8

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At eight o’clock Saturday morning, I pull up in front of Aster’s building and find her waiting with a carry-on suitcase in one hand and a thermos in the other. My original plan was to catch a ride to the wedding with Wes and T.J., but I’d bailed on the idea when Aster agreed to come, opting to rent a car so we could be alone for the trip. And the plan is already worth it. Even in faded jeans and that yellow jacket, she’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen, and it’s impossible not to smile as she climbs in.

“Good morning,” she says as I pull away from the curb.

“Is it? Or is it a bile and revenged-filled morning?”

She smirks and sips her drink. “Well, it’s still early.”

“How’s your week been?” I take the turn off campus for the freeway, and a few minutes later we’re on our way to Lawrence. The day is cold but sunny, the roads clear and quiet.

Aster tells me about a girl who tried to prank her ex-boyfriend by using a fan to blow flour under his door, but accidentally got her hair caught in the fan and tried to run away with it still attached to her head. There’s another story about a drunk kid who came home, forgot where he lived, and tried every door on three floors until campus police got thirty-seven reports of attempted break-ins and came to catch the would-be bandit.

I listen as she talks, her story-telling funny and wry. She takes her job seriously but not too seriously; it’s like she cares, but not in a motherly way. More like she’s been down some of those roads and she wants to point kids in a better direction.

“You remember the other night?” I ask, switching the radio station when it turns to static.

Aster sips her coffee. “Which night?”

“The one where you said you hadn’t had a wonderful life, bad things had happened.”

She’s quiet for a second. “I didn’t say bad things happened.”

“You sure?”

She gnaws on her lip. “I just meant I’m too old to be naïve. So a guy’s an asshole. I shouldn’t be surprised. He was too good to be true, anyway.”

“How so?”

“You first.”

“What do you mean?”

“Asking me to tell you about Jerry is like asking me to tell you I had a winning lottery ticket and I lost it. So you go first. Tell me something painful and embarrassing about yourself.”

“I don’t buy lottery tickets.”

She’s not impressed. “Uh-huh.”

My free pass to Holsom comes pretty close to winning the lottery, but even though I’m not the most impassioned student, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep it. Still, I’m not about to tell Aster about my shitty upbringing and my even shittier life choices. I didn’t have amazing parents, but they tried. There’s a large period in my life where I didn’t try at all, and that’s nobody’s fault but mine. That’s what the judge said. It was up to me to make better choices—could I?

I peek at Aster.

The judge would not approve of this.

“Um...” I clear my throat. “I’m afraid of the water. I fell into a pond once, trying to retrieve a tennis ball, and nearly drowned.”

She frowns at me. “How’s that painful and embarrassing? Did it happen last week?”

“No, I was five.”

“Then it doesn’t count. Try again.”

I rack my brain, trying to think of something I can actually admit to. “I’ve been sprayed by a skunk,” I announce.

Aster turns in her seat. “What?”

“Yeah. Worst fucking thing.”

“What happened?”

I sigh and rub the back of my neck, remembering. “I had a, uh, job interview later that day...” It was an assignment to steal my first car, but she doesn’t need to know that, “...and I had a bunch of nervous energy, so I went for a run. I had my music on, wasn’t paying attention, and at the last second I saw this skunk scurrying across the path, three little baby skunks in front of her. I came to a halt but it was too late—she turned tail and sprayed me. Horribly. Intensely. It was awful. If you could die from a smell, I’d be dead.”

Aster’s laughing her head off. “What about the interview? Did you go?”

I grimace. “Yeah. I went. I read online that tomato juice helps with the smell, so I bought a dozen tins of juice, filled the tub, and sat in there for an hour. It didn’t help at all. I had a red tinge when I went to the interview, which lasted all of two minutes.”

That part’s true, too. Teddy covered his face and told me I stank, then gave me a piece of paper with the car information, told me to bring it to the garage in twelve hours, and instructed me to start wearing deodorant. He didn’t buy my skunk story.

“So you didn’t get the job?” Aster guesses.

“No,” I lie. “I didn’t get it.”

“Poor you.”

“Yeah.” I wait for lightning to strike me dead. “Poor me.”

We drive in silence for a minute, and I know Aster’s thinking she might get away with not answering the question. I consider giving her the out, but after another thirty seconds I say, “Your turn. I showed you mine; you show me yours.”

She huffs, then sighs in resignation. “Jerry never did anything wrong,” she says, picking at a spot on her jeans. “Like, really never did. And it wasn’t even annoying. He was just so good. He was always on time. Always called when he said he would, or if he was going to be late. He picked nice restaurants and let me decide what movies to watch. When we first met I had a sore neck because I’d been sleeping in a lumpy bed all summer, and when he learned about it he bought me one of those foam things for my mattress and a special pillow.”

“He just wanted to get into your bed.”

She shrugs. “At least my neck stopped hurting.”

“So he’s punctual and generous. That’s not unheard of.” I can be punctual and generous, if that’s all it takes.

“Imagine if you’d gone to that job interview, and it was a job on Wall Street that was going to pay you a million dollars a year,” she says. “And you walked in smelling like ass and they shook your hand and hired you anyway. That’s unheard of.”

“That’s different,” I argue. “You don’t smell like ass. Any guy would want you. Jerry’s not remarkable, he’s alive.”

Aster arranges her empty cup in the holder between us, stalling before she answers. “He was special to me,” she says softly.

My heart twists in my chest. One day in second grade I came home from school and didn’t see our dog tied up on the porch like normal. When I asked my dad where she was, he didn’t bother to lie and say she ran away, he said he gave her to someone as collateral on a loan he’d taken out. When he paid it back, we’d get the dog back.

I had to see another family walking Daisy around town for the next eight years.

So I know how Aster feels. And now I know how my dad felt when I sobbed myself to sleep, punished for someone else’s bad judgment and selfishness.

“How old are you?” I ask, changing the subject.

She lets me. “Twenty-one. You?”

“Twenty-two. I worked for a year before I came here.” I’d actually been on parole and not allowed to leave the state of Oregon, where I grew up, but close enough. “Point is, you’re young. And if you want to work on Wall Street, there’s someone out there who’ll hire you.”

“I don’t want to work on Wall Street.”

“I know. What do you want to do?”

“I want to be a divorce lawyer.”

I assume she’s kidding, then sober when I realize she’s serious. “Oh—really?”

“Yep.”

“Are your parents married?”

She slants me a look that says the topic’s off limits. “No. Yours?”

I give her a look that says the answer may be different, but the unpleasantness is the same. “Yep.”

Her lips quirk and she peers through the windshield. “Great day for a wedding.”