Chapter 34

NASHVILLE

The last time this happened, I had a dorm room. I had a place to tuck myself away, a twin XL bed with white cotton sheets, a heavy comforter to pull up and over my head.

This time I’m strapped into a shared van. I’m surrounded. I have no way to make myself invisible.

Shame claws through me, screaming at the pace of my heartbeats, and when the van stops in front of the hotel lobby I slam open the sliding door so fast it jams my elbow. I run for the lobby bathroom and someone—Camilla, maybe—shouts my name.

The lobby is cavernous and cool, aggressively southern. Ornate carved arches from the floor to the towering ceiling; plush velvet furniture; elaborate chandeliers. It’s like stepping back in time. I think, distantly, that if I’d existed in the Gilded Age, I wouldn’t have even wanted to be a doctor. I wouldn’t be failing, because I wouldn’t be trying to do this at all.

The bathroom is empty. When I beeline for one of the enormous stalls I break out in full-body goose bumps; I am simultaneously freezing and on fire. I close the heavy wooden door behind me and click the lock and slide to the floor with my back against it. I pull my legs to my chest and jam my cheeks into my kneecaps until my bones hurt. The breath is rushing into and out of me so erratically that my ribs ache, those five finger-shaped bruises. Panic floods me like the lake all over again, hot down my throat, drowning me alive.

My fingers tingle, numbing. I wrap them around my forearms and dig my nails into the skin until it breaks. A logical pain, and one I deserve. Sweat prickles at my forehead. I’m so hunched over my spine is digging into the wooden door. It hurts, and I press back even harder.

The person I knew I’d be this fall recedes, like a specter or a stranger. The best in her class, the one with the job everyone else wanted. The one with the perfect setup for her college career, ahead of the pack from the moment she set foot on campus. I’ve been her for so long in my own mind that now I feel hollowed out, hardly human at all. That person will be someone else. And I will be me, less than.

I think of Ethan, convincing me to stay on this tour to bolster my application. How I’ve oriented my entire awful summer around this one thing and it didn’t even work. How maybe if I’d gone to Penn like I was supposed to we’d be celebrating right now—we’d be in the dorm room I’ve only ever seen through video chat and he’d be wrapping his arms around me. The familiarity of him. The relief of being the person he knows me to be.

I need a bed. I need a room with curtains to draw and a door to lock and the promise of isolation.

I wait long enough that no one who knows me will still be in the lobby. And then I wipe the blood off my forearm with toilet paper and go in search of my room key.

I hold the key to the reader and it hesitates, blinks red. I’ve got the key card in my right hand and I’m counting my fingers on my left, low and breathless, so fast I’m not even processing the numbers. I try the key again—red. I need to get behind this door before anyone sees me, before I’m swallowed by myself in the middle of this hallway. There are tears pressed against the backs of my eyes. I know they’re coming.

“Please,” I whisper, trying the key again. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. “Pleasepleaseplease.”

Red light. I tap the card again, jiggle the lock, counting out loud. Again. Red light. Door handle digging into my palm I’m pulling it so hard. Red light, angry beep, and I’m about to sit down on the floor when the door opens inward. I almost fall into the room, right into Silas.

“Audrey.” He breathes my name, his whole face broken open with shock.

“Oh my god,” I hear myself say. My eyes dart around—his suitcase, open on the foot of one bed. Puddles, peering at me from the ottoman of a mustard velvet chair by the window. And the room number, on the wall right next to the door: 407. I’m 408. I’m 408 and I’m so, so intolerably stupid.

“What happened?” Silas says, eyes wide. I need to move and I keep not doing it.

“I’m fine,” I say. My thumb is still tapping my fingers, counting wordlessly.

“Okay, Audrey, you’re shaking.” He reaches for me, careful, like I might spook. When his hand lands on my arm it’s so warm and so gentle I feel the tears choke me from the inside—this is too kind. I need to be alone. “Come sit down.”

