by Joy Preble
“Oh,” says Max.
A few feet away, another couple—a real couple, I think, not just two people thrown together by pie and a missing sister—embrace. The guy is tall and slender, thinner than Max, and even though it’s freezing out here, the girl is wearing a short summery dress and cowboy boots. They’re hugging and she’s pressed against him tight, her hands in his jeans pockets. They kiss then, a long kiss that lasts and lasts and I think of how Max kissed me at the Luxor, but I know it’s not the same.
“Good for them,” I say, voice coming out brittle. I clear my throat.
“Maybe they just met each other,” Max says, eyes laughing now—maybe about the blue-haired prince my sister had imagined for me—but there’s something sadder in them, too, just for a second. “They were eating cheeseburgers at the Big Boy and he put mustard on his fries and that was that. Well, after they ate some pie.” He grins.
I shake my head. “She’s on a diet. No pie for her.”
Max nods. “You are right, Leo Leonora. How could I have missed that?”
“I’m smart, remember?” I tap a finger to my forehead.
But when they kiss again, Max says, “We need to go,” and he’s no longer smiling.
“They’ll probably break up tomorrow,” I say, trying to lighten the mood.
He doesn’t react.
“Maybe then she’ll eat the pie,” I say, even though it sounds sexist. I wait for Max to say something clever and quippy and ironic. But he doesn’t.
“You break up with someone lately?” I ask, because it’s suddenly obvious that maybe he has.
Max circles his tongue around the inside of his cheek. “Yeah.”
A million thoughts ramble through my brain. Who was she? Is she the real reason he’s on the run?
“It happens,” I say lamely.
“Oh?” He barely glances at me.
My skin heats. “Well, not to me. I mean, I . . . I haven’t gone with anyone long enough to break up with them.” And now he knows it.
I am grateful when he doesn’t respond. And possibly grateful there is no girl back in Texas waiting for him.
We walk to the truck and climb inside. It still smells musty and stale, but familiar, too, and I buckle my seat belt, settling in. Max shoves the gearshift into drive. We bounce over gravel to the entrance ramp, then out to the highway. The sky is filled with stars. In Vegas there’s so much neon I barely remember the sky is there.
I sneak a look at Max. When this is over, will I see him again? Is he someone I want to see? The way my heart lunges both surprises me and lets me know the answer. Yes.
Is it yes for him, too?
In my pocket, Mom’s cell vibrates sharply.
Another text from Paris. From my phone.
I need you to do this, Leo. You’ll figure it out once you’re in LA.
My hands go slick around the phone. Outside the truck, the wind spirals a cold blast that sneaks in with us. I shiver under the sleeves of Max’s loaner hoodie.
“What if I don’t find her?” The words come louder than I want.
Max’s eyes linger on me briefly, then he turns his attention back to the road. “Leo, I . . . you’re sure Paris wants to be found?”
The question makes my heart lurch.
“Of course she does,” I snap.
He presses his lips together.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to . . . I mean, I really appreciate that you’re—”
Max reaches out his hand, rests it briefly on my knee. I freeze, then realize he’s being nice.
“We all have our secrets,” he says. “Maybe she . . .” He trails off.
I bite my lip. What is he really asking? My heart is a trip-hammer now and I don’t want it to be.
I pat his hand awkwardly, and he puts it back on the wheel. “She’d never hurt me. We take care of each other, Paris and me.”
Max clears his throat. “Maybe you more than her?”
“No,” I say, but I think he doesn’t agree.
We drive more miles and Max plays more country medley, and what do you know, it’s Taylor Swift. If anyone can sing about love gone wrong, it’s Taylor. “I thought I had you figured out,” she croons. “Something’s gone terribly wrong.”
“Why do you want to be a doctor?” Max asks abruptly, totally confusing me.
I tell him the same things I’d told my school counselor: I’m good with science and math. That it would be like solving puzzles every day. That I could make sick people better, take broken people and put them back together.
He looks straight ahead as I talk. Now and then, he nods his head so I know he’s listening. “It’s a lot of school,” he says when I’m done.
True.
Also, not the reaction I usually get. When I tell people I am going to be a doctor, they nod approvingly. You are smart. You are special. You are driven.
If I told them the truth, that the idea of being a doctor—walking around in a lab coat, listening to people’s chests with a stethoscope, scribbling out a prescription on one of those little white pads—is more real to me than any clear sense of what it will be like to actually do the job, those looks would fade. I know this as sure as I know anything.
I do not tell them I am just a girl who lives in a too-small house in a place I never wanted to be.
We hit a bump in the road, and my gaze snaps from the window. Max glances over, his face lit orange by the dash.
“What if you had a patient you couldn’t help?”
“Why?” I try to read his face, but he looks back at the road, hands on the wheel, giving me nothing.
“What if things went wrong? What if you weren’t as good as you thought?”
His words make me flinch. My heart scrapes at my ribs. Does he think I can’t do it?
“I guess you learn to deal with it,” I say, hoping this sounds doctorly. “I mean, you do the best you can, I guess. Not everybody gets better. Or not better enough.”
It is a weak answer and I know it. But what does he expect me to say?
