Barrett—thank you.”
She looks troubled, though. Through dinner, too, and after, when we take a bath together. She seems unhappy. Distracted.
On Christmas Eve, as we sleep underneath the glow nights in her bedroom with our gifts piled on the couch, the refrigerator stuffed full of food for tomorrow, I learn why.
She talks during a dream, and I hear names I know.
Michael’s.
Niccolo’s.
John’s.
And mine.
EIGHTEEN
Gwenna
December 31, 2011
11:39 p.m.
I step back inside and am greeted by the sound of “Pumped Up Kicks” coming through the ceiling speakers. It seems the band is taking a break and they’re playing radio. As a musician, I like this song. As a person, I’m not sure. I haven’t analyzed the lyrics or anything, but I’m pretty sure it’s about kids running from a school shooter.
Should I hum along with it?
I’m not sure I can help myself.
I press my lips together as I walk past the bar. The taste of Marlboros in cold weather takes me back to K-ville at Duke. I can smell the mix of stale material—sleeping bags and tents, the whiff of body odor (even though everyone in our tent tried to shower when they weren’t on shift), the lingering pall of smoke and tang of liquor. I can almost smell our textbooks, see our phones’ lights as we lie there like sardines in sleeping bags, trying for weeks to stake our claim to UNC or one of the other tented games. That’s Duke: basketball, and being there for years, that’s what winter is to me.
The memory evaporates as I blink at a brunette who’s planted in my path. She’s tall; I have to look up to see her face, which is oval-shaped, with pretty lips, and framed by brown curls. As I look at her, her brows narrow.
“You’re the model?”
“Huh?” I catch my cheek between my molars. I’m about to ask her if we know each other when she shakes her head and bursts out laughing.
“Sorry! I’m Marina. Where I’m from, in San Juan, there is this big, big billboard. You’re wearing a beige dress?”
I smile, nodding. I remember that shoot.
“And the Alexander McQueen clogs.”
I nod, half-sad because McQueen is dead now, half-impressed because this girl knows her shit.