Colin must sense there’s something wrong. In a flash, he’s out the door with his hands on my waist, whispering in my ear. “It’s okay, Ria. It’s okay. We’re getting out of here.”
I don’t ask where. I can’t. I just let him take me down the stairs, put me in the LeSabre and drive. It’s as if someone slipped a drug into my food. I’m not connected to my body anymore. I’m floating off to the side somewhere.
We’re sitting at an intersection waiting for the lights to change when I get knocked back to reality. There’s a woman I recognize in the next lane. She’s looking at me. I suddenly see myself as she sees me: out cruising with my boyfriend in my flashy turquoise convertible. It’s almost as if there’s a thought bubble over her head reading, How heartless can that girl be? Her father could be dead!
The light turns green, and I blurt out, “Go! Go!” It startles Colin. He turns and sees the lady in the next car too. I don’t know if he understands or not, but he hits the gas.
He keeps one hand on my leg, the other on the wheel. He drives straight to Point Pleasant Park. “It’ll be quiet here,” he says.
He parks the car and leads me up a winding trail through the woods to an old tumbledown army fort. In the summer, there’d be bus tours and day camps and people getting their wedding photos taken here, but today there’s no one except the occasional power walker.
Colin drags a picnic table over so that it’s half-hidden by one of the old stone walls.
We lay side by side on the tabletop. This stray thought floats in from my previous life: I should have some sunscreen on. I’m the type that burns.
So’s Dad. Is he wet and wounded and now sunburned as well?
Am I weird even wondering that?
I reach over and take Colin’s hand. At least here, I don’t have to worry what other people think. I say, “Thank you for rescuing me.”
He turns to me and smiles. He’s got one eye squinted up from the sun. The other eye is as green as a Granny Smith apple. “Thank you, nothing,” he says. “I just wanted you to myself.”
It’s such a Dad thing to say—one of those fibs he comes up with just to make you feel good. I do my best to play along.
“You’re lying,” I say. “You would have been happy to stay there all day—or at least until the muffins ran out.”
We both laugh even though it’s not that funny.
“I just couldn’t stand it,” I say. “Everybody looking at me. Everybody expecting me to act a certain way. Even Helena and Sophie doing their big drama-queen thing. It made me want to scream.”
I get up on one elbow and look at Colin. “He’s not dead,” I say. “I know it. How am I supposed to take everybody’s stupid condolences when he’s not even dead? It makes me so mad.”
Colin gets up on one elbow too. He puts his hand on my hip. “People are just trying to be nice, Ria.”
I squish my eyes together and let out this sort of frustrated growl. “Well, they aren’t nice. They’re making me feel terrible. And I. Can’t. Handle. It.”
I flop back down on the tabletop with my arm over my face. We’re quiet for a long time.
“Fine,” Colin says. “You don’t have to handle it.”
He leans over me. “Forget about other people. We don’t have to spend time with them. I’ll pick you up when I get out of school, and we’ll go somewhere, just you and me. We can act however we like. We can do whatever we want. We can be sad or happy or mad—whatever we feel like. Okay?”
I don’t know what I’d do without him.