In Harmony

Willow’s expression softened. “Oh. Okay. If you don’t mind.”

“I don’t.”

As we walked toward my truck in the theater parking lot, every dent and scratch in the blue paint screamed for attention. Once inside, Willow sat with her eyes locked on the view outside her window. Her hands clutched her bag tight, her coat sleeves tugged far over her wrists.

We were silent on the drive to Emerson Hills, where the flatness of Indiana was broken by a few rolling hills. We passed a small overlook with a view of downtown Harmony. Most of the houses here were huge. No cottages or trailers allowed. Stables and trees in the backyards instead of piles of rusted, twisted metal.

Willow directed me down one street. “Right here is good,” she said with a vague wave of her hand.

“Which one is yours?” I asked, pulling to the curb in front of a house built in brown brick and gray stone.

“This is great, thanks,” she said. She grabbed her bag and reached for the door, then paused, her hand white-knuckled on the handle. “Thank you. Not just for the ride, but for showing me the amphitheater and for our talk. I think it helped.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Was it helpful for you, too? I mean, as far as what Martin wanted from us?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was.”

I scrambled to think of something else to talk about, anything to keep her in the car for one more minute…

“Okay, then,” she said, grabbing her bag. “I’ll see you Monday night.”

“Yeah. See you.”

She climbed out of the truck and shut the door, then waved at me from the curb. And didn’t move.

She’s waiting for me to drive away.

Normally, nothing could’ve budged me from the curb until I knew she was safe inside her house. But I made an exception and flipped the truck around to head back to the western edge of town, to my shitty trailer. In my rearview, I watched as Willow fidgeted with her bag. Maybe she was digging around for her house keys, but I doubted it. And by the time I turned the corner, I knew the brown and gray house I’d pulled in front of wasn’t hers.

Willow

Monday morning in English class and Mr. Paulson was at his usual spot, rifling through papers. Angie was at her desk, wearing baggy jeans, Dr. Martens boots and a black T-shirt that read, I’m pretty cool but I cry a lot.

When she saw me, she pulled out her phone, shook it and put it to her ear with a perplexed look on her face.

“Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?” She let her hand drop and gave me a pointed look. “That was a rhetorical question, in case you were wondering. How do I know this? Because my real friends, Caroline and Jocelyn, called me over the weekend.”

“Sorry,” I huffed, slouching into my desk. “I didn’t feel like talking okay? I don’t always feel like talking on the phone. In fact, I hardly ever feel like talking on the phone.”

“I get that. Most people don’t like talking on the phone anymore. That’s what the text function is for.” She turned in her seat and leaned over her arm toward me. “You told me you’d call after I dropped you off downtown. I assumed that meant you would call me. But you didn’t. So I had to call you. You didn’t answer. I then spent the weekend thinking Isaac Pearce murdered you and dumped your body in a ditch.”

“You did not think that,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Does it matter to you what I thought? My guess is no.” She whirled in her seat to face front, then she whipped back around. “Look, I don’t know how they do things in New York, but here friends don’t just go silent on each other whenever they feel like it.” She held up her hands, empty palms facing me. “I’m not a stalker, I’m not your mother, I’m not your babysitter. But you could’ve texted me. That’s all I’m going to say about it.”

She turned around. And that was all she had say to me for the rest of the class too.

So what? I thought, trying to find my protective layer of I-don’t-give-a-fuck. I’d stopped putting effort into friendships long ago. My New York friends told me the exact same things Angie did. Told me a hundred times until one by one, they gave up on me. Michaela, my best friend, stuck it out the longest. She suspected something had happened that summer, but I refused to talk to her at all, about anything, afraid the worst story would come tumbling out. By Thanksgiving, she stopped calling me. Her last text was the week before Christmas break:

Please talk to me.

I didn’t respond. When we moved to Indiana, we got new phone numbers and I cut off everyone who knew me before. X’d myself out of their lives.

Angie’s back to me hurt more than I was prepared for.

The bell rang and she hurried out of the classroom without a glance at me. I grabbed my stuff and followed her to her locker.