“No,” I say, but when he moves I do, too, and suddenly the door is closing behind us and I’m sitting on the edge of one bed and he’s sitting on the edge of the other one and it’s so much, it’s too much, I’m so far from enough.

Our knees are touching. I can feel Silas’s eyes on me, the absolute head-on angle of his body directed at mine.

“Don’t look at me,” I whisper. I don’t deserve to be looked at. I don’t even want to occupy the space of my own body. “Please don’t.”

He’s quiet, and when I hazard a glance up at him he has a hand pressed over his eyes. Arm in the air, elbow cocked at an angle. His hair wavy and wild and a blue T-shirt I’m so familiar with by now and the way he smells—like woods and soap and GG’s house.

“Not looking,” Silas says, and something swells so huge in my chest that it practically pushes me off the bed toward him. Even after what happened in Colorado, even like this. Everything inside me wants to be close to him.

“Tell me what happened,” he says. “I won’t look.”

I don’t want to tell him. I don’t want it to be true.

“I didn’t get it,” I say, and the words shred from me like violence. Like something that’ll leave me different. “I know you think I’ve been this rigid, soulless robot—”

“I don’t think that.”

“—and it wasn’t even worth it because I failed.”

Silas says, “The ICU position?” and when the sob gasps out of me I lift a hand to my face so we’re mirrors of each other.

Silas moves, then—coming to kneel on the carpet in front of me, his hips between my knees. My eyes are squeezed shut so tightly it hurts.

“Can I?” he whispers, and when I manage a nod his arms come around me, nudging my elbow up and out of the way so it’s rested on his shoulder. I exhale and his arms move into the space it leaves, pressing even closer to me so the bruises on my rib cage ache. He’s holding me so tightly there isn’t room for my shame, or my fear, or anything else between us. I push my face into his neck, knowing he can feel the tears stuck to my eyelashes but incapable of moving away. And he doesn’t, either, and time doesn’t pass, and when his fingertips dig into the tops of my shoulders something shifts inside me. A change I’m too afraid to name.

“Everything’s falling apart,” I say, and when he pulls back to look at me the collar of his shirt’s all wet. I reach for it, like I could dry it with my fingers. “God, sorry,” I sniff, and Silas traps my hand in his. He rotates my wrist, eyes tracking over the set of cuts on my forearm—four crescent-shaped slivers, red echoes of my fingernails.

“Audrey,” he says quietly. I try to pull my arm away but he smooths his thumb over the cuts, his fingers folded around my palm. His gaze moves back to mine. “Everything?”

“Everything.” Failing at the only plan I have, the only thing that was mine to control this summer. The off-kilter way I felt yesterday at the Bard on the Barge, like maybe what I’ve always understood about Camilla is wrong. And Silas, right in front of me—god, and Ethan, who’s going to hate this when I tell him. Ethan’s disappointment seizes inside me, wrings me out. “I’m ruining everything.”

“Name one thing,” Silas says, and I wipe roughly at my eyes. This is the most embarrassing moment of my life—worse than Lake Michigan, worse than the Sex Summit.

“I didn’t get the shadowing position,” I say. Hasn’t he been listening? “I haven’t achieved a single thing this summer.”

Silas is quiet for a minute, studying me. “That’s not true,” he says. “Two days ago you walked barefoot through GG’s entire garden without an earthworm touching you.”

The laugh that bubbles out of me feels indecent, obscene. Silas smiles, but he looks sad.

I draw a rickety breath. “I’m serious.”

“I am, too,” he says. I realize my hand is still in his, resting on my knee. “You’ve met all kinds of doctors and impressed the shit out of every single one of them.” I can’t meet his eyes. “Sadie always tells me how you blow everyone away. And you’ve spontaneously road-tripped across the country, and seen the biggest field of mailboxes in America, and done a bunch of shows that have made a lot of people really happy.” I look at him, and something goes loose and squishy and vulnerable inside me. “Audrey, that’s the opposite of nothing.”

