Chapter 38

MIAMI

In time, the heaviness lifts. My limbs start to feel like my own again; I draw deeper breaths and sleep more soundly and start to eat. Just like after the Sex Summit, I come back to myself with time. Eventually, the marks on my arm feel like they were made by someone else.

Camilla did the show without me. When I asked what she would tell everyone, she said: the truth.

Audrey couldn’t be here, she told the audience in the clip Mick posted to her social media after the show. No one pressed; I guess it was reason enough. But I knew, watching it on the blue rectangle of my phone, who had recorded the video—and that he knew exactly why I wasn’t there.

In Colorado my shame circle was small: Fallon. Here I’ve let the storm of myself wing wide: Silas, Ethan, Sadie. Cleo and Mick, maybe, if they’re disappointed in me, too. My dad, whose calls and texts I haven’t been answering. And Fallon, again, who I finally texted Doing okay over here! Which was an absolute lie and felt like some cowardly kind of betrayal, especially considering she’d seen me do all of this before. But she didn’t have service, it seemed, and I hadn’t heard back from her.

I’ve let so many people see into my darkness this time. I don’t know how to move past it except to pretend that it never happened, which—now that I’m out of it—is nearly how it feels. I don’t recognize that person, unshowered and alone in her hotel room. I want her to be fictional. I want to separate myself from her. I want, for the first time in recent memory, my mother.

The day after the Nashville show we do yoga together in her hotel room. We video call my dad. I watch the smile spread across his face at seeing us side by side and I feel young and safe and different.

I send an email to the epidemiology lab at Vanderbilt and apologize for missing our appointment. I cc Sadie, and she replies directly to me: Can I come by? I’m thinking she’s going to chide me for messing up a visit she worked hard to set up for me. Tell me that I need to get my act together for the rest of them. I’d deserve it if she did.

But when I let her into my hotel room, my chin ducked, apology already halfway out of my mouth, Sadie doesn’t say anything at all. She just reaches for me—like it’s what she came here to do, like it’s something we’ve ever done before. I let her hug me, maybe because I’m too stunned to stop it. Maybe because it feels good, after what happened on the airplane, to have her see my sadness and hold it against her instead of pushing it away.

“It’s okay,” she tells me before she leaves. Like I said anything, which I didn’t. “Take your time.”

So I do. When Silas knocks on my door again, I don’t open it. When Ethan keeps not calling me, I brace for what’s coming when I see him in Miami. The if/when.

The moment—not quite here yet—when I’ll finally have to face myself.

My mother is leading a guided stretch when the power goes out. Theater lights clicking off in one great wave, audience gasping into the dark.

I’m suspicious the whole thing’s for my benefit, anyways: we’ve been in Miami for twenty-four hours and she’s tried to get me to do yoga with her three times already. Weekly Flow doesn’t feel as bad as it used to, but a girl can only handle so much yoga. Besides—a backyard workout makes it nearly impossible to avoid people seeing me, which has been my primary modus operandi for the last few days. The house Mags rented in Miami Beach has six bedrooms and an infinity-pool’d backyard surrounded by trees; the yoga mats have been waiting out there for me like docking stations. Visible from every single back window.

“Emotional pain doesn’t live in our brain with our memories,” Mom told me. “It lives in our bodies. You need to move and tap into it.” She stood across from me in the massive, granite-sheathed kitchen, watching me pour a second cup of coffee before anyone else was awake to intercept me. She knew that Ethan and I were on a break because I’d told her—which isn’t something I do, historically. But we’ve tiptoed into some new kind of territory where we say stuff to each other. It feels scary in an edging-on-good way.

“I’m not in pain,” I told her. It was true: I’d rounded the gloomy curve out of Nashville and I didn’t want to keep focusing on it. I had action to take now: more jobs to apply for, fall courses to enroll in now that I was less than a month out from the start of school. I’d been emailing back and forth with my assigned premed adviser, laying the tracks to optimize my course load across all four years of undergrad. It was like a puzzle, fitting together my prereqs and electives and the professors I wanted to study under. It gave me purpose. I felt like myself again, and I didn’t want to run into Nashville Audrey while hanging inverted in downward dog.

“Let’s arch our left arms up and over,” Camilla says, now. “Breathing deeply into our bellies and—”

The stage lights click off all at once, silence falling in that eerie, ancient way—when not even the central air’s still running, and you realize that the whole world has been white noise until now. I blink into the sudden dark, letting my arm fall out of its arch as emergency lights click on down the theater aisles. There’s lots of gasping from the invisible audience. Above the domed roof, thunder rumbles.

“Please move calmly toward the exits!” A voice rises above the murmured panic, someone from the theater appearing in front of Camilla and me with a flashlight trained on his face. He looks like he’s about to tell us a ghost story, and I think for the millionth time of Silas in his tree house in Colorado. The sun setting over the garden and all those crickets clicking in the woods and the promise, still, of the life waiting for me in the fall.

“The hurricane is coming early.”

Magnolia appears from nowhere, her face hazy in the dark. She puts a hand on my shoulder and then Camilla’s, helping to guide us from the stage. “It’s supposed to make landfall tonight—we need to get back to the house.”

Mags has been tracking Lola for days, a tropical storm gathering angrily in the Atlantic. It was a blip and then a smear and then a cyclone, hurtling straight toward Florida because of course it is. Why wouldn’t this happen? When I pull my phone out of my skirt pocket Ethan has texted me for the first time in a week: Not sure if you’ll have service to see this, but my flight’s canceled. Just as I open it to respond—though to say what, I don’t know—I lose my last bar of cell service.

“Power outage.” Cleo’s voice hisses so close to my ear that I jump. She cackles and wraps a hand around my elbow, tugging me along behind Mags as we move through the backstage maze. “This is gonna be fun.”

“What if we die?” Mick’s voice is high, not quite panicky but close.

“No one’s dying,” Mags says firmly. “The management company has already boarded up the house. We’ll be completely safe.”

I glance behind me—a black, endless tunnel back to the stage. “Where’s Silas?”

“I’m here.” His voice is soft and close, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from. The other side of Mick, maybe. Cleo squeaks as we brush past the stage curtains, pulling me closer, and all of us follow the pinprick of Magnolia’s phone flashlight toward a glowing exit sign.

The rain is thrashing outside, palm trees arching ghoulishly in the street.

When I find Silas’s eyes in the waterlogged moonlight, he looks away first.