* * *
I get tired of swimming long before everyone else. I’ve never been much one for the water, and it’s getting kind of late anyway. My limbs are tired and sore from being folded up in the car for days. I put my dry clothes back on and stretch out on the sand. I listen to the sounds of them splashing in the water and close my eyes, but something is building just below my rib cage, no matter how much I try to fight it off, a constant reminder of how fast we’re moving toward the person I’ve been waiting to meet.
“Ellie.”
My eyes fly open, and I realize that Cade is bending over me, and that I must have fallen asleep, right here by the lake. As I’m still processing this, Cade drops down onto the sand beside me. He’s still shirtless, but at least he put his pants back on, and I don’t look at him as he settles in beside me.
“They look happy.”
I tilt my head at an uncomfortable angle to see Gwen and Wes in the water. They’re wrapped around each other, floating as a single entity, and I can hear that they’re talking, but I can’t tell what they’re saying. But yes, they look happy.
I turn on my side and press my hand under my head so that I can just look at Cade. “Can I ask you a question?”
He smiles up at the sun, shining down on him, shining on the layer of water coating his skin. “Sure.”
“How did they die? Your parents?”
I see him run his tongue over his teeth, not looking at me, and I regret even asking.
“I’m sorry. That was rude. I just wanted—”
“A house fire,” he says over me, quickly.
My stomach clenches. “Were you there?”
He shakes his head. “I was on a camping trip with my grandmother. I think that’s one of the reasons she took me away and never let me come back. She’s protective of me because I was with her that day. I think she feels guilty a lot, about everything, even though she couldn’t have changed anything. If anything, she saved me, you know?” At this, he turns his head to look at me. “If I’d been home, I might not have made it out.”
“That’s awful. I’m sorry.” But he’s here. He did make it out, and I can’t imagine living with that. I wrap my arms around myself, curl up like I can protect myself from Cade’s sadness.
“I’m sorry I didn’t really know Luke.”
At the mention of Luke’s name, my eyes shoot back to Cade’s. “What do you mean? You knew him.”
Cade shrugs, causing sand to bunch up under his shoulders. “I knew him the way people in Eaton know each other, but I didn’t know him. It’s like, all I have are these snippets, flashes of memory. We had speech together before he graduated, and he was always so confident at the podium when I was always so nervous; he was always hanging out with Wes when I came over to your house or had his arm wrapped around a girl at school. I remember these little pieces of him, like how they were always asking him to be on the morning announcements and he was always winning medals in track, but I never really knew him.”
“Maybe if you know me, you know him.” He’s the one who said part of me is made up of Luke, that I took on so much of him. I never had his confidence or that thing about him that made it impossible not to be drawn to him like he produced his own gravitational pull. But there are still pieces of him here.
Cade shakes his head. “I think maybe you knew parts of him that other people didn’t. What everyone else saw and what you saw aren’t the same thing.”
I think of all the nights Luke stayed in my room until he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore, just talking, all the times we took a detour on the way home from school just so we could finish listening to the song on the radio, every time he introduced me to a new band or a movie he knew I’d love or a corner of Eaton he found bearable that no one seemed to know about. I think of the way his eyes always went soft when he told me how proud he was of me or how much he loved me or how excited he was about the future.
I feel the hardness in my throat and look away from Cade so he can’t see that my eyes have filled with tears.
I hear Gwen and Wes making their way out of the lake. A moment later, Gwen collapses on the sand beside me. She looks perfectly content to lie here in her dripping bra, black with little pink roses.
“What are you guys talking about?” she asks.
I’m hesitant to tell her. I don’t even know where Gwen stands on anything anymore. I don’t know if bringing up Luke will make her sad or angry or completely unresponsive. So I don’t answer her.
Cade does, though. “Luke.”
