"Lostness"

Behind this street- past the fences with their metal links rusted into rough copper, past the houses and the kids and the cars that all need cleaning- there are mountains. A whole chain of them, folded into each other, dry and dead-looking and older than anything else.

From Noah's yard, when you lay in the brown grass that rasps around you and you see through the dust, they look closer than they are. I used to think I could reach up and pluck one out of the sky if I wanted. I mean I really believed that, only I never tried because our yard was too small to fit a mountain and I was a little afraid of what people would say. It's a good thing that I was a scared, shy little kid because if I ever tried to prove half the crazy shit I believed in, who knows how many times I'd have been disappointed?

I couldn't grab mountains, from Noah's yard or anywhere, but I didn't learn that until I tried to visit them. The cop car rolled up and found me outside a gas station, knees pulled up to my chest, not crying but terrified. I couldn't remember how to get home. The way home was one crumbling brick house, one wooden door that needed painting, one empty soda can in the gutter, one window full of old ads after another.

I didn't pay attention to the outside streets when my mother took me places in the car, so I could get lost two streets away from my own house. I made up for it later, when Noah and I memorized things for miles in every direction, but then I was helpless. I was scared, probably for the first time, that I was going to die. Not of hunger or cold or at the hands of sinister people who might snatch me up into their vans, like we learned about in school. I might just vanish, from sheer lostness.

The cops took me home. Since my mom was out working, I got handed over to Noah's older sister Elaine. She picked me up and I pressed my face into her shoulder, where her skin smelled like fading layers of flowers and something richer underneath. I hated looking at the man in the blue uniform who talked to me like I was stupid, and I loved Noah's sister for how she always smelled good.

She let me sleep in her bed and didn't mind if I cried, afraid and angry that my own eyes had lied to me. I had gone a hundred steps and I was no closer to the mountains that I was in Noah's yard. I fell asleep in the dark house, scrunched up in blue covers stained with cigarette smoke. I woke up when my mother came to carry me home, but I didn't open my eyes and we didn't talk.

This was the first thing I proved wrong. It was the one that upset me most and the only one that made me cry, which is funny, because mountains don't matter at all. But they're still there, even when other things have gone, and maybe they deserve credit for staying put.

Our street is called Shell Avenue, even though the ocean is miles away and "avenue" makes me think of a place with big white houses and green lawns, nothing like here. Our neighborhood doesn't have a name, because it's old and made up of a messy knot of roads, without a fence to stop us from spilling out into other places.

I guess names don't mean anything. Noah's comes from the Bible, but he's never built or saved a thing. Mine is "Ella"- not famous and I've never looked it up, but I'm sure it would be something stupid like they all are. I don't want to know that my name means "princess" or "wise one" in a language that nobody's spoken for a thousand years. I just want it to be mine.

This place is cradled by the highway, separated from that snarl of metal and tar by a ripped-up chain link fence. Holes are torn ragged in it and trash clings to the bottom, tossed from car windows and dropped from lazy hands. One long street runs along it for miles, until the houses become fields and they don't need to protect us from the highway anymore. Or the other way around, which seems more likely sometimes, when I look out at the fresh washed SUVs with kids in the backseat, eyes glued to a tiny TV screen.

Off the main road are narrower ones with names like Sierra or Tanner, all shades of brown. On each street the houses look different, so Noah and I always know where we are. First the squat white-trimmed ones, then the red shutters, then the yards ringed by chicken wire. For all I know, the pattern goes as long as the road does, but we don't walk far. Just in circles.

The people here aren't bad. They either work too much or not at all, so they're either dead tired (the kind where you stumble when you walk home) or they're sleepy (the kind where you lay on the couch all day and no part of you is really awake.) No one has much to do outside of television and playing records with stupid words that give you a headache, carrying little kids on your hip and staring out the dusty window at the highway always moving past you.

That's the grown-ups, anyway; the ones who had a chance to leave but didn't take it. They didn't know it would be the only chance they got. They didn't realize how they'd be tethered to this place, until it was too late. They could leave- some do. They pack everything into the back of a truck and start driving. We watch them go and they watch us waving in the rearview mirror, then we go home and forget them.

