“Maybe she doesn’t want you to know.” He pauses, considering the possibilities. “Because she’s dating her swimming instructor and she doesn’t think you’ll approve of him. Or maybe you are right. Maybe she’s having an affair with a professor and the only place they can meet is in the swimming pool after hours where they can have sex in the water.”

I suddenly get a picture of the time Quinton and I almost had sex in the water. I was confused at the time and was glad he backed out, but now… well, thinking about ha**g s*x with him in general gets my skin burning and makes my stomach somersault.

But I try my best to pretend the word “sex” coming out of his mouth doesn’t have any effect on me. “You sound so scandalous. Has that older lady that you’ve been helping out been making you watch soap operas again?”

“Yeah, sometimes. Why? Is it starting to show?”

“Yeah, kind of,” I reply. “How is Mrs. Bellington doing?”

“Good. Although her family put her in a nursing home the other day clear across town so it’s really hard for me to visit her,” he says, then pauses. “You know, she kind of reminds me of you.”

“A seventy-year-old woman reminds you of me.” I frown, taken aback a little. “Wow, I feel kind of stupid right now.”

“Don’t be,” he says. “It’s a compliment. And besides, she reminds me of you because of some of the stories she’s told me about when she was younger.”

I relax a little. “Like what?”

“Like how she spent time in the Peace Corps.”

“I’ve never been in the Peace Corps, though.”

“Yeah, but I could easily see you being a volunteer, going around, trying to help the world,” he says, his mood lightening. “Spreading Nova peace everywhere.”

“Is that really how you see me?” I wonder, feeling a little uncomfortable with how much he actually might see me—more than Landon, maybe. “As a do-gooder?”

“In the best way possible.” His tone is much more upbeat than it was a few minutes ago. “You’re a good person, Nova Reed. Too good to be talking to me, probably, but I don’t want to stop you.”

“No way,” I argue defensively. “You’re perfect for me.” I shake my head at my cheesiness. I’m one step away from Jerry Maguiring it like Tristan did the other day. “Sorry, I didn’t mean for that to come out the way it sounded.”

“It’s okay. You can call it payback for me being cheesy earlier, but I think I’m just a little on emotional overload between this phone chat and our text conversation earlier. You’re giving me a high dose of the feel-goods and I’m starting to get really nervous about how I’m feeling right now. It’s freaking the shit out of me.” He stops talking and if I listen really closely I can hear the scratching of a pencil across paper. I wonder if he’s drawing and, if he is, what he’s drawing a picture of. “So would you mind if we call it a night and go to the song?”

We started the song thing a week ago, when Quinton asked me for some good ones to listen to. Instead of telling him, I turned some on for him. Every night since then, I’ve picked out a song and we’ve listened to it together before I hung up.

Honestly, I’m not really ready to stop talking, but if that’s what he needs then I’ll give it to him. So I get up from my bed and go over to my dresser to turn on my iPod. “Sounds good, but what kind of one do you want for tonight? Happy? Sad? Angsty?”

“How about a mellow, relaxing one?” he requests. “Because I think I need to chillax a little.”

“Hmm…” I consider my options, then scroll to one that I hope will relax him. “Okay, you ready?” I ask, with my finger hovering over the play button.

“Yep, hit me with your best shot.” He laughs at his own joke, since the other night I picked “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar.

“Hey, no recapping the previous night’s song choice.” I press play. Moments later, Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” comes on. I crank up the volume and stay near the speakers so he can hear it.

He’s quiet, absorbing the guitar solo until it gets to the lyrics, then he finally says, “Excellent choice, although I’ve heard it before.”

“Yeah, I figured, but is that a bad thing?”

“Nah. In fact, I like that I have. Usually you’re so music-superior over me, but now I feel like we’re equals.”

“That’s because I’ve taught you well, young grasshopper,” I joke, turning up the volume a notch.

“Did you seriously just quote Kung Fu?” He’s stunned.

“Yeah, so what? I’m cool like that.” I plop down on my bed on my back, bouncing a little before settling and returning my feet to the wall and tapping them to the beat of the music.

“You know what? You seriously might be the coolest person I’ve ever met, Nova Reed.”

“And vice versa, Quinton Carter.” I lean over and pick up my drumsticks from my nightstand. Then I start drumming them on my legs to the beat as we listen to the song together.

When it gets to the chorus, he tells me, “This song makes me think of you.”

I stop tapping the drumsticks and set them aside. “How so?”

“I don’t know… the lyrics just make me want to see you.”

I rotate to my side, trying not to grin. “That’s secretly why I picked it. So that you’d want me to come out there and see you.”

“I don’t think I’m ready for that.” He seems irritated with himself. “I’m sorry, Nova. I wish I was, but I’m afraid. Not just of how it’ll feel or if I’ll be able to handle it, but of what it’ll mean for us. And what we’ve got now is so great at the moment. I just don’t want to ruin that.”

It stings a little, but I let it go, because he’s only being honest. “That’s okay. We’ll see each other one day, right?”

“Yeah, one day.” But he doesn’t sound that committed, which seems somewhat strange. I mean, we’ve been spending all this time on the phone, and it felt like we were headed somewhere, but maybe this is how he plans on things being. Maybe he can only talk to me when there’s a few-hundred-mile barrier between us.

We don’t really say much after that and when the song’s over, we say good-bye and hang up. It’s about eleven o’clock, not extremely late, but at the same time, all I want to do is go to bed.

After getting into my pajamas, I decide that before I go to sleep I’ll make a recording. I do it lying on my back, with the camera above me, the good one my mom gave me, because the clarity is always better. Plus, it’s right there on my nightstand.

