Chapter 31

It turns out to be a tree house, tucked in the woods at the end of the garden. One tree-layer deep, so you’re mostly in shade but can just see the house through the pine boughs. There’s a little ladder up to it, rope that feels rough and frayed on the soles of my feet.

“This is maybe more unpleasant than an earthworm,” I tell Silas. But he just grins and lowers a hand down from the tree house to pull me the rest of the way inside.

“This is my favorite place in the world,” he tells me. It’s small, a platform with three walls and one open side looking out over the garden. The walls are covered in pencil drawings, tangles of messy kid handwriting and hangman games and stick-figure scenes. I think of Cleo’s dragon on that chalkboard in Austin.

“The whole world?” I say, and he looks over one shoulder at me. Sitting at the edge of the platform with his feet dangling over, framed by the meadow of GG’s garden.

“The whole world,” he says, and I come to sit beside him. Our arms are a few inches apart. He points to the ceiling, the far corner where a drawing of a flower stands out from the pale wood in fat black lines. “My mom drew that one. She grew up here, with GG and her siblings and my grandpa when he was still alive. Her name was Daisy.”

He smiles at me, and I study his face in the soft dark. “That’s why it’s your favorite place?”

Silas shrugs. “It’s part of it—imagining her here, that small. So long before she got sick that it wasn’t part of her at all.”

I nod. “It must have been hard to see her like that.”

His eyes move over mine, and he hesitates before finally saying, “It was, yeah. I try to, um—just try not to remember her that way. It was such a small part of her life but it feels like the biggest part sometimes, because it was at the end.” Silas lets out a rush of breath and glances back at the daisy. “But that’s not fair. And when I’m here, it’s easier to remember the rest about her, too.”

“Like what?” I say, and when he looks back at me I wonder if I shouldn’t have asked. But eventually a smile tugs at one corner of his mouth, shy and lopsided.

“Like she desperately wanted GG’s green thumb, but she didn’t have it. And every summer in Michigan she’d plant tomatoes and we’d wind up with literally one dime-sized tomato that she’d make this big show of ‘harvesting’ in August.” He shakes his head, and a moth flits between us. “She’d use this fancy steak knife to cut it into fourths so we could all try it. It was this stupid ceremony every year.”

“That’s not stupid,” I say. I’m picturing it: Silas, younger, standing next to that woman from the dining room pictures. His dad there, too, a middle-aged man with his same face. A kitchen island in the Midwest, summer sun slanting through the windows, Silas’s little sister hanging off his elbow. “That sounds really nice.”

He smiles at me. “Yeah, it was.” He looks down at his feet, swinging slowly through the dark. “What’s your favorite place?”

I wipe the soles of my feet with my hands, then my hands against each other. Blades of grass and rope thread drift into my lap. “I’m not telling you.”

“Is it embarrassing?”

I glance at him, trying to not to smile. Which just makes him smile wider, and when he leans closer to me I can’t quite bring myself to move away. “Audrey, is it a library?”

I laugh, surprising myself with it. “No, but close. It’s a reading room.”

He’s still smiling, eyes holding mine. I think he’s going to make fun of me, but he just says, “Tell me about it.”

There’s a hair tie on the floor next to me, white elastic with a pink flower bead. I pick it up, think of Silas’s eight younger cousins. “It’s on the third floor of the student center at the Summit School. Just this really imposing, academic space with beams in the ceiling and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and lots of long tables with moody lighting.” I glance at him, trying to track if he’s bored yet. But he’s just watching me, same as before. “It’s the best late, like at midnight, when you get to be alone there. And it’s so quiet, and you’re surrounded by books full of other people’s smart ideas.”

It feels new, talking about this with him. Not Audrey studying on tour or Audrey in Camilla St. Vrain’s shadow, but the Audrey I actually am, in my own life. It feels like crossing a line I maybe can’t uncross. And the way Silas is looking at me—like he sees that space, just as I’ve described it—I find myself scrambling to change the subject.

“What about you?” I say. “With school. Tell me more about these documentaries.”

“Someday documentaries,” Silas says, and I tense at the phrasing. “I don’t know. When I think about the rest of my life, it’s the one thing I can’t see getting bored with. The one thing I could imagine having fun with even if I had to do it every single day.”

I study the side of his face, soft in the quickly falling dark. “What?” he says, and I shake my head.