I know they move to towns just like this one, tiny stale worlds whose only difference is a different colored dust. They can't run away.

Our school is a flat, long building with worn-down corners and a metal roof. It started out white, but now when you run a hand down the side and let all the dirt pool in your palm, it looks like a fresh swipe of paint.

Noah and I have only one class together. He's on the advanced track, even though he never does his homework. I guess they see his test scores and put him in the hard classes, thinking, We'll give him one more try. But this year was his last chance and he's still pulling mostly C's.

I walk home with Noah and a girl named Dacey. We could ride the bus or borrow Elaine's scuffed-up sedan, but I like the time between school and home. One part of the day over, the next one waiting; it's like you're on some island outside of your normal life. When I tell Dacey these things she laughs like she understands, but Noah laughs like I'm crazy.

By the time we were in middle school, Dacey was popular and we weren't, but after a few months of trying to ditch us, she realized we weren't going away. She's got a lot of other friends, but they live on the mountains rather than at the foot of them. We're the ones that don't notice when she lets her hair down curly and loose and doesn't put makeup on and says whatever she wants to. So sometimes we don't see her for a while, but we don't miss her, because we know tomorrow she'll be sitting on Noah's step. There'll be little red marks around her knees from where she's got her sweatpants rolled up and her hair will smell like her father's house, cigarettes and sawdust.

Dacey doesn't talk a lot when she's with us, not like at school. She sits with her legs swung up over the couch arm, lying sideways, looking at me and Noah. It's like she's learning what normal people are like, in case someday she turns out to be one of them. But she says she's happy with us.

"Are you happy with your other friends?" I know their names, everyone does, but I don't like saying them when I've never talked to them.

Dacey laughs. "Yeah," she says, "or I wouldn't be friends with them, would I?"

Dacey's going out with a kid named Justin, who she doesn't like much, but he's nice and doesn't touch her when she doesn't want him to. She says he's better than the other option, like there's only one other way. Last year she told me that she doesn't like boys much at all. "I like talking to them," she said, "I like the way they look, and it's not like I felt sick touching them. You know- the skin, the bones, the way they look at you from up close- it's not that different from girls. But I never felt anything. None of them meant more than the next."

I understood her, or I tried to. I never stayed with anyone long- maybe I had the same problem. When I thought of boys, I thought of my fingers in the notches of their backbones, the muscles tensed to breaking, how hard it was to see them from up close, the half-shut trembling eyes. I never talked to them much, and all our time was spent behind closed doors, hands on each other. The only real words we spoke were when we met- strangers still, hesitant and on the edge of something. Instead, each boy was another language of touch, learning to read the crook of a shoulder of how tight he held your hand on the walk home.

It was always me that ended it. When I got the feeling that I'd uncovered everything new, when I knew we had nothing else to say, I stepped back and let it crumble. There were never any hard feelings. I'd pass him in the hall and we'd both smile, maybe brush hands and keep walking. It felt like seeing an old friends and knowing that you've got nothing to share anymore. The person you knew is an earlier version, this person strange and too different to get used to.

Before Dacey told me, I never wondered if I was messed up. I wondered if the next one might be different, but I wasn't sad when he was the same. I never wanted things to last forever. I never wanted him to mean more. There was always a little relief in goodbye. Now I wonder if I'm looking for the wrong things.

I swirl the straw around in my Icee, waiting for the brain freeze to wear off. It tastes like cough syrup but it's the coldest thing for sale at the convenience store, and even in March it's hot here. We reach the top of the last hill and there's Shell Avenue, not much more than a dip in the road. Most days I don't go home until dark- when my mom gets home from the office and defrosts whatever's in the freezer- but Noah's busy and I'm tired. The door isn't locked. Not because we trust the neighbors, but because everyone knows there's nothing much to steal.

My backpack slumps to the floor in a mostly-empty pile of blue mesh. I go to fall on the couch, but I see the corner- small and safe- and tuck myself into it instead. I used to fall asleep here all the time, curled up in the little space between couch and coffee table. It's harder to fit now- my chin has to rest on tucked-up knees and my ankles are crunched- but the vantage point is the same. A ceiling fan making its slow rotations, a slice of the window exposing sky and mountain. My mom probably doesn't know I still hide here, but I'll wake up before she gets in the door. I can't sleep through the sound of a key in a lock.

