Page 46 of The Getaway List
My voice is surprisingly calm.
“Yeah,” says Tom. “I didn’t mean to keep it from you. It wasn’t meant to be like that. It was just—I came up with the idea and Mariella took off with it, and it all happened quickly.”
“Two years ago,” I repeat.
Tom swallows hard. “I made the app when things were just—kind of at their worst. When I felt so separate from everything here and didn’t feel like it would ever change. I just wasn’t really talking to anyone at the time.” He lowers his voice. “I felt like if I told you I made the service I’d have to tell you the rest. And I didn’t want to.”
I search his face, seeing the guilt that lines his features and wishing I weren’t so upset with him. The last thing I want to do is make Tom feel any worse, but if we’re going to get past this, I need to understand.
“I already knew something was wrong. And I could get over you not telling me that, because I get it. I felt the same way. I didn’t want to be the Riley high school turned me into either,” I remind him. “But shit. You did tell me about the app. Everything about it, just short of the most important thing, which is that it came from you.”
I think of all the countless snippets of conversation between us, not just back and forth over text the past few years, but face-to-face these past few weeks. All the nights he spent sitting next to me on the couch on the laptop that he must have been using to work on the app. All the dispatches he took me on knowing full well he was the eyes and ears behind it, and I was totally in the dark.
Tom has made me feel so many things in my life—brave. Understood. Loved. But now that another thought is occurring to me, for the first time I wonder if he’ll make me feel like a fool.
“Does this mean you know who sends things?” I ask. Maybe I’ve been gabbing all up and down the city about the mysterious admirer sending me things when it wasn’t a mystery to Tom at all.
“No,” says Tom quickly. “Mariella keeps the backend anonymous. I don’t know who sent you anything, same as I don’t know who’s been sending me things.”
This comes with yet another unexpected sting, because Tom not knowing who sent anything is a final blow to that tiny, ridiculous hope that it might have been him. I think of the notebook I have tucked away at the bottom of my bag right now, the one I haven’t written in yet because I was too busy pulling everything together this week, and feel my stomach churn with an embarrassment so immediate that it makes me feel like a little kid. I’m glad at least that I never mentioned it to Tom.
“Were you just never going to tell me?”
Tom takes a small step back from me. “The thing was—I wasn’t planning on saying anything this summer at all, because I didn’t know we’d be together,” he admits. “And then you were here and it all just kind of got away from me.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you wouldn’t have told me now, Tom. I know about how things were for you these past few years. It’s not like there’s anything left to hide.” I take a step back of my own, this one larger, with intention. “I mean, it’s me,” I say, my voice cracking.
Tom looks at me then with such regret that it feels like it splintered in him, too. “I know. I know,” he says quietly, reassuringly. He lifts his arms up a fraction, like he’s going to reach for me but thinks better of it. “It wasn’t anything to do with you. The truth is I didn’t want to say anything because it’s not going to be mine anymore. I’m looking for someone else to run it.”
I shake my head. “Why? Because of school?” I ask. But no—that can’t be right. Tom’s taking a gap year.
Tom worries on his lower lip. He’s only quiet for a few beats, but I feel every inch of the tension in them just the same.
“Because I’m leaving New York.”
The words feel like a cartoon piano falling from the sky. Like they’re just as ridiculous and incomprehensible, but still hold an impossible, crushing weight.
“What?” I manage.
Tom’s voice is so resigned that I get the sense he’s been waiting to break this news to me for a while now. “After you head home, I’m taking a job with my aunt in North Carolina.”
It’s been so long since I’ve thought of Tom’s aunt that it takes me a second to conjure a mental image. She runs a small winery way out in the middle of nowhere that’s quite literally called Ornery Bitch Vines, and with good reason. She’s about as kind as a cactus is to a bare foot.
“When did you decide this?” I ask numbly.
Tom lifts a hand to the back of his neck, tightly threading his fingers through his hair. “Actually, I was going to leave the day you got here. The backpack on my bed—it wasn’t because I came back from a trip. I was packed to leave.”
“And then I showed up,” I say, strangely hollow.
I blink myself back to that day, to those full first few of them. There were a lot of questions I thought to ask him, but apparently I should have asked him more. I’m suddenly just as frustrated at myself as I am with him—I knew something wasn’t right. Something beyond Tom’s new shyness or the mysterious gap year or his mom being so busy.
The truth is I don’t know Tom as well as I think I do. Not just because I didn’t see the signs well enough to dig for Tom’s secrets, but because Tom had one this big in the first place.
“Leaving the city is kind of why I made the app in the first place. I was feeling so cut off from everything and so out of place here, and my mom—well, you’ve seen the apartment,” he says, gesturing upward. He’s kept himself together for most of this conversation, probably for my own sake, but I can see him unraveling now. There’s something wobbling in his expression, an unsteadiness just underneath every word he speaks. “Everything’s like that now. We went from living in the suburbs to living in this high-rise and going to fancy restaurants with famous people and traveling all over the world without a moment’s notice, and I just—I don’t recognize any part of my old life, and I’ve hated every second of it. I wanted something that was just mine.”
The same pang of recognition aches in my chest. The one I felt when Mariella was talking about taking up photography on her own; the one I’ve felt for so many years that it feels like a separate organ in me, like another beating heart. This yearning to have a life that’s just mine, with untouchable things in it.
“I figured if the app did well, then I’d have my own money to leave,” says Tom. “It just felt important that I did it on my own.”
