This is my mess. I have to choose.
I nod. “Yeah,” I whisper. “We gotta be there.” I don’t say that the reason we have to be there isn’t because of suspicion, isn’t because of who might be watching, isn’t to try to prevent more bits of Josh from turning up. It’s just because I can’t imagine sitting at home, alone, waiting for more bad news.
If this is going to go wrong, it might as well go wrong right away.
Roya bites her thumbnail and looks at me. “It’s settled. We’ll go.”
“Shit,” Marcelina hisses. “Okay. I’ll be there.” She turns to Maryam to coordinate a carpool, and the conversation shifts to logistics.
Roya is still watching me. She lets her voice drop to a lower, more intimate tone. What she says next is just for me. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”
“Like what?” I ask. She rolls her eyes.
“Like turning yourself in. Anything could happen from here. We have to stick together.”
I close my eyes for a count of four. “I won’t turn myself in,” I say. Even though that’s exactly what I was thinking of doing. When I open my eyes, Roya is looking at me like she can see right through to the knot in my stomach.
The rest of the girls start filing out of the bathroom past us, but Roya still hasn’t moved. “Today, right?”
“Today?” I ask, trying not to stare at the curve of her collarbone.
“Yeah,” she says. “Today. Me and you. Arm-in-arm?” She smiles at me, a small pleased-with-her-own-cleverness smile. “Yes, no … ?”
I had almost forgotten. “Yeah, today,” I say, my heart pounding. Roya steps closer to me and her eyes flick to my mouth.
“It’s a date,” she says softly. Then she steps past me, and my heart is pounding, and she’s gone.
All day I’m waiting for someone to bring up the arm. Waiting to hear a whisper in the halls, or to see a cop in the cafeteria. But other than an announcement in fourth period about the search party, no one is talking about it. Lunch is awkward and stilted, and we spend half of it in silence, staring at each other’s untouched food. I pass by Josh’s decorated locker and see that someone has ripped off the duct-taped teddy bear, leaving behind a swath of adhesive gunk. A sticky note that says “we miss u john” has been stuck to the middle of the gray stripe where the duct tape used to be. I rip it down and crumple it in my fist and drop it into my locker. When I clear my locker out for the summer, I’m sure I’ll find it there, but right now I don’t care. I just don’t want to look at it.
When I get out of sixth period, I have a message from Roya waiting for me. Parking lot fourth row in. Gotta boogie.
I get into her car without letting the heat out properly. I start sweating immediately. Drastically, aggressively sweating. Torrential sweating. Roya’s got the windows down and she starts the AC blasting the second the car is turned on, but it’s still dire. She looks at me with an expression that says I’m melting, and I would laugh if I could breathe through the heat.
“Drive,” I finally manage to croak. She nods and peels out of the parking lot at Paulie-speed. Her hair whips back from her face in the breeze, and the shimmer of sweat along the curve of her throat makes me lose the ability to breathe for about a minute. I stare out the window until I can get all of my thoughts into a line. “Where are we going?” I ask as she turns onto the highway.
“I want to show you something,” she says. “Trust me?”
“Of course,” I answer. She turns up the radio. At first I think that she’s trying to show me something about the music, but then I realize that she just doesn’t want me asking any more questions. So we sing along with the songs we know, and I stick an arm out the window and let the air rushing past the car lift my hand, and Roya drives.
She drives for an hour before I try to ask again. “Roya? Where are we—”
“Please,” she says, her eyes still on the road. “We’re almost there.”
She parks by a stretch of road that looks exactly like the twenty miles that came before it and, I suspect, exactly like the twenty miles that come after it. Birch trees line either side of the asphalt, a long stretch of white that keeps going as far as I can see.
“Marcelina would love this,” I say, resting my hand against the patchy white bark of the nearest tree. I don’t feel anything but the scratch of wood under my palm, but I know that Marcelina would be immersed in the stories of the forest.
“Yeah,” Roya says, but she sounds distracted and I’m not sure if she actually heard me. She’s got a duffel slung over her shoulder, and she’s staring into the trees in a far-off way I’m not used to. “Let’s go?”
“Sure,” I say, and I follow her into the trees. They’re spaced far enough apart that it almost feels like a set piece in a movie, a fake forest, but then I turn to look behind me and realize that I can’t see the road anymore. Without Roya, I know I’d never find my way back. That’s the mark of a real forest: you can get lost before you realize that you should be trying to stay found.
I follow her through the trees, only occasionally having to step around the sparse undergrowth. Her hair is up in a high bun. The back of her shirt is dark with sweat. I watch the way her calves move with each step, the way the backs of her knees turn pink in the heat. We don’t speak. She’s not looking back at me. Whatever our