When my mom gets home, I've climbed out of the corner. I ask her how her day was, and she seems surprised to see me there. "Oh!" she breathes, remember she has a daughter as she drops her purse on the kitchen counter. "Fine. Long day, but fine." I pull out my homework and listen to her rattling in the freezer. "Are you going to your dad's this weekend?"

He lives a few minutes up the street. He paints, not that well. It doesn't matter, I guess, because he paints things like fruit and meadows and farmyards and sells them to department stores. The kinds of art that get hung on newlyweds' walls, something to fill the white space.

"Sure," I say. I don't stay at his house much, because most of the time he visits on Sundays. We sit on the couch and talk. A lot of times I end up listening to them chatter about when I was small, glossing over the rough patch between now and then. My mom smiles a lot when he's here. It's not like she's still in love with him, but she likes having someone around to remember with. My mom's best with the past and the future. She likes having a memory of something better than living it, and she plans things so much that when she finally reaches the present, it's old news.

I like staying at my dad's, his little yellow house and garage full of half-done canvases. He married a woman who reads books about tai chi and mystics from a thousand years ago. She does pottery and she's moved the furniture every time I visit. She's not a thing like my mom, which I guess was the point.

"How's Noah doing?" my mom asks. I hear the microwave start spinning. What'll it be tonight, re-thawed chicken or corn that's still half-frozen? I try not to mind it, because she's busy and she barely knows how to cook. I could always do it myself. I know she cares about me. Maybe I seem just as strange to her, as much of a mystery. But I don't know what to talk about, with her. I haven't tried in a long time.

"He's fine," I say, which is about half true.

Noah is easy to be with most of the time. We walk around and try to make each other laugh. We're both good at it, so we spend a lot of time hunched over, stumbling, always half out of breath. You can tell when he's having one of his nervous days, because he doesn't laugh. Or else he does this quick half-smile, on and off, like when you turn on a light and the bulb blows.

I'm not sure why he thinks I'm so funny, because I've never been much of a clown. Maybe I've just learned exactly what to say to make him laugh or yell or shut up. If you asked me, I couldn't tell you out loud. It's one of those things you just know, and it goes away when you think about it hard. Like your fingers remembering a song you used to play on the piano, and you can't make it happen. You have to let them go. You can look down at your own hands, the fingers collapsing on the keys, and wonder how the hell they're doing it.

It's a little scary, knowing just how to make someone feel better or worse. Like they're a robot and you've got the buttons to make them sit up, run, fetch. Like they can't help themselves. I guess you don't have to worry, unless you've turned your back on someone. Those people are the ones that really know how to hurt you.

Noah and I don't talk much about anything serious. If something bad happens, we tell each other, but we don't talk about it. "Leah called me a whore today," I'll say, and he doesn't know who Leah is, but he'll lift a hand and point his thumb at the floor.

"Thumbs down for her. She's dumb," he'll say. From there it's on to the next distraction.

On Saturday we walk to my dad's place. Noah's got both my bags slung across his back. It's not like he's trying to be a gentleman, he's just paranoid that he'll be scrawny his whole life. He spent all of puberty waiting for the growth spurt- he's got a few pictures of his father tucked into a box, and he's all muscled up. Noah got taller, but there was no new brawn in store. He just went upward. Now he carries things, lifts bottles of detergent once in a while, waiting for the day it makes a difference.

"Question," he says. "Do we know where the King's been lately?" The King is this old man that sits on the corner of Shell and 73rd and talks to people. All the little kids go to hear him sing, but you never know when he's going to feel like it. Some days he just sits there with his cat and smiles at the dirty-faced kids that wait at his feet. When they ask him for a song, he'll either sing them one in a language they've never heard or say "manana." I looked it up and it's Spanish; it means "tomorrow". But those kids act like it's magic. They walk home and try to copy the way he walks, his voice tinged with some mostly worn-off accent.

"We don't if you don't," I answer.