But those things aren’t the same as this, the brutal truth rattling behind my teeth. It wants to come out, so I let it. “I let myself down.”

“But you tried your best,” Silas says. “Their choice wasn’t yours to control.”

Tears fill my eyes and I press them shut. “I just wasn’t good enough.”

“No,” he says, and when he squeezes my hand I open my eyes again. “They’re strangers and they don’t know you and this is just one thing. There will be so many other things.”

“Yeah,” I say quietly. “It’s just that if I can’t be the best at things like this, I’m not sure who I am.”

He hesitates, eyes moving back and forth over mine. They’re flecked green in the light from the windows, deep and brown and endless. “So you have to hit the mark every single time, or you might as well not exist? There’s no middle option?”

Yes, I think. That’s exactly it. I don’t have a loud, loving family like Silas. I don’t know how to connect with people like he does, or to move through the world so easily. I have school. I have my place there, at the top. The tears are so thick in my throat now that I can’t speak through them.

“That’s too much pressure for anybody,” Silas says. “This is one job you didn’t get. It doesn’t mean anything about who you are.”

“But it does,” I say. There’s a magazine in the pocket of his suitcase, the same one Cleo showed me on the boat in Chicago. I pull it out, hold the headline up to him: Camilla St. Vrain’s Valedictorian Daughter Holds Court in Chicago. “The whole world knows me this way. Valedictorian.” I point to the word, and it feels more like a punishment than a compliment. “That’s who I am.”

Silas’s eyes track over the magazine, and he sighs through his nose. “But the whole world doesn’t really know you, Audrey. This is one piece of who you are, and it’s not even close to the most interesting thing about you.”

I don’t believe that, not even a little bit. And when I pull my lip between my teeth and clamp down I try so hard to hold in the words. I really do. I know how they’ll sound—indulgent and desperate. But I say them, in the end.

“What is?”

A muscle works in Silas’s jaw, like he’s weighing what to say next. And his voice is quiet when he finally, carefully speaks. “That you came here this summer to be close to your mom even though it scares you.” I close my eyes—maybe not ready, after all, to hear this. “Even though it’s felt really shitty sometimes. Because you’re hopeful for it.”

Silence spreads between us, fills the room. It takes everything I have to keep breathing.

The AC kicks on from beneath the windows; Silas clears his throat and keeps going. “That you know how you want to do good in the world, and the way you trust yourself to make it happen.”

My heart is beating so hard I’m sure he can feel it, all the way through my bloodstream to my palm pressed against his.

“And,” he says softly, “that you jumped in that lake after Puddles. Your heart’s bigger than your fear.”

The tears are leaking onto my cheeks now. When I open my eyes Silas is completely blurred out in front of me, like an illusion, like something so good I could only have dreamed it up.

“You don’t need to earn it,” Silas says. “Or prove it with some job. I lost my mom before I was ready and it—” He breaks off, looking away from me. He presses his lips together, swallows, draws a breath. “When you lose someone like that, you just know.” Our eyes meet. “We don’t have to do anything to earn it, Audrey. We matter to the people who love us just by existing.”

His words land in a soft, scared place deep inside me. And I realize that the feeling I’ve been tripping over all summer, like a splinter stuck through me sideways, is fear. I’m terrified that I built a whole life at the Summit School and that I have no place anywhere else. Not with my mother, not at Penn with Ethan, not with the interns. That maybe I don’t belong anywhere. And that if I can’t even get this job, I won’t matter in college at all.

“Listen,” Silas says. His voice is low and serious. “Fuck those guys, okay? You’re going to be the best doctor.”

I want to thank him. I want to tell him that I’m so, so sorry about his mom. I want to hide my face in his neck again—the only place I’ve felt safe this whole, entire summer.

But in the end, the only word I manage to get out is his name. Silas, whispered between us like an apology. And he just nods, like he heard the rest of it, and pulls me into him.

I close my eyes in the warm dark against his neck, and I count into the quiet, and I breathe. He breathes with me.