You Are Here (22 page)

Now Peter stood up to poke at the fire with a stick. The flame made the world around it seem small; everything beyond it was dark except for the hazy glow of the giant star in the distance, which shone through the spindly trees with all the subtlety of a UFO.

“You probably would’ve loved the birthday parties my parents always had for me,” Emma said, and when Peter glanced over at her, she could see the fire reflected in his glasses. “Their idea of a fun night is a good game of chess and an old bottle of wine, so you can imagine their version of an appropriate celebration for an eight-year-old.”

“It can’t be worse than the year my dad made me go kayaking and I got hit in the head with the paddle.”

“Trust me, it was.”

“I broke my nose,” he said, raising an eyebrow, and Emma laughed.

“Well, they made
me
write a poem about what I wanted for my birthday, then had me get up and recite it at one of my dad’s poetry readings in New York City. I told a roomful of literary scholars that I wanted ‘stickers that sparkle, and a dog that barkles.’”

Peter laughed so hard he began to cough, shaking his head and pounding at his chest, his eyes tearing from the smoke. “I bet they saw a lot of potential in you,” he said between gasps, and Emma couldn’t help laughing too; for all the miserable birthdays between them, all the misunderstandings and disasters and disappointments they’d each suffered, it seemed suddenly easier not to care, now that they were together.

“If you could do anything for your birthday,” she asked, once she’d caught her breath, “what would it be?”

Peter smiled at her. “This.”

When he sat down again, it was on the same log as Emma, which seemed a bit closer than necessary in a circle meant for eight to ten people. She watched him lift and then drop his hand twice, as if deciding whether or not to reach for hers, and then—with a kind of slow-dawning horror—she realized he was leaning over to kiss her. His eyes were closed, and his lips were pressed together so tightly he might have been trying to avoid the dentist, but still Emma understood where this was going, and she felt such a mixture of pity and annoyance and sadness all at once that she found she’d scooted all the way to the far end of the log almost before realizing she’d planned to do it.

It took Peter a few seemingly endless moments to catch on, his eyes fluttering open in confusion. When it finally registered what had happened, he leaned back stiffly and focused his attention on his shoes. Emma swallowed hard, frozen in place on the other end of the log. She couldn’t look up, because that would mean seeing the hurt on Peter’s face, and so she stared at the fire until her eyes began to water, anxious for one of them to say something, to begin the conversation that would inevitably follow. But she couldn’t for the life of her imagine how to begin.

The fire made the surrounding trees bend and loom like reflections in a fun-house mirror, and the dog curled up with a yawn, his bad leg pulled tight to his chest and his ears swiveling back and forth. But still they just sat there. It seemed to Emma that this was the world’s longest silence, a yawning gap between them that would never end. Even the air seemed to have changed, clotted and spoiled by what had happened, and she understood that something had been tipped by her reaction. And that no matter who had been the one to lean in, no matter who had closed their eyes and reached for the other, it was still somehow her fault, and always would be.

Peter was the first to clear his throat, looking desperate to strike up a conversation, any conversation, and Emma was almost disproportionately grateful to him for being the one to do it.

“My dad would’ve loved this kind of thing,” he said, and his voice seemed to strain with the effort. “He goes camping with his buddies all the time.”

“Upstate?” Emma croaked, pleased to find that her voice still worked.

“Yeah.”

“Does he ever take you?”

Peter shook his head but said nothing.

“Well, it’s nice he goes out and does stuff,” she said, jerking her chin toward the fire pit. “My dad has this one poem about fire, and—”

“I know it,” Peter said, cutting her off. “It’s one of his best.”

Emma snorted. “Yeah, well. He just writes about stuff like this. He turns it into stanzas and couplets. And my mom, she analyzes things until they stop meaning anything. ‘The fire represents life and the ashes represent death.’ It’s all just words.” There was a kind of momentum to the conversation now, and Emma felt herself being swept up by it, happy to focus on something other than what had just happened. “Sometimes, I feel like they don’t actually experience anything. Like they’re not living so much as studying life.”

“Yeah, but that’s
how
you experience things,” Peter said, sitting forward, his eyes now bright behind his glasses, the wounded look replaced by a kind of determination. “By digging deeper, not just accepting them for what they are. Your parents are brilliant. Look at my dad. He just sort of plods through life, drinking with his friends, going to work every morning, always the same thing. That’s no way to live.”

Emma stared at him. “Your dad’s a policeman. He saves lives. He protects people. How can you think that’s less important than the way my parents hole themselves away with their books?”

Peter stood abruptly and grabbed the bag of marshmallows from among their things. She could tell he was angry, though she wasn’t sure if it was because of the failed kiss or the discussion at hand. He jabbed one onto a stick so hard it skidded halfway down, then considered it a moment before adding two more. It looked like a great sticky shish kebab, and he thrust the whole thing over the fire with a frown, all the while shaking his head.

“What happened to dinner?” Emma asked, watching as the marshmallows caught fire, the soft shells turning a gritty black in the flame.

