There is no evidence of Roland-and-Louise in Roland’s inscription to Addie. He fills her entire back page, as if she’d been saving it for him.
Addie,
You made life very interesting for me this year. I am really appreciative to you for all the things you gave me. You have a way of reassuring me like nobody else can.
I hope we can see each other this summer. I’m sure we’ll see each other at the beach after graduation. That’s really going to be wild. After that I doubt I will be around too much because the band and myself are going to lead very secluded and mysterious lives living together somewhere.
When I think back on high school I think, what a waste of our formidable years. I really am glad to be moving on, although the future for me is unpredictable. All I can say when someone asks me what I’m going to do is “other plans.” No one would understand if I told them my real ambitions. You are one I think that can understand to some degree what I am trying to pull off.
Lots of love and luck,
Roland Rhodes
Underneath he has drawn a genie lamp, a flat thing with a curved spout and a cloud coming out. His words are in the cloud, as if by magic — Addie’s wish, being granted.
Beach
But they don’t see each other. Graduation week at Ocean Drive is supposed to be for graduates, but Roland brings Louise and rents a motel room instead of sharing one of the big houses with everybody else. Addie imagines them sunning by the motel pool, Roland rubbing Louise’s back with coconut oil while he tells her the story of his diving injury.
They don’t show up at any of the parties. This ought to be a relief, but Addie is in no mood to feel relieved.
At the last party on the last night, she gets drunk and loses her virginity once and for all, to J.C. Green. They don’t plan it; she and J.C. barely know each other. They just happen to be the last ones still conscious after everyone else has gone home or to bed or found another place to pass out. They are sitting on a gritty sofa in the living room of a big oceanfront house. Someone has left the tone arm of the stereo cocked back and a Doobie Brothers album plays endlessly. Addie doesn’t know why she came to the party at all or why she’s still here. She gets up to leave and staggers, whirly-drunk. J.C. catches her. He’s fat, with a beery, greasy smell, mildly sickening. But his fatness is also a comfort, something to sink into.
Addie lets him hold her. She can feel a thumping through his jeans, like a lowdown heartbeat. She doesn’t care. She lets him turn her around and fold her over the arm of the sofa. She lets him take down her striped shorts and hump her from behind to the beat of “Long Train Runnin’.” J.C. is relentless and annoying, like the song, which she will never be able to listen to again.
She thinks of Roland. This is his fault. Because of him, nothing is special.
She Leaves
All year, Sam watches his sister leave.
He watches her leave for school every morning — the same time as him, but not the same school.
He watches her graduate, orange sash across her gown.
After graduation she leaves for the beach. A week later she comes home sunburned and won’t talk to anyone.
That summer she leaves every morning for her job at the library. She goes out after work every night, he doesn’t know where. Weeks go by when he doesn’t see her at all.
At the end of summer she leaves for college.
“Write me letters,” she tells him.
He does. In the beginning he writes to her almost every week.
Dear Addie, we got a new TV with a remote control. Now Bryce can change his own channels.
Dear Addie, they won’t let me try out for sports.
Dear Addie, I took my bicycle apart, cleaned and lubricated all the parts and put it back together. It flies.
Dear Addie, Bryce fell. In the kitchen. He hit his head on the counter. We picked him up and Claree put a cold washcloth on his head.
Dear Addie, thanks for the sweatshirt. What exactly is a Spartan?
Dear Addie, the Davenports came over for a cookout and Bryce set the poplar tree on fire.
Dear Addie, they have a new rule at school. Everybody has to be in a club. I was in the chess club but there were only two of us and it got boring. I joined the travel club but we never traveled, we just sat around looking at slides. So my friends and I started our own club, the Apathy Club. For homecoming we made a banner, MAY THE BEST TEAM WIN. It won for Most Appropriate, but no one went to pick up the prize.
Dear Addie, this time he fell in the street and Mr. Davenport had to help us bring him in.
Dear Addie, when are you coming home?
Dear Addie, I can’t wait to be the one who leaves.
Greensboro
The university is forty minutes and a world away from Carswell.
A world of books — at the heart of campus is a gleaming new library tower, big as God.
A world of flyers — on every wall in every building, on every telephone pole on every street corner, flyers advertise readings and concerts and lectures and rallies and auditions and art openings and roommates wanted and things for sale, cheap.
A world of rolling lawns and majestic shade trees and people reading, arguing, laughing, making out, working calculus problems, playing guitar, playing Frisbee, playing Hacky Sack. There’s always someone to talk to, someone to go to the new film festival at the Janus with, wander the bars of Tate Street with, smoke pot and eat Mexican food with. Addie is infatuated with all of them. Jimmy the physics major, who cooks her pancakes in his dorm room. Stephen, who does yoga and smells faintly of patchouli. Geoff with a G, who shows her his poetry, which is so raw and wild and charged she decides to give up trying.
No one gives her the deep-down panic of real love, the jolt she always felt with Roland. But Roland would not fit in this place. She thinks of him only rarely, and with only the smallest tug of sadness — for him or for herself, she couldn’t say.
She studies literature — the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, the Germans in translation. She studies history and Latin and logic, which she loves for its perfect reliability. She studies the philosophy of literature, the philosophy of science. All of her philosophy classes are taught by the same professor — a compact, muscular man with round glasses, neatly combed hair, and neatly pressed shirts tucked into neatly pressed pants. He never lectures without a piece of chalk in his hand and never strays too far from the board.
He lectures about retrocausality. He draws pictures of the space-time continuum on the board to show how the future influences the past, except he doesn’t use those words.
“Is it the same as predestination?” the class asks.
The fallacy of that question, he says, lies in the use of “pre-”. There is no before or after, no pre- or post-. No past, present or future. “Every event,” he says, “affects every other event.”
He is intense. When he talks, a bead of white spittle forms in the corner of his mouth. He has hair in unexpected places, on his knuckles and elbows and the undersides of his forearms. He tells Addie she’s the best student he’s had.