“I’ve never factored fun into it, I guess. When I think about my career.”

He lets the words sit there between us, and I’m so sure he’s pitying me until he says, “But it’s also about that feeling, right? The one you get when you know you’re putting your energy in the right place.” He nudges his knee against mine, then moves it away. “How you’ll feel when you help a kid with a broken leg, or cure a lady with cancer, or whichever way you choose to save the world. I’m so scared of that.” Our eyes meet. “Seeing people hurt. And I think it’s pretty incredible that you’re volunteering for it.”

I curl the hair tie in my palm. Think of him in Chicago, drenched through, how angry he sounded in the hull of that boat. How afraid.

Silas makes me feel bigger than I am, sometimes—the way he talks about me, the ache in my bruised ribs that reminds me just how alive we both are. I bite my lip and turn the conversation toward him.

“What is it for you? The feeling that makes you want to make movies.”

“It’s like—” Silas breaks off, moving a hand through the dark air in front of us. “You know when you’re watching something on film and it’s just human people having a human experience but it hits you in the throat?” He looks at me. “And you feel overwhelmed by the experience of being a person?”

Right now, I think. He makes me feel overwhelmed by the experience of being a person.

“That’s what I want to make. That feeling, where you’re watching something alone on your couch but you realize we’re all connected in this completely fundamental way that we don’t even have to ask for—it’s just there.” He looks at me. “And we aren’t alone, ever.”

I squeeze the hair tie, feel the bead bite into my palm. I’ve spent so much time feeling alone.

“Do you believe that?” I say quietly.

“Which part?”

“That we’re never alone.”

“Of course,” he says, and then he hesitates. “You don’t?”

I open my hand, and both of us look down at the elastic. “I guess not. But it would be nice to be that type of person, to see the world that way.”

“‘That type of person,’” he repeats, and I look up at him.

“What?”

He blinks, dragging his teeth across his bottom lip like he’s trying to land on the right way to say this. “I don’t know, Audrey, it’s like—you’re categorizing both of us. Giving us these labels as certain kinds of people.” It’s dark enough now that the distant light from the house is pooling in his eyes. “Things can just be what they are, right? People, too. You could surprise yourself. You could change, and feel differently, if you didn’t see yourself only one kind of way.”

It feels, suddenly, like we’re talking about something else. Like I’ve lost the thread, and I’m out of my depth, and I wish that it weren’t so dark so I could see better. I wish that I weren’t barefoot.

“Well, I hate surprises.” It sounds more defensive than I mean it to, but when Silas shifts away from me I keep going. “This is how my brain works. I’m a science person, and I’m on this path, and it just—” I break off, button back into myself. What the hell are we even doing out here? Hopkins Hospital releases its decision in three days and I’m sitting in some tree house in the middle of nowhere. “I have plans, and I need to be a certain way to achieve them. This summer is just an interlude—”

“An interlude?” Silas cuts me off. The emotion on his face is so unfamiliar that I struggle to clock it for what it is—anger. “This summer isn’t just an interlude, Audrey, it’s your life. As much a part of it as every other part.” He pauses and it’s loud, crickets screaming in the woods. “Don’t put all of this on pause. Don’t—” He breaks off, eyes on mine. I have no idea what’s coming next but I’m not expecting it to sting as much as it does. “Don’t count us all out just because we don’t fit into some plan you thought you had.”

“I do have a plan,” I say sharply.

“Okay,” Silas says. It’s more of a sigh than a word. “Look, can we try something?”

“You always ask that when you’re about to make me try something anyways.”

His eyes rake across mine. He says, “Can you tell me what you’re actually thinking right now?”

What?I blink at him, try to bring his face into sharper focus. It’s so dark out here it’s like we’re looking at each other through water.

“I’m thinking I made the plans I made for a reason,” I say. “And I just met you. And you don’t know me at all.”

Silas is quiet then. I can’t meet his eyes, but I do see him hold his hands up in the dark, like I’m some animal gone feral in front of him. Like he’s showing me his surrender.

“I’m tired,” I say, and when I leave the tree house, he doesn’t follow.

But I’m not tired—not descending the rope ladder, not crossing the wet grass in my stupid bare feet, not slipping into the house too quietly for anyone to notice.

I’m not tired. I’m lonely.