My dad's house is on the corner. He painted it pale yellow, so it's a little smear of color against the tan backdrop. He's not home, so I'm left laying on the couch watching the ceiling fan spin. I wonder what Noah thinks about when he has to walk home alone. He's different from a lot of people- he can't think about a lot at once. Instead he gets stuck on one tiny thing and he can't get past it, like a skipping record. That's when I have to start watching him from the corner of my eye, checking for the lightswitch smile. The problem is, he's okay in the daytime, when he has school and me to be distracted by.

Most of his freakouts are at night. That's what his sister called them, when I asked. "I don't know," Elaine had said, folding another towel from the basket in front of her. "He just has them. sometimes. He sleeps and sits around and doesn't hear me when I talk to him. Then he'll stay up all night and forget about eating. Our mom used to do the same thing," she says, her voice gone quieter. She always talks about her parents like they're a secret. "Maybe he's sick. I don't even know what it's called."

Maybe there are pills for it. This is what people go to therapy for, I think, but I've never said so to Noah.

I think about how normal he seems, how worried Elaine sounded; I realized I've never told him what I think about when I'm alone at night and I should be sleeping. He doesn't know, I think, and I would never know anything about him being sick if she hadn't told me. I wonder how different people are when they're alone. It gets cold, and I shut off the fan.

Monday after school I go to Noah's house. Elaine probably still thinks I'm in love with him. She lets us shut the door when we're in his room, and she smiles to herself as we go down the hallway. She thinks she knows what goes on in there, but she's wrong.

Noah and I have kissed five times. Once when we played house when we were five and I wanted to be the dog, but Thomas said he was sick of pretending to be a girl, so that time I had to wear the dress and kiss Noah. The dress itched and his lips tasted like applesauce. Thomas and I decided to both be dogs and Noah chased us around with a busted fishing net.

Once on a dare, when a bunch of middle school kids all sat in Adaly Juster's basement and yelled at us to kiss because they thought we'd wimp out, but we did it because we had to. Everyone told us to move our heads, but we sat still and giggled behind closed mouths. "Wasn't that weird?" he asked a week later. And it was, but better, it hadn't been special. I hadn't liked it. If I had, we probably couldn't have been friends anymore.

The next was the first time we kissed on purpose. We'd just started freshman year and the only real kiss I'd had before was at the fall dance, when my date took me out by the dumpsters. It was wet and it took too long. I was a little bored by the time he stepped away and leered at me.

I was in Noah's room the next day, bent over my math book, when a strand of hair fell in my eyes. I reached up to tuck it behind my ear when I realized it wasn't mine, and the next time I blinked, Noah had kissed me. His lips were chapped but he was nice about it. I didn't get butterflies in my stomach and I didn't fall in love with him, like on television. Instead it just felt soft and everything was quiet.

"You look surprised," he said when we sat facing each other on the carpet.

"I am," I said. "It wasn't awful."

The fourth was a year ago. He was curled up on my living-room couch, trying to calm down. He was hardly ever like this, not in front of me, and I never know what to say when someone's upset. "It'll be okay" usually turns out to be a lie, and what if I try to touch them and they push my hands away?

I sat down next to him and waited for him to stop talking. "What if," he kept saying, "what if we never get anywhere? What if things stay the same?" And it was funny, because those were the things I wondered, at night when I couldn't sleep and the air felt heavy. Except I never put words to the worry; that could make them real. If I pretended they weren't there, they couldn't swallow us whole.

He pressed a hand to his face, fingertips putting indents on his mouth while he closed his eyes. I was scared he'd start crying. The only times I cried were when I woke up confused, the room dark and hazy, and after a few shallow breaths the tears would start. I wasn't sure why it happened. I just felt too full, and it emptied me out.

"Don't be mad," he said then, and kissed me hard. It almost hurt- the pressure of his teeth, the bad angle, our cheekbones colliding. It ached, but it wasn't all pain. I felt sick, I didn't know what I was doing, but his hands trembled in my hair and on my neck and I wasn't the one who pulled away. He leaned in so our foreheads touched and said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," and his heart thumped so hard I could feel its beat against my shoulder. He sounded like it hurt to breathe.

