Page 9

CHAPTER 9 ANNIE

2000

Bolton Landing

We graduated in June, but Amanda didn’t want to leave before Kerri’s birthday. Probably the last one she’d get to attend for a long while, she reasoned, and so I agreed. Amanda had told Kerri about our plan to move to Hollywood—she didn’t keep secrets from her little sister. I Kerri worshiped Amanda, and only more so after hearing about our big dreams. She said that once we got settled maybe she’d come visit.

So, we waited out the summer, and into the fall, before leaving. That last week before, Amanda and I started packing the car for Los Angeles. Just little things we didn’t want to forget, like our sleeping bags, some clothes, and favorite books—items impervious to heat or cold—and each time we tucked something away in Brando’s trunk, we’d look at each other and smile maniacally. Time moves slowly when you’re that age, and it felt like we’d been talking about this for a hundred years. Now, finally, we were doing it.

Although that same awful thing was still happening to me—had been happening, for many months: I had started imagining life without Amanda.

It was one of those things I could never figure out how to talk about, even in an abstract way. But it was always there, in every exchange over the last year when we talked about the drive west, and our future. As we stashed things in Brando’s trunk, a thread of panic wrapped around the moment.

( How, how, how would I ever fall in love with someone else with her around? was what the voice I tried to mute was wondering inside my head.)

One Saturday afternoon, we each put a few sweaters in the back of the car. The trunk was slowly filling, but you’d be surprised how much room a Civic has. We were standing shoulder to shoulder staring at our growing collection and there it was—this need to create distance between us. I said, “Did you ever have a different plan?”

I wanted to introduce the idea of us apart, make her wonder why I was thinking about it. But also, I made my voice as soft and warm as possible, so maybe she’d ignore the depth of the question and accept it at face value. My hands were overhead, gripping the edge of the trunk, leaning into it. She was just a few inches to my right, and she squinted at me, and I could tell she was deciding how to take my question. How did I want her to take it? Maybe I wanted her to storm away with a fuck you, Annie , but also, maybe I didn’t.

“A different plan?” she said tentatively, like she was wary of what I was getting at. “You know this has always been my plan.”

“Okay,” I said, injecting my voice with a quality that was meant to convey the opposite. Yeah, sure , was my tone. But right after, I regretted it—why was I picking this fight just before we were supposed to leave?

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Amanda had, per usual, read me correctly.

“Absolutely nothing,” I said, and this time my voice sounded sincere because it was. She still seemed cautious of me and was leaning slightly away when I looked at her, her left eye squinting like, What are you playing at? But I plowed through the weird energy I’d created, slamming the lid of the trunk down, and wrapping my arm around her shoulder, pulling her close to me.

“You ready for this adventure?” I thought I was going to say “our”— our adventure —but I just couldn’t bring the word to my lips.

I . Note from Cate: Amanda and I never said this aloud, but I think we didn’t tell anyone else about our plans because we didn’t want the added pressure. If, a year later, we came slinking home, we wanted the chance to rewrite the story about where we’d gone, what we’d done, and why we were back.