He’s quiet again, just more country music—someone I don’t know—and the thump of the tires rolling over the road. But he shoots another glance at me, hard enough that my heart gives a thump with the tires. Max Sullivan does not know me well enough to question my career plans.
“What about you?” I ask, knowing I sound snippy again, but his question has made me edgy. “Why do you want to research or be an engineer or whatever?” He’s been pretty vague about the whole thing.
Silence.
We bump along in the dark, squinting now and then in the light from oncoming traffic.
“You’ll go to Rice, right?” I say, to fill the quiet between us. “After this year off. I mean, you’ll have all the money you earned, which is great. I guess it’s smart to take, what do they call it? A gap year. And research. What’s biophysics, anyway? Is it really a combination of the two or—”
Max reaches over and yanks his iPod cord out of the dash—a sudden, violent sort of motion. I stop rambling. His eyes stay fixed on the road. My pulse jolts hard.
“You ever fail at something big, Leo Leonora?”
What?
“Does losing my sister count?”
He doesn’t laugh, not even a chuckle.
“I have,” says Max Sullivan.
Thoughts of the “charge it to the Sullivans” store and all the rest of what he’s told me fly through my brain. None of it seems enough to run from. If I told him all my truths, what kind of silence would there be in this truck then?
He sighs audibly, and I find myself irritated.
I say, “You didn’t make valedictorian? You didn’t ace your SATs?”
More silence. I watch the numbers tick on the odometer. We hurtle along through the night.
It occurs to me that I am driving in the desert with a stranger.
“There was a girl,” Max says, not looking at me. My heart skips a beat. “Her name is Ashley. She’s why I left.”
“Max,” I say, eyes on him even though he won’t look at me. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“If I do, will you listen?”
I hesitate, watching him watch the road.
“Yes,” I say.
He says, “You may not like what you hear.”
“I’m tough,” I say, trying for lightness, but he still won’t look at me.
A semi whizzes by us, and the truck sways hard. Max pulls the wheel, swears under his breath.
“Everyone’s damaged, Max,” I say quietly. “One way or another. Even those annoying people who always look happy.”
The truck has stopped shaking but not my hands and I tuck them under my legs to still them. What if I just told Max everything right now? But I can’t. I won’t.
“Okay,” Max says.
“I grew up on Tennyson Street. A neighborhood called West University. Big brick house, nice lawn, pool. The whole thing. My mom teaches yoga. My dad’s a professor at Rice. Physics.”
“Well, that explains the geek jokes.”
Max gives me the smallest of smiles. Another mile ticks by.
“I’m the youngest—you know, the oops kid. My sister’s ten years older, my brother’s in the middle. They both work in DC now. He teaches school. She’s a doctor. But my parents had money by the time I was born. We took a lot of vacations. Skiing in Aspen. A lake house in Austin. That kind of thing.”
I nod my head like I’m familiar with “that kind of thing.” I have skied once, up in Big Bear. But it was a long time ago and I know it is not the same thing. Except for the going-down-the-mountain part.
Max goes on about playing soccer and football and doing well in his classes.
“I was valedictorian at Lamar,” he says. “You were wrong about that.”
I shoot him a brief glance, but he’s looking straight ahead.
“So Ashley,” I say gently as a truck rushes past us in the dark.
“Ashley was my girlfriend. We started going out the end of junior year. Ashley Pennington. Ashley Maude Pennington, actually, although she’d probably be pissed that I told you her middle name. Tall. Blond. Soccer team. Smart. Real smart. Me—I have to study. But Ash—it was easy for her. Pretty much everything.”
“But you were number one,” I say.
“Well,” says Max, and is quiet again. The pine tree air freshener and his museum tag sway in the endless rush of AC.
I try to picture what Ashley Maude Pennington would look like: Tall and willowy—the kind of girl who picks just the right little black dress that shows off her tan bare legs with well-muscled calves. She gets sweaty playing soccer and she’s got toned arms with only the faintest of little blond hairs on smooth skin and solid abs. She never smells like chemical frozen yogurt because her family has buckets of money and she doesn’t have to work at Yogiberry unless she wants to.
“We were that couple,” Max says. “That ‘walk through the hall arms around each other’ couple. The couple that everyone wants to be—athletic, accepted to good colleges, in all the right classes.”
“Did you love her?” The question flees my mouth before my brain knows what I want him to answer.
“No.” He lets the word hang, dangling at eye level like the ugly air freshener.
“I thought I did,” Max says then. “She was, well, we . . .”
He frowns but doesn’t turn his head. “She wasn’t the one. I knew it—had known it even before that. But it was April. Two weeks before prom. She’d planned it all for us. The group we were going with. The limo. The restaurant. The beach house in Galveston we’d all rented for after. I was going to drive down the afternoon before prom and drop off the booze and the food. It was all set. The dress. My tux. The flowers.”
His hands are tight on the wheel. He is still looking absolutely straight ahead—like a sea captain searching for a whale or an iceberg, maybe.
“There was this party at UT. Ash wanted to do the sorority thing. She was a legacy through her mom. Kappa. That’s one of the big ones. She went with a couple of her friends.”