The last time was a few months ago. It was after Andrew broke up with me, the first boy that ever beat me to the punch. I was more angry than sad, disappointed in myself for not realizing what was coming. I sat on the kitchen counter and kicked my legs up, leaning my head against the refrigerator. The plastic felt good on my hot cheeks, and then my feet met denim. I opened my eyes and Noah was standing there saying, "Jesus, Ella, it's okay. Stay still."

The afternoon sun fell dusty through the window and put a fuzzy outline around him, but his face was divided into spaces of shadow and light. For a second he looked like Andrew, and I'm not sure if I let him kiss me again because I missed Andrew or because I didn't know what else to do. He pressed his mouth to the shell of my ear, the hollow of my cheek, the tip of my nose; his hands on my shoulders were still this time. When he tried to kiss my mouth, I turned my head away. I felt like I was being brave, like I was saving something. Maybe I was just scared of wanting it to happen.

And maybe Elaine will end up being right. Dacey asked me once if I"d ever slept with him. "It would make sense if you did," she said. "You know things won't go wrong. You won't break up. You'll never feel like he didn't deserve it."

"That's sad," I said. "Why do you think I want to sleep with him? I've known him since I was six. I'd have figured it out by now."

Dacey shrugs. "You're the one keeping count."

Elaine is almost thirty now. I can remember her eighteenth birthday, right before Noah's mother moved out. The sound of off-key singing and torn wrapping paper drifted from the open window above us. Noah and I sat on either side of the water spigot and filled mop buckets, then lugged them across the patio and poured it on the dirt. We were building sandcastles. It was summer, and all her friends were moving away to college, but she stayed.

She works at a hardware store uptown and takes care of Noah, but she likes to talk about where she's going once he moves out. "We stayed here because it was easy," she told me. "The house was already paid off. I already had a job. I never really minded taking care of him, because I wasn't headed anywhere. But when he finishes school, I'm leaving faster than you can blink."

She took a drag off her cigarette and flicked it against the windowsill, where a little pile of ashes shivered in front of the open window. Every few minutes a breeze would blow and a puff of them would rain on the back of the couch, but she didn't notice. "Still don't know where I'm going. Somewhere it's never too hot. Somewhere with plants that can live through summer."

I show up at Noah's house and he's not there. He does that a lot. He'll take Elaine's car and drive out to the middle of nowhere, some dirt road surrounded by fields, and sit on the hood while he thinks. He took me with him once, but he said I made too much noise. "He's off finding himself," Elaine says when I walk in, but she grins afterward. She loves her brother, even if he doesn't make sense to her.

Noah used to make fun of this motivational speaker who did late-night informercials. His big thing was "finding yourself," and that turned into Noah's reason for everything. Mornings before he left for school Elaine used to wish him luck at finally finding that elusive bastard. One day when I showed up, she said, "He's in his room, fondling himself." A soda can came sailing toward her head from the hallway. "Jesus, finding! I meant finding, goddamn."

I apologize and turn around on the porch, thinking I'll come back later, but Elaine yells for me to stay. "He'll be back soon enough, and I haven't talked to you in a while," she says. With me standing in the living room, I see her looking at the stacks of magazines of dirty laundry like it's taken my being there to make them visible. "How've you been?" she asks.

"Alright. How are you?" I ask. Elaine shrugs in a funny way, tilting her head and shifting her hips. She never stays still and when she moves, it's with her whole body. "How's Noah?" She tenses up, her shoulders sloped high. Elaine twists her mouth and looks past me out the window when she answers.

"He's doesn't talk to me much, but I guess he's okay. He's calmed down. He'll stand around, smiling at nothing, and when I ask him what he's doing he gets all jumpy like I've caught him doing something wrong." The daylight bleaches out the details of her face, smudges over the tiny indentations that have spiderwebbed from the corners of her eyes. When she frowns, she looks like Noah- eyebrows low and darker than her hair, mouth bitten so it's red and always looks wounded. But most of the time she's smiling. Then her face is moving so fast that at rest it seems shapeless; it hangs loose on its bones.