After I hit record, leaving the iPod on so there’s music in the background, I sort of just lie there for a while. I wonder, if anyone actually watches this, if they’ll think I’m nuts. Probably. But maybe that could be my point. Maybe one day I’ll put every video I’ve ever made together and title it Diary of an Erratic, Over-Thinking, Do-Gooder Madwoman. Definitely not a life-changing video.

I summon a deep breath and pull myself together before I speak to the camera. “You know, a while ago I kept having that dream about Quinton jumping off the cliff. I think it was my subconscious letting out its fear of him falling back into drugs again. The dream stopped, thankfully, after I started talking to him regularly, and I can hear the clearness in his voice—the soberness. But now I’ve started having these weird dreams where he’s standing on one side of a long stretch of land and I’m on the other and we’re just waving to each other. When I first started having it, I wondered if it was a representation of us reuniting soon, but now I’m starting to speculate if it really just means that we’re going to remain long-distance friends forever. If maybe we’ll never move forward in our relationship.” I press my lips together, gathering my thoughts. “You know, when I first met Quinton, I was in a strange place. One filled with confusion and memories of Landon. Stuck in the past and I didn’t know what I wanted for my future. Then there was this summer where all of my thoughts were consumed by the urge to save Quinton… which I didn’t really do, but he’s getting better and that was the whole point of going to Vegas. Now I really don’t have too much to think about other than if Quinton’s doing well, so I can feel my future out there, flashing before me, like a stupid neon sign that’s reminding me that I’m going to have to go somewhere with my life. And I’m not talking about career-wise. I’ve already got sort of a map for that with college and my part-time job at the photography shop. And while it’s in no way what I want to do with the rest of my life, I know that I want to do one of two things. One, make a career of helping people, like I hope I’m doing when I help at the suicide hotline, or two, do something in film, which is why I’ve been taking film classes… although I wish I could just get the balls to take a break and go help with the documentary…”

I daze off momentarily, thinking about how many people I know who have stories to tell. Then I blink back at the camera. “But anyway, that’s not the point of this recording. The point is that I’m headed somewhere with my career, but when it comes to relationships, I’m not headed anywhere. I haven’t gone out on a date since the end of my sophomore year. I’m twenty, veering toward twenty-one, and I’m still a virgin, which is just plain weird. I almost got there with Landon once, but I waited too long and then he was gone. And then I was going to let Quinton take my virginity when I was high out of my mind, but he was too good of a guy to take advantage of me.” I recollect the time in the lake, when he nearly slipped inside me, but then backed out and left me there. It was the moment the memory I’d been suppressing finally broke through. The moment I remembered finding Landon hanging from his ceiling by a noose.

“But I think the really strange thing is that I don’t even think about dating. I’ve been asked out a couple of times this year but declined. I used to do this because I was still hanging on to my love for Landon, but now… well, I think it’s because my feelings are caught up in someone else… and sometimes I have to wonder if I’m in love with Quinton, but I’m not sure where that’s going to get me since I’m pretty sure he doesn’t love me back. Yeah, I know he cares for me, but love… I’m not sure. And what really scares me is, what if he never does?”

Chapter 5

Quinton

December 9, day forty-one in the real world

My support group’s okay, I guess. For the most part, I just sit by myself in the back and listen to everyone talk. Although Wilson, the guy who’s in charge of the meetings, has cornered me a few times and asked me to share my story. I told him I wasn’t ready, though. That I’ve only been out for a month—well, forty-one days to be exact—and I’m not ready to share what’s going on inside me yet, not even with myself, let alone a whole roomful of people. He told me he gets it and I actually believe that he does, considering what he’s been through. What’s surprising to me is how normal he seems, despite what happened. Like right now. I’m listening to him talk about the accident and his guilt over it and it’s the strangest thing to me because, for starters, he can talk about it sober. And also because he doesn’t look like he’s going to break down.

“You know, I remember right after, I was sitting in the hospital, getting a few cuts stitched up, which was pretty much the only thing I had from the accident.” He sounds calm, but I can see it in his eyes, the remorse, existing, yet it’s not eating away at him, like it feels like it’s doing with me. “And I kept thinking, why me? Why did I survive?” He adjusts his tie, something he always does whenever he’s speaking. I think he might even wear the tie for the sole purpose of having it to fidget with. “Why couldn’t I have been the one to die in the car accident instead of the other way around?” He pauses there, loosening the tie as he glances around at the ten to twelve people sitting in the fold-up chairs, staring at him. All different ages, heights, weights. Male. Female. So different, yet we all share the same thing. Guilt.

He starts to pace the room, taking short, slow strides, even though his legs are long, like he wants to take his time. He’s thirty-five years old and told me the other day that the accident happened almost ten years ago. Ten years on March seventeenth, to be exact, which is his birthday. I thought it was totally f**ked up when he told me that, that something like that happened on his birthday, and he replied that it would be f**ked up no matter what day it happened on.

He suddenly stops pacing and faces the group. His choked-up demeanor has changed into one of what looks like anger. “For the longest time I kept asking myself, why me? And there were a lot of people who were asking the same thing, especially the children and the grandchildren of the people I killed when I ran the red light. They blamed me—still do. And I don’t blame them. It’s my fault. I know that, and for the longest time I thought I had to suffer for it. Pay for what I did.” He crosses his arms, the anger switching to passion. “And you know what, I should… pay for it, but not by having a pity party for myself.” He shakes his head. “But let me tell you, I did have a pity party. A huge one, where I jacked up my body with about every drug I could think of, and you know what? It made me feel better, and I guess that was the most fucked-up part of it all—that I was feeling good. Getting high, while people hurt because they lost a loved one, all because I couldn’t put down the damn phone while I was driving.” He pauses, lowering his head, and I think he might be crying.