“Where then?” she says, checking her phone again for the time. For the text reply that won’t come; she knows his class schedule, his practice schedule, his feeding schedule. As he knows hers.
Bony shoulders rise and fall and Phil says, “Cannot say, man, as I am not his keeper.”
She looks beyond him, and Phil opens the door wide for her to look. Beds and desks and clothes and pizza boxes and socks and Troy’s gym bag and his Nikes, and she knows just by looking, just by smelling, that he did not spend the night here. And there it goes, inside her chest: her heart stepping up to a ledge and tottering, dizzied, ready to fall. It’s the sensation of losing at the net, of rising up for the block and knowing she’s failed even before the ball goes sizzling by her ear to boom against the floor—a sound for her heart alone. Beaten, it says. Outplayed, schooled.
“You’re welcome to come in and wait,” Phil says. “Smoke a little bud, if you like.”
Weighing his chances, she thinks. Liking the look of her legs in those tights. She sees herself in the skirt and tights and understands she’s come not to see Troy but to be seen by him, at this hour, looking good.
Because if you dressed up for your boyfriend, then you didn’t dress up for your professor. Although either way you are a vain and stupid girl.
Phil stands watching her. Scratching his ribs.
But now the ball comes back over the net into deep court where her girls, her sisters, take it onto their wrists, take it lightly onto their fingertips and gentle it once more her way, nice and high, and she is ready, she is coiled hard and tight, a perfect rattlesnake of timing: “Gonna have to take a pass on that invite, Phil,” she says, “but could you give Troy a message for me?”
“Sure thing, man. Messages are my specialty.”
“Tell him I came to say good-bye.”
“Good-bye?”
“Yes. I just found out I have cervical cancer. Stage four. I’m going home and I don’t want him to try to contact me.”
Pale, dull-eyed Phil, speechless. His face goes one way but his eyes stay on her. “I sense a certain lack of sincerity here,” he says, and without taking her eyes off his she presses her hand to his boxers and cups the whole soft works in her palm, her long fingers. His body bows and he shows the pinked whites of his eyes and gasps.
“Listen, Phil. I want you to tell Troy this—right here.” She holds his gaze. His balls. “You got that message?”
Thirty minutes later she’s in front of the house, fifteen minutes late, and Audrey is sitting on the porchsteps in her black peacoat and black watchman’s cap and sturdy winter boots, a seaman off to sea, and the girl has got some luggage.
“Damn, girl,” says Caroline, and Audrey says, “I know, I’m sorry… I don’t know when I’ll be back,” and Caroline takes half the load and they get it all squared away in the back of the RAV4 and they buckle up and they’re off. Five minutes later, doing forty down Union, Audrey cranes around to watch the bus depot go by and, doing so, sees the large blue gym bag in the back seat. Fully loaded, Caroline’s jeans, socks, her favorite sweater busting out. Audrey looking her friend over, then, taking note of the flannel pajama bottoms she wears, the old gray hoodie, the pink Adidas, and Caroline turning briefly to meet her eyes and then turning back to the road.
“What the fuck,” Caroline says. “Road trip.”
BECAUSE THE TRUTH is she’s glad for the excuse to get away, she says. If Audrey was just homesick for her pet chicken she’d still be on board, so will she please not sit there being so darn grateful the whole way?
They’ve got their coffees, and the RAV4 is climbing the eastern coast of Arkansas, up the 55 North toward Missouri. A gusty but otherwise fine day for driving.
Audrey is silent awhile and then says, “Who would have a pet chicken?”
“I’m just saying.”
“What would you even do with it?”
Caroline sighs. When asked by housing why she wanted a new roommate after their first semester, Caroline wrote: “Irreconcilable species.” No idea what Audrey wrote.
“Is it Troy?” Audrey says.
“Is what Troy?”
“Why you’re glad to get away.”
Caroline looks over, looks back to the road. “It could be a lot of things, Audrey. I might be having a psychological crisis. I might’ve decided college is a waste of time and money. I might be sleeping with my professor. I might’ve decided life is too fucking short. I might—”
“Which one?”
“What?”
“Callaway?”
“What? No. Seriously?”
“Buford?”
“Buford? He’s like, a hundred years old and smells like old bedsheets.”
“Nice eyes, though.”
“Nice eyes. Jesus, Audrey, I am not sleeping with my professor, I was just making a point. I was just posing hypotheticals—remember those? Remember when we talked about those?”
“Yes. But it just stuck out, that one.”
“Well”—pushing out the flat of her palm—“stick it back in.”
“All right. Sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Caroline says, flicking hair out of her eyes. Sliding a glance at Audrey, who sips at her coffee.
“Is that how you see me?” she says. “Someone who would sleep with her professor?”
“No. I never thought about it until you mentioned it.”
“But you went there pretty quickly.”
Audrey holds her coffee in midair. Then sips, and says, “Not because I think of you like that, though. But because you always surprise me, Caroline. You always do. I count on you surprising me. That’s all.”
The girls face forward. The fields sweeping by, unrolling like great corduroy rugs, brown and white, the white not cotton now but lines of ice from the storm caught in the furrows. Above them bends the deep and empty sky. Audrey reaches to touch the colorful loops of beads that hang from the rearview mirror. The beads click when they get swinging, and in the thick of them, like a little thing nested there, is a white rabbit’s foot, stained in shifting spots of colored light. The RAV4 was a gift from Caroline’s father, the rabbit’s foot a gift from her brother. Not so lucky for the rabbit, said Caroline’s father. And: A moving vehicle is no place for luck, daughter. May this vehicle be safeguarded by intelligence, by great care and caution, and not the amputated paw of a rodent.
“So what is it, then?” Audrey says, and Caroline swipes at her eye—a single tear, where did that come from?
“Let’s just say it includes but is not strictly about Troy,” she says, and neither girl says another word for a mile, two miles. Then Audrey says, “I’m sorry, Caroline,” and Caroline says, “Screw it. Screw him. Are we going to listen to these tunes or what?”
THEY ARE JUST a few miles into Missouri when the first text comes, a two-note chime, and Caroline’s heart jumps to it like a trained animal.
But she defies the chime, her heart’s response to it. Eyes on the road, hands at ten and two. They’ve been listening to an old Radiohead CD—the RAV4 is pre-Bluetooth by, like, one year—each in her separate thoughts, and Caroline waits for the end of the song before she fishes up the phone from her tote bag, reads the message, places the phone in her lap and takes the wheel two-handed again. Now it begins.
The phone chimes and vibrates on her upper thigh, sending its hum, its message, deep. The times when he would text at night and she would hold it there, waiting, her heartbeat beneath it, in her belly, everywhere…