"What are you doing after graduation?" She doesn't say "for college," so I guess she knows I'm not going. I told the school guidance counselor that I'd like to work, something where I use my hands. I like that feeling of my palm muscles aching- it seems like proof that I've done something. But when I think of hands I think of art, pottery or painting, and I'm awful at that. It got me off the hook on Career Day, but now I'm dreading the moment when I have to decide, when all the other doors get slammed shut.

"I'm not sure," I say. The words hang in the air and I feel condemned, even though Elaine's face doesn't change. "Work, I guess, but I'm not sure where. I'd like to get out of here."

She snorts. "Who doesn't?" She lights a cigarette, the movements so streamlined they look almost graceful. "Noah's been accepted to a few places. Nothing top-notch, but he figured that before the letters ever came. He's still deciding between Pepperdine and some school up in Oregon, last I heard. But you probably get that news before I do." Elaine looks down at her toes, maroon polish dark as a bloodstain against the pale carpet. "So-" and I realize she can't look at me, she's too nervous, when she says, "what on earth are you going to do with Noah that far away?"

I freeze. I've never thought about it before. When we were small I pictured us driving together, anywhere near water, places we'd never been. Now I try to think about myself alone in the driver's seat, and I can't do it. I see some girl's body, her face a smear, like smudged chalk. "I don't know," I laugh, nervous. "I can work anywhere, can't I? Doesn't have to be too far away."

She looks up at me and knows in an instant what I'm thinking. "You haven't talked about it with him, then?" I shake my head. Elaine looks back to the window and I hear Noah pull up in the car. "It's gonna be weird," she says, "not having to watch out for his ass all the time."

When he walks in, I ask, "Found yourself yet?"

"Yeah," says Noah, "but I didn't like him."

The King is back on his street corner that weekend. Noah and I walk past on our way to Dacey's house and I ask him where he's been.

"I was down and out for a bit," he beams, "but I found my front porch's view was hardly comparable to this corner's." Directly across from him is a dead shrub and the freeway, so I wonder how awful the view from his house is. Even a brick wall would be better than this.

"King," Noah says, "what's your real name?"

He frowns at his cat for a moment. "It's Arthur," he says finally.

"Why doesn't people call you that?"

The King shrugs. "They never asked."

A few more weeks and school is finished. Everyone else runs out of the classrooms and throws stuff in the air. Noah and I walk out behind them and our feet rasp on a sea of white paper. We have one last summer ahead of us before he leaves, I think. Some people are throwing parties, going places. They want it to be the best summer they've ever had, but that idea scares me. That kind of freedom is too hard to let go of.

Dacey's off to camp the next day. She's going straight to university afterward, so her car trunk is full of supplies for a new life. Blankets, shoes, a tiny trashcan; the next four years of her life are shoved into this ratty sedan. It's some girl's school in Maryland. Noah and I tease her that it's the perfect place to scope out a date with a chick majoring in art. She laughs in my ear while she hugs me. A tawny froth of curls at my cheek, a low sound like caramel buzzing against my skin, and something pangs in my chest.

"I'll miss you," I say, but I'm glad for her. No more belonging to people she barely knows, no more changing between one life to the next. The car door slips shut and we watch until we see her speed by on the highway.

I dream about the summer for a week. Not the ones I'd had before, with sprinklers raining in the dusty yard, sun-bleached kiddie pools, fake sandcastles. I dream of walking down sidewalks and leaving wet footprints behind me, hearing the call of crickets, of laying on sand while my skin soaks up the heat and light. I fall asleep wishing for these things, a small ache in my throat, and I can't tell the difference between waking and dreams.

"Situation," Noah says as we sit on the curb in front of my house, feet tucked up against the sidewalk. "You're driving, and you think, I don't want to stop the car. You see where you're headed, but you roll right past, like you can't help yourself. What do you do?"

"Keep going," I say. "What else can you do?"

Noah picks up my hand from where it rests on my knee, where my fingers were tracing a tear in the denim. He doesn't hold it but examines it- he runs a fingertip over my knuckles as intently as if they were mountains,s crapes his nails over the delicate tracery of veins and tendons beneath the skin. When I look at him I can't tell what he's thinking. I wonder if I'm in love with him.