Gwen just nods, like this is exactly the answer she expected, but Wes sits down by our feet, wrapping his arms around his knees. “Remember that place on Fifth that shut down a few years ago? What was it called?” He looks to Gwen and me for confirmation, but it’s Cade who answers.
“The Gorge,” Cade says. “Best ice cream floats.”
Wes grins at me. “We used to go there all the time. Their roast beef sandwiches were the shit. Luke used to order his root beer float first,” he says with a chuckle. “Remember that time he ordered a float and when the waiter showed up to get his food order, he just ordered another float?”
I throw back my head and laugh. “And then he puked both of them up on the side of 377 on the way home.”
“Gross,” Gwen says, laughing. “That is so Luke.”
“It’s this place,” Wes says quietly when we’ve stopped laughing. “Michigan. It … it feels like him.” His voice is so soft I almost don’t hear him over the sounds of the birds flying by, the traffic on the road, the sound of my own heartbeat in my eardrums.
Wes is looking at me in this way that’s telling me he wants me to agree with him. He wants me to tell him that I can feel Luke here, like he’s haunting us. I look away from him and push up off my back.
“We need to get back on the road,” I say, even though it’s not going to make much of a difference. Ann Arbor is our next stop, and we’re not that far away. I wait for them to dress, and then we all traipse back to the car.
I don’t feel Luke like some spirit with unfinished business. I don’t think he’s watching us from Heaven or anything like that, sending us signs and signals to let us know that he loved us. I think he’s dead. And I don’t think any amount of driving across the country is going to bring back the dead.
* * *
In the car, Wes glances at his phone, clipped into a holder beside the steering wheel, and goes north on 75.
“Why are you going north?” Gwen asks, absently, using the visor mirror to get something out of her eye. “It’s south to Chicago.”
But Wes keeps driving. Beside me, Cade leans forward, his eyebrows pulled together, but Gwen just fidgets, putting the visor up and looking over at Wes.
“Wes?” she asks, and I see Wes glance at me in the rearview mirror. I can’t look at him or at her or at anyone, really. We never should have waited so long to tell her. She glances over her shoulder at me, and even though I don’t look at her, I can practically feel her looking at me. I can feel the moment she realizes what’s happening.
“No,” she says, snatching Wes’s phone out of the holder and looking down at the screen. “We’re not going to Ann Arbor.”
“Gwen,” Wes starts, but she cuts him off.
I can see panic in her eyes, wide and so white around her pupils. “Shut up. You guys don’t just get to hijack this fucking trip without telling me. We’re not going to Ann Arbor. We’re not going to where he—”
Wes slams on his brakes, pulling to the side of the highway and turning on the hazard lights even as cars zoom around us, honking as they go.
“Did you guys think you could just decide without me?” she asks, looking around at all of us, and I feel bad for Cade because technically, he had nothing to do with this decision.
“You don’t get to just make a decision like that,” she growls at us. “It’s where he died!” Gwen says, louder than I’ve ever heard her speak. Her eyes are glistening with tears, and I have to look awa
y from her as she wipes them away. “I mean, this trip isn’t about that. This trip is about getting out of Eaton. It’s about experiencing the world. It’s not about going where Luke did.” She looks at Wes then at me. “Right?”
Without saying a word, I reach into my bag, where I’ve been keeping the map. I hold it out to her, and she just stares down at it. I can’t tell what she’s thinking. She leans against the door behind her, like she’s too tired to hold herself up.
Wes takes the map from my hand and holds it out to Gwen. Gwen looks so confused, confused and angry, but she takes the map from Wes and opens it in her lap. For a second, I see an image of Luke bent over it, spread out on the dining room table in the time between when we got out of school and my parents got home from work. I push it away.
“What is this?” Gwen asks, her eyes roving over the whole thing, her hands trembling.
“It’s a map,” Wes says, and Gwen shoots him a look that makes his eyes go wide.
“I can see that, Wesley. Where the hell did it come from?”
Wes looks at me, shrugs, his eyes still wide.