My heart is thudding again because whatever’s coming, it’s not good.
“So the thing is, Leo Leonora. I was going to break up with her. After prom. I knew I was. I knew we’d be that couple, too. The ones who do it on the beach after prom with a bottle of champagne making it classy and then the next morning one of them picks a fight—publicly so there’s no going back. And everyone is still hungover when the rumors start burning up their cell phones and by the time we all get home, it’s over.”
“Max,” I say, but I don’t think he even hears me.
“She went to a frat party that weekend. At UT. She got very, very drunk.” He takes a drink of his long-gone-cold coffee. Swallows audibly. Then sips more.
“She was very drunk, Leo.” His voice sounds far away.
“So she cheated on you?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe.”
Something worse than cheating? How much worse?
“The frat house had a balcony on the second floor. That’s where she fell. She’d been drinking—her blood alcohol level was off the charts. She tumbled over the balcony and slammed into the concrete.”
I wait for him to tell me she’s dead. That this is what he’s running from—the dead girl he was going to break up with. I hold my breath.
“Permanent brain damage. A dent in her head. The vision in her left eye shot to shit. Motor function impaired. Speech slurred. You get the picture.”
I put my hand on his arm, but he shakes it off. My brain fills with the image of beautiful, damaged Ashley. In this version, she has a thin, twisted blue-and-yellow thread bracelet around her tanned wrist.
“You know what I really think about science, Leo? About all those theories and talk of black holes and dark matter? They’re just theories. All that logic? It’s just crap.”
“It’s not crap.” My voice sounds thin. “It’s not,” I repeat, stronger this time. “The theory of relativity? The elements? Cures for diseases? They’re real, Max. You know that. You work at a science museum. You explain things to kids.”
He makes a noise in the back of his throat. “You know what the world did with Einstein’s theory? They made weapons of mass destruction.”
I glare at him. “But that doesn’t make it crap.”
“You know why Alfred Nobel founded the Peace Prize? Because he invented dynamite. He was trying to make amends.”
“Are you saying Einstein was sorry about figuring out the theory of relativity? Because I don’t think—”
“I’m saying that people do horrible things and sometimes there’s no making it better.” The pain in his voice swells around us.
My stomach knots hard and I press my clasped hands against it.
“You don’t know me,” I say after a few beats. “You don’t have to say the rest of it.”
For many more miles he doesn’t. We just drive, and LA gets closer and closer, and I think about Ashley, this damaged girl who he never loved. I have no right to the rest of the story. It’s not like he owes me any truths.
But the silence grows louder and even though we’re in the middle of nowhere—not anyone’s favorite place to be—I say, “Pull over.” And when he glances at me confused, forehead wrinkling, I say it again. “There,” I tell him, pointing to an exit with a sign for an In-N-Out Burger. I’m not even sure where we are, exactly. I haven’t been looking.
I don’t want to stop. I don’t even know why we’ve gone this far in the first place except that it has happened and we’re here and my sister is still missing.
Max doesn’t say anything then, just pulls off the highway and comes to a stop on the side of the access road. Way in the distance I can see the red-and-yellow In-N-Out sign glowing. The truck feels too small—even more than it has—and so I open the door and climb, w
aiting for him to follow, a part of me tense until I’m sure he’s not going to just peel away and leave me here.
We lean against the truck as it settles and ticks and the heat from the engine sifts into the air. The sky is still inky and studded with stars.
My own truths flicker over my tongue, waiting. But I am not brave, not really. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“Here’s what I know about black holes,” I say, looking at the sky. “They happen when huge stars die and collapse on themselves. But when a star goes supernova, the particles explode everywhere. That’s what I read. So if you think about it, we’re all made of stardust, see? Tiny particles that filtered into everything.”
I don’t look at him, but I can feel Max’s shoulders seem to relax a bit.
“That’s all I’ve got,” I tell him. Because honestly, it is. I don’t know that much about the stars.
Max snorts, a rather rude-sounding noise.
“You are not a great comfort, Leo Hollings.”
“Never said I was.” But I’m smiling inside at the oddly soothing sound of his voice. I realize that over the past hours I’ve grown used to listening to him talk.
Over on the highway, traffic whooshes by. We stay leaning against the truck, our shoulders touching lightly. His fingertips brush mine briefly, but he does not take my hand and I do not offer it.
“What you have to understand, Leo Leonora, is that I’m the guy who always does the right thing. That’s just who I am.” He holds up three fingers in the Boy Scout salute.
“And they all expected me to—I don’t know what they expected. That I would be at the hospital with her. Of course. That I would sing to her and talk to her and visit her every day and bring her flowers and teddy bears and act like she was exactly the same.”
His fists clench and he breathes in through his nose, holding it a long time before he exhales. Behind us, someone honks a car horn, a short staccato blast. Max keeps his eyes on an invisible horizon.
“Not just her parents and mine. But everybody. Our friends. The teachers at school. Our coaches. I was going to break up with her, Leo. And now there she was in that damn hospital bed looking at me like I was the only thing she had left. You know what her mom said to me? ‘She’ll be okay as long as you’re here.’ Like if I wasn’t, she wouldn’t make it.”