"Do you think I'm fucked up?" he asks. "My sister does. She thinks I'm crazy." Noah doesn't look at me when he says it. It's the first time he's ever talked about it. There have been times that my phone rang at three in the morning and it was Noah, choking and scared, times that my hands were so slick on the plastic that the phone slid out of them. For a long time I didn't know it wasn't normal, and even after, I never asked him what was wrong. I'd just talk and talk until he fell asleep. I always wondered who was the one to hang up on Noah's end of the line.

"She doesn't," I tell him. "She worries about you. Elaine's not angry. She just wants you to be okay."

Noah stares at the asphalt. "She told you," he says.

"Yeah," I answer. I don't even think to lie. "Someone had to." It scares me when my voice comes out bitter and shaky. I sound like my mother used to, when I listened to her and my father fight in the kitchen, lying in bed with one ear pressed to the pillow. But they weren't really fights. My father never argued back. Just my mother's voice, pulled taut like a whip about to crack. "Why didn't you tell me? You trust me, don't you?"

It's a long time before he answers. "Even I didn't know what was wrong. I didn't know what to say."

The blood is loud in my ears. It sounds like the ocean, or more like the ocean in a shell; like a recording of a sound. "Either way," I say. "Either way, I wouldn't know the difference." I stand up and every step toward my front door is a burst of thought, each one dying in a moment. He doesn't trust me. He barely knows me. Who knows who he is when I'm not there, when no one's around? How much do you never know about someone?

And as soon as the door closes behind me, I realize I don't know what his favorite color is. It's so tiny and pointless that my back slides down the door. I dig my hands into the carpet and laugh.

At night, I don't dream, but I don't wake up crying either.

I sleep until afternoon, and when my mom is sitting there at the table, it takes me a minute to notice her. "Why are you home?" I ask. There's a letter when my name on it sitting on the counter, handwritten.

"Noah dropped that off," she says. She doesn't answer the question.

An apology note, I think, but I'm only a little relieved. I"m not sure how something that big can be fixed with ink on paper. I think of Noah posting a sheet of paper over a huge crack in the ground, hoping it'll hold, and when I grin the smile feels foreign on my face.

I sit on the porch to open it. It's a map of the country, with a dotted red line weaving its way across borders. There are tiny gold stars every few inches, like the ones that teachers stuck to gold papers when I was little. "NOAH'S SUMMER ADVENTURE" is printed in capitals at the top. There's a letter attached:

Hey Ellalah.

Hate to sound like an old excuse, but it's not you, it's me. Just kidding. A little. I've been planning a road trip for a while, and I'm leaving a week after graduation. After that I'm going to school in Oregon. I'll send you postcards, so don't go too far without me. It's weird, I'm writing this in May, but I feel like I've already left. Anyway. Don't get paranoid that I'm gone forever, because you have to be a phone call away. Come to think of it, you could tag along to Oregon. Like you told Elaine, you can go anywhere.

Missing you before you're gone. Bye Ella.

-Noah

In Elaine's driveway, the car is already gone. Her face is bright in the window- looking out, but not looking at me. I pull my phone from my pocket and dial Noah's number. I don't have to look.

"So," I say, "made it to your first gold star?"

"Yeah," Noah answers, "but I didn't stop. I felt like going, what can I say?"

"Waste of cool stickers," I point out.

"You can reuse them," he says. "If you must."

"When'd you leave? Early?"

"Like a thief in the night," Noah says. "So what are you gonna do all summer?"

"Tagging along with Elaine, maybe. She says she's moving. Somewhere green."

"Sounds nice. Did I tell you I'm racing through a desert right now?"

"Bring me a souvenir," I tell him.

He laughs. "I'll bring you some sand." His voice crackles at the end and after I wait for an answer, I realize the connection's broken. I tuck the phone in my pocket and wave to Elaine.

I find the King on his corner. "Hello," he says. "Where's your friend?"

"He's gone," I say. "Went traveling. Then off to school." The King, who's been petting his disgruntled cat, pauses in mid-stroke and frowns at me.

"Left?" he echoes. He looks at the snarling highway, the tired houses, the heat waves over the asphalt. "Why'd he want to leave?"

"I don't know," I say, and it's the truth. I keep walking, leaving him to preside over his kingdom of sand.