She lets go and falls back into her pillow, and I step back.
‘What’s the secret?’ Ethan asks.
‘It’s not a secret,’ she answers and then closes her eyes, her sweet elixir doing its job for another fifteen minutes.
Ethan swipes at one eye with the heel of his hand and clears his throat. ‘We should go,’ he says.
We say good-bye, but Allys has already fallen asleep.
Her father walks us to the door. His composure is regained. He has returned to the tired man who greeted us, a circle of calm of his own making. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he says. ‘I know it meant a lot to her.’
Her mother hurries out to the porch before we leave. ‘You. Jenna. You live on Lone Ranch Road, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought so,’ she says. She turns without saying anything else and goes back into the house.
Ethan and I leave, retracing the steps that brought us here. We don’t speak until we get out to the main highway.
‘I guess it’s moot at this point,’ Ethan sighs.
‘What’s that?’
‘Allys won’t be telling anyone about you now.’
I stare out the window. The landscape sweeps past as a gray blur because I am focused on a distance somewhere between the window and the world around me. An inexact distance that holds nothing but Ally’s words. Ethan underestimates her. ‘She already did,’ I tell him. ‘That’s what she whispered to me. That’s what she meant. It’s not a secret. She told her parents. She told them to report me.’
A swath of red flushes Ethan’s face beneath his eyes and his hands tighten on the steering wheel. ‘I won’t take you home,’ he says. ‘You can come to my house. Anywhere. I’ll take you somewhere where no one will find you …’
Ethan continues his desperate plans for my escape, but I find myself drifting, wondering where Ethan’s anywhere might be, caught up in a world of maybes and what-ifs and wanting to stay there because it is a much safer world for me than the one I am in.
Leaving and Staying
I almost could.
I could almost leave and never look back.
Like Mr Bender, I could leave everything I was behind, including my name.
Leave because of Allys
and all the things she says I am.
Leave because of all the things I am afraid that I will never be again.
Leave, because maybe I’m not enough.
Leave because Allys, Senator Harris, and half the world knows
better than Father and Mother and maybe Ethan, too.
Leave.
Because the old Jenna was so absorbed in her own needs
that she said yes when she knows she should have said no,
and the shame of that night