“It came from us,” I say, and when Gwen looks at me, I realize how confusing that sounds. “I just mean, we’re the ones who put all the marks on it, me, Wes, and Luke. Like, three years ago. It was just something stupid we were doing, but I guess Luke kept it. He must have taken it with him when he left.”
“You found it with his stuff?”
When she asks that, it’s hard to get over how much we’ve kept from her, so many secrets, so much information that’s just been piling up. “Someone sent it to me. I got it the day of Luke’s funeral.” At least, that’s when I noticed it on my desk. I have no idea how long it sat there before I noticed. The world has been just a haze for so long.
I wait for her to say something, but she’s still just looking down at the map, so I keep talking. “Someone sent it to me from an address in Michigan. That’s where we’re going. It’s not really about where Luke died. I just want to know who sent me this map. Who had it.”
“I can’t believe you,” she says, her words barely even there. “I can’t believe you just weren’t going to tell me.”
My eyes shoot back to Wes, but he’s not looking at me. His eyes are trained on the floor. “We meant to tell you earlier,” he says. “Well, kind of. We weren’t going to tell you at all. I was afraid you wouldn’t come. I was afraid if you found out this trip was about Luke, you’d get angry. And then we decided we were going to tell you, but then we forgot and then we were here and—”
She clutches the map in both hands. “You had this with you the whole time,” she says between her teeth. “And this isn’t even—” She stops and folds the map up. “This doesn’t even have anything to do with me. If the three of you made this map then you should have come alone. You shouldn’t have brought Cade and me with you.”
At that, Cade’s head comes up, and he looks at me. He was never upset about being left out of the loop, but I guess it’s completely different for him.
Gwen’s eyes sweep over all three of us, and then she throws open her door and slams it shut behind her, and I scramble to follow her out. The slam of a car door behind me tells me that either Cade or Wes followed, too, but I don’t stop.
“Gwen,” I call to her, but she’s walking down the side of the highway, like any second now she’s going to put out her thumb and hitchhike back home.
When she turns to look at me, her eyes ablaze, I can tell she’s not interested in what I have to say. “I never should have come on this trip,” she says. “I’ve spent the last year trying to separate myself from all this shit, and you just yanked me back into it.”
“We wanted it to be about the trip for you,” I say. I feel like I’m begging, and maybe I am. “We’re still going to see places, experience things outside of Eaton.”
“I don’t care about any of that,” she shouts. “I never cared about getting out of Eaton.”
“Then why did you come?” I don’t mean for it to sound accusatory. I don’t mean for it to sound like I don’t want her here.
She throws up her hands. “Because I thought you wanted me to! Wes said both of you wanted me to come! I guess I was stupid to believe that, too.”
“No,” I say, pleading again. “I wanted you to come.” It’s not the whole truth, but it’s the truth now.
When Gwen looks at me again, I realize she’s crying, tears pressing into all the crevices between her eyes and her chin. “I missed you,” she says, like it’s painful to say. “There were days I missed you more than I missed Luke. When I lost Luke, I lost you, too, and that was hard. You were important to me, and then you were both gone, and that was hard.” She sucks in a breath and wipes at her face.
“I missed you, too,” I say, even though I didn’t, not really, until just now, but it’s like at this moment, I’m feeling a whole year’s worth of missing her.
She takes a deep breath and looks out at the highway. Cars are racing past, and I want to reach out and pull her close, away from any potential danger. But I know Gwen doesn’t need me to protect her. She can handle herself. She didn’t need it when I hid the map from her, either.
She finally sighs and crosses her arms, turning toward me but walking by like I don’t exist to get in the car. She pulls the door shut, and then it’s just me and Wes, standing outside in the sun. He taps once on the hood and then shrugs.
“Ann Arbor?”