Peter spun the stick in slow circles, letting it burn. “Don’t you know how lucky you are?” he asked, still not looking at her, still shaking his head. “You were born lucky. You grew up lucky.”

“
Lucky
?”

“Yes,” he said, swiveling to face her. One of the half-melted marshmallows dripped off the stick and into the fire. “You’re surrounded by some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met, and you’re completely ungrateful for it. You have no idea how good you’ve got it.”

“It’s because I’m not
like
them,” Emma said, nearly spitting the words. “What am I supposed to do? Pretend to be good at math? Pretend to care about the stupid Civil War?”

Peter slashed at the fire with his stick, the smoke twisting up into the dark. “So, what? You act all mysterious to seem more interesting?”

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“You’re always wandering off or running away,” he said. “But you’re a lot more interesting when you’re just being yourself, you know. When you’re actually
here
.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Emma said coldly. “Where else would I
be
?”

“You know what I mean,” he said, a rough edge to his voice. “It’s like you’re so busy trying not to act like your family that you’ve never even stopped to consider that it might not be such a bad thing.”

“Well, what about
you
?” she shot back, aware of the bitterness in her words. “You complain about your dad not wanting you around, and then you complain when he wants you to stay home for school. You can’t have it both ways.”

Peter dropped the stick, his lips parted just slightly. “Well, neither can you,” he said. “You can’t keep everyone at arm’s length and then expect them to be there for you when you need them.”

“I don’t,” Emma said.

“You do.”

“Don’t act like you know me just because you want to be like my parents,” she said, suddenly furious. “And just because you’d rather hang out with them doesn’t mean everyone would. Not everyone finds them so damn fascinating. Not everyone’s as weird as you are.”

Emma realized they were rapidly entering the territory of things that could not be taken back, and she knew she should feel guilty. But all she could muster was a small pit of anger. Because what good did it do to feel horrible about this, when she already felt horrible about so many other things? She’d never yelled at her parents, never railed against her siblings; she’d just retreated further into herself, and now it felt good to finally take it out on somebody. Suddenly, all she wanted to do was scream at the top of her lungs and pound her fists on the ground and yell because it hurt—because it had
always
hurt, and she was only just now realizing how much.

“It’s not weird to be smart,” Peter said, looking hurt. “Just because
you
have the attention span of a cricket—”

“I’d rather know a little bit about a lot of things than a lot about just one thing.”

“But you don’t,” he said. “You don’t care enough to bother with
anything
.”

This was true, of course. Emma knew that she’d always been on the wrong side of the invisible line that separated her from her parents, from Patrick and Annie and Nate, even from Peter. But how could she tell him that the reason she always acted so disinterested in everything was because of the worry that she herself wasn’t all that interesting?

“I got us all the way here, didn’t I?” she said. “I’ve stuck with
this
, anyway.”

“You wouldn’t have done it on your own, though,” he said quietly. “You wouldn’t have done it without me.”

“I’m not stupid, Peter,” she said. “I can read a map too.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“And I could’ve done without the running commentary, by the way. The only reason I even called you in the first place is because I thought you were quiet.”

“No, you didn’t,” he said, looking up at her sharply. “You called me because you had nobody else to call.”

And she knew he was right.

He scowled at the fire before stooping to reorganize the careful architecture of twigs and branches, leaning away when the winds shifted and the smoke became too thick. When he stood up again, pushing his glasses up on his nose, there was a streak of ash just below his left eye. Emma watched him pace back and forth, pulling her knees up close to her chin. And for the first time, here in the middle of the woods, she stopped thinking of this—whatever this was between them—as something she’d been nice enough to put up with, and instead began to wonder why someone like Peter Finnegan would ever want to bother with someone like
her.

chapter twenty

Peter woke the next morning to find himself face to face with an enormous grasshopper, which directed a beady eye at him and rubbed its spindly legs together like some sort of cartoon villain. Pursing his lips Peter sucked in a breath and then exhaled, and the bug hopped away in a hurry.

It was still early, and the sun hadn’t yet made its way through the thick awning of pine trees above, so the woods still looked smudged with gray in the pale dawn. He pushed himself up on one elbow, taking stock of the situation: the small pile of ashes from last night’s fire, the pine needle stuck to his cheek, the sneakers he’d kicked off, which were now wet with dew. His whole left side was covered in dirt from the way he’d slept, sprawled on the hard-packed ground, and he slapped at his shirt to brush it away, without much success.

The air still smelled smoky and burnt; everything was damp and tinged with cold. Peter threw off the Roanoke sweatshirt, which he’d been using as a blanket, and got stiffly to his feet. Through the trees he could see the blue car, bright against the muted colors of the woods, its windows almost completely fogged over.

It was taking most of his energy to forget about how he’d tried to kiss Emma last night, and each time the memory rose again in his mind, it was all he could do not to go slinking off into the woods on his own, just so he’d never have to look her in the eye again. It had been mortifying and embarrassing and horrible, all the things he’d known it would be. So how, he wondered, could he have
possibly
thought it was a good idea?