Page 49 of Rhodes

The highway rolls out ahead of us in the dusk, the trailer rattling behind. She fights my radio, lands on a station, and leaves it this time on some peppy song I recognize but couldn't say what it is.

"I didn't even wreck," she says. "I want that noted. We had a full day, zero wrecks."

"Day's not over."

"Optimist."

The phone buzzes in the cup holder somewhere past Pearl River. She picks it up without thinking, the way she's picked up everything in my truck for a month, and I sense a hesitation.

"It's Coop," she says.

"Read it to me."

She turns the screen toward me at arm's length instead, holding it out there. I take my eyes off the road for as long as I dare to read the text.

how's my girl doing? tell me something good.

Neither one of us says anything. The trailer rattles while the headlights find the reflectors on the guardrail.

"You want me to answer that?" she says.

"I'll get it later."

She puts it back in the cup holder, the screen facing toward me now. Then she reaches over and turns the radio up, which is the kindest thing anybody has done for me in a long time. We ride the last forty minutes into New Orleans without either of us saying one word.

I never answer the text.

FOURTEEN

Tilly

Reversibility: The standard holds that any intervention should be capable of being undone by whoever comes next. Everyone in the trade is taught it, and everyone in the trade knows how few things stay undoable once they have been done.

I'm awake before my alarm, which never happens. The second I open my eyes, the dread returns with a vengeance. I fucking kissed Rhodes Stone yesterday!

I roll over and bury my face in my pillow. I wish I could disappear into the goose down rather than face him. God, what was I thinking?

I flip over and lie there flat on my back, staring at the ceiling, looking for the strength to brush it off and act like that never happened.

Through the wall, I can hear him. Rhodes is up, which he always is, moving around the kitchen in that quiet way he has. The tap runs, then the coffee grinder kicks on, that ugly rattle it makes for exactly seven seconds, and cuts off.

It's all so normal. That's the problem. Every single sound out there is a sound I've heard for a month straight, and none of it knows that yesterday I kissed my brother's best friend in the middle of his family's cabin.

I pull the blanket up to my chin and kick my feet under the covers.

Okay. So I have to walk into that kitchen. That's the whole task. I've done it however many mornings in a row without a single thought in my head, so that's what I do.

What do I do with my face? That's the first thing. If I walk in there looking careful, he'll know I've been thinking about it, and then he'll get that flat, closed-off look he gets, and we'll both stand there being weird about being weird.

But if I go in too breezy, too loud, same thing.

The move is to act as if it's Monday. Because it is Monday. I have a nine-thirty class and that god-forsaken lab report half finished I need to work on in the library afterwards. I go in, get coffee, say something dry, he says something drier, and the world keeps turning. If nobody says it, it didn't happen. That's just science.

I throw the blanket off and get up.

I pull open the dresser, and this is where I lose the plot a little. I stand there holding a green shirt, put it back, take out a black hoodie. I fold the first one and set it on the bed. I find the jeans that don't have shell dust ground into the knee. I'm reaching for a third shirt when I catch my own hand doing it.

I stop.