ELEVEN
We get to Ann Arbor after sunset and immediately check into a hotel room. But Gwen doesn’t get in the elevator with the rest of us. She stares at the open doors, her arms crossed, and we all exchange glances, even as the elevator chimes to let us know the doors are about to close.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Wes says, stepping back out of the elevator to join her. He reaches out to brush her bangs away from her forehead. It’s probably the gentlest thing I’ve ever seen Wes do, and it makes pain spear through me. I know things will probably be hard for them now. The door slides closed behind them, and like he was waiting for that, Cade stands closer to me, our shoulders pressing together.
The elevator rocks as we race to the fifth floor, and I watch the numbers light up as we move up, up, up.
“Are you okay?” he asks. I can see his reflection in the mirrored elevator doors, watching me. I look down at where Wes left his bag at my feet.
“Gwen is really upset.”
“What about you?” he whispers. “What about how you feel?”
I crane my neck to look up at him. “I don’t feel anything,” I say.
He clamps his lips shut and doesn’t ask me anything else. As soon as we’re inside our room, I collapse onto one of the beds theatrically. I hear Cade laugh from the other side of the room. It hasn’t gotten past me that we’re currently alone in a hotel room, with no end to our privacy in sight, so I carefully keep from making eye contact with him while I roll over and pull my duffel bag onto the bed with me.
“Want to order pizza? Watch a movie?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say, taking out my phone. “I can find a place to order from.” But when the screen is completely black, I remember that I turned it off in Louisiana, remember what happened the last time I turned it on. “Actually, you should probably do that part.” I tuck my cell phone in the pocket of my bag with the map.
Cade orders pizza and then reaches for his bag. “I’m going to take a shower while we wait,” he mutters, and I look up to find him standing at the end of my bed, a change of clothes in his arms. “I smell like Wes’s car.”
“Which means that you smell like fast-food tacos and feet.”
Cade grimaces, and I smile at him. He looks like maybe he wants to say something else, but he just turns and locks himself in the bathroom.
* * *
Gwen and Wes don’t show up while we’re eating pizza or while we’re watching The Breakfast Club, and eventually, I’m too tired to wait any longer. I shower, holding my face under the hot water.
If Cade smelled like tacos and feet then I probably do, too, so I scrub with the hotel soap until I smell fresh.
As I throw on a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, I listen for the door out in the room to open, for Wes and Gwen to come in, for signs that Cade won’t be the only one in the room when I step out of the bathroom, but I don’t hear anything. Except I do hear something, and when I open the door, I realize it’s soft music, playing over the speaker of Cade’s phone.
I don’t recognize the song, but it’s the kind of song that seems like it was written just to lull you to sleep.
“What is this?” I ask, tossing my dirty clothes on the floor by my duffel bag and watching as Cade turns away from the window. His eyes drop to my legs, and I’m self-conscious suddenly, standing in front of him, feeling naked. What is it about pajamas that make a person feel so unclothed? I have to remember that Cade has seen me in my pajamas before, not to mention my underwear just a few hours ago.
Cade is wearing a shirt, and I’m thankful for that. My nerves are alive enough already without also having to deal with so much of his skin. He’s wearing a T-shirt and basketball shorts, and it’s a second before he answers me.
“Sufjan Stevens,” he says. “Thought it might help us sleep. I’m not used to all this city noise.”
I laugh. In Eaton, the only sounds at night are the trains and the cicadas, but I can hear the sounds of sirens, of music, of nightlife outside our hotel room window. I walk to his phone and turn the volume up, trying to drown out the noise even more. I turn to his bed and see a book right in the middle of the mattress. I reach out to grab it. It’s a book about Napoleon.
I’m still holding it in my hands, feeling the heavy weight of it, when Cade moves behind me. I feel him settle just a little too close, feel his breath on the back of my neck. I drop the book on the bed and turn around to face him.
I can sense his hesitation in the way his eyes move over my face, the uncertainty painting a line between his eyebrows.
We Are the Ghosts Page 19
