Page 53 of The Getaway List
“It’s perfect,” I say firmly.
Tom holds my gaze for long enough that I see the same ache in it that I’ve felt all day. As grateful as I am for this camping Hail Mary, I can’t help but wish we had a moment alone to talk. I’m worried if we spend the rest of the night pretending everything’s fine we’ll just start feeling like everything’s fine, even when it’s not. And if the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that the issues we’re glossing over only get wider the longer they’re ignored.
Jesse abruptly clears his throat. “Anyway, now that you’re here we’re going to get the takeout.”
“Oh. Do you need help?” I ask.
“Nope!” says Mariella firmly, following him to the door. “Luca and I are coming, too.”
Luca looks surprised by this information but follows without question as Mariella gives me a pointed look, jerking her head toward Tom. I wait until the door shuts behind them to give Tom a wry look and say, “Wow. What a totally spontaneous and not-at-all orchestrated thing our friends just did, leaving the two of us alone on this roof.”
Tom shakes his head in mild amusement. “I feel like I need to say I didn’t ask them to do that, even if I’m glad they did. Assuming they didn’t just lock the door behind them and leave us out here to rot.”
He’s sitting on top of one of the sleeping bags and sets a hand on it, gesturing for me to sit next to him. I do, even though it takes every bone in my body not to hug him as I’m doing it, if only to make up for the deeply unsatisfying one we hugged last.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” I say back.
It feels more like coming home than walking into the apartment did. For a few moments after that we sit in silence, but it’s a comfortable one. A “gathering our thoughts” kind of silence. My eyes skim the makeshift campground as we ease back into each other, when an astronomy book by Tom’s knee catches my eye.
“Is that a new one?” I ask. The cover is sleek and shiny and doesn’t look anything like the ones with the dog-eared corners and beaten-up spines on his desk.
He picks it up and flips through a few of the pages. “Yeah. It came this morning, right before we were supposed to leave.”
“Another dispatch?” I ask.
Tom nods, staring down at the book and then at me with the slightest wariness in his face. It occurs to me that it’s not just me wondering if Tom has been sending me dispatches. Tom might be wondering the same thing about me.
“You don’t know who’s sending them,” I say out loud, just to confirm.
Tom swallows. “I thought it would be weird to check.”
I can’t decide in that moment whether to tell him that it isn’t me, because I can’t tell whether he’d think it was a disappointment or a relief. I don’t think I could handle interpreting either of those from him right now, so instead I let the unasked question hover between us until it gets swept up by a breeze.
I wonder who it is, then. If Tom has a sense for who it could be. If it’s someone he knew from school or the dispatch service or traveling with Vanessa, someone Mariella might not have known about. Someone Tom has already held the face of in his hand, someone Tom has already wrapped an arm around the waist of and danced with and fallen asleep beside, same as he’s done with me.
“Anyway—I guess it would have been handier for stargazing out in the woods,” he says. “But maybe we’ll see a few stars tonight. It’s been a while since I bored everyone to tears with astronomical facts.”
I feel a knot in my throat. When we initially were going camping it was going to be at a grounds halfway between Virginia and New York the spring of junior year. It was meant to be an all-around reunion of sorts—not just for me and Tom but a cluster of our friends, too, Jesse included. I was so excited that I scraped some money together to buy a used telescope and spent the weeks leading up to it learning all the constellations Tom had memorized long before we even met, the ones he was always so excited to tell me the names of and the stories behind whenever we found ourselves out at night.
Ultimately I had to bail because my mom thought Vanessa would be chaperoning, and when it became clear she was in an uninterruptable “creative flow” and wouldn’t be leaving New York, my mom said I couldn’t go. I was devastated but told everyone to go on without me. Then Tom dropped out of it, too, so we missed out completely, stargazing and all.
Now someone else appreciates Tom enough to know his stars, someone I’ve never even met. I was planning on telling Tom about the constellations I’d learned, the maps of them I’d scored into my head, but the thought of it is almost humiliating now. Like I’d be showing too many of my cards when Tom’s plans have already scattered the whole deck.
Tom nudges his shoulder against mine lightly and says, “You okay?”
I purse my lips. “You’re leaving,” is all I say back.
Tom gives a slow, quiet nod, staring out at the city past us. No matter how many times I see this view from his apartment it doesn’t lose the ability to take my breath away. The strange infinity of it, how you can see forever and still see so many individual parts—every single one of those twinkling lights leading to a room full of people living lives just as complicated and exciting and routine as ours. It feels like holding entire worlds in the palm of your hand. It seems impossible to me that Tom would let it go.
“I feel like I should explain more why I didn’t say anything about that either. The thing is, there’s no real hard out for me going to North Carolina. I was worried if I told you that I planned to go that you’d feel like you couldn’t stay. And I love having you here. I just wanted it to go on as long as it could. So I hope—I hope you’re still planning to stay through August like you planned.”
His voice is so unsteady by that last sentence that I understand this is what he’s been worried about all day—that I wasn’t just spending the night at Jesse’s, but might decide to clear out entirely.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say sincerely. “I just don’t understand why you are.”
Tom nods, and I can feel the weight of his relief as he leans back so he’s lying flat on the sleeping bag, looking up at the sky. I do the same. It’s a familiar gesture from childhood. I lived in an apartment complex in the middle of town, but Tom’s house was a few miles out, free from enough of the light pollution that we could make out planets and constellations, that during meteor showers we could pick out shooting stars.
