Since You've Been Gone

“Emily,” Sloane called after me, half pleading, half annoyed. I didn’t let myself look back right away, just concentrated on walking away from my best friend, even though it was the last thing I wanted to be doing. After a moment, I turned back, and saw her smile as she pocketed her ID and stepped past the door guy into the darkness of the bar.

I sat in my car, and when the sedan outside my window slowed, I shook my head for what felt like the hundredth time that night. When people saw me in the driver’s seat, parked in an ideal spot, they all got really excited and turned on their blinkers, thinking I was leaving, any minute now. I would shake my head, and motion for them to go around me, but still they seemed wildly optimistic, sitting there with the lights flashing, waiting for me to give up the spot and go.

I had thought about it when I first got back to the car alone. I was just going to head home and let Sloane find her own way back, since she wanted to go to this bar so badly. I had even put the keys in the ignition, but hadn’t started the car, sat back against the seat and tried to sort through everything that had just happened, and so quickly. I realized there was a piece of me that had been waiting for this to happen ever since we’d become friends—the moment when Sloane would realize I wasn’t cool enough, or daring enough, to be her best friend. I knew at some point she would figure it out, and of course, tonight I’d given her ample proof.

I stayed in my car for two hours, occasionally playing games on my phone, then worrying about the battery, wanting to keep some juice in it in case she texted. Even though I’d put the keys in the ignition, I’d never really intended to leave. I didn’t at all trust Sam to come and get her, Milly and Anderson weren’t reliable enough, and I couldn’t even calculate how much a cab from Hartfield to Sloane’s house in backcountry would be. More than either of us had, that was for sure.

There was a knock on the passenger side window, and I shook my head without looking up from my phone. “I’m not leaving,” I called.

“Good to know,” Sloane said through the glass. I looked up and saw her standing by the passenger side door, and I reached over to unlock the car, and she got in. “Hey,” she said.

“Hi,” I said, sitting up straighter and setting my phone down. Things felt strange and tentative between us, in a way they never had, not even when we’d first met.

“Thanks for waiting,” Sloane said. She leaned forward, not meeting my eye, and pulled my iPod out of the glove compartment, hooking it up to the line in.

“Sure,” I said, hating how stiff and formal this seemed, wishing we could just go back to being us again. “Did you . . . have fun?”

“Yeah,” she said, glancing out the window. “It was okay. You know.”

I nodded and started the car, even though I didn’t know, and that was apparently the whole problem. We drove in silence, Sloane’s face lit up by my iPod screen as she flipped through the mixes she’d put on it, all her music. I swallowed hard as I turned the car onto I-95. I didn’t know how to fix this, what to say—I just wanted things to go back to how they’d been a few hours ago. “So what was it like?” I asked when I couldn’t stand the silence any longer. I could hear how high and forced my voice sounded, like my mother when she was trying to get Beckett to tell her about his day at school.

Sloane sighed and looked out the window. “Just don’t,” she finally said.

“Don’t?” I repeated, feeling my stomach sink.

“If you’d wanted to know what it was like, you should have come in with me,” she said, shaking her head as she spun the track wheel, going too fast now to even see any of the song names. “I mean, I put a lot of work into tonight. I bought our IDs, I planned the outfits, I arranged all this, because I wanted to see the band with you. Not by myself.”

I glanced away from the highway and at my best friend for just a moment. “Then why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I knew you wouldn’t have come!” Sloane almost yelled this, and I think it surprised us both, as silence descended in the car for a moment. “And I was right, wasn’t I?” I tightened my hands on the steering wheel, gripping ten and two as hard as I could, willing myself not to cry. “You’re so scared of things sometimes, and for no reason,” Sloane said, her voice quieter now. “And sometimes, I wish . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence, just let it hang in the car between us.

I wished it too—whatever it was that in that moment Sloane wanted me to be, that I was falling short of. I took a shaky breath and said, “I’m really sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said immediately, easily, and I knew she meant it. It was something that still amazed me about her—how quickly she was willing to forgive. Since everyone in my family—including the cat—was a grudge-holder, I couldn’t quite believe it sometimes.

“Next time, right?” I gave her a quick smile, and I could hear how I was forcing my voice to be cheerful. But Sloane just smiled back at me.

“Sure,” she said easily. She spun the track wheel once again and then clicked the center button, and “With You,” her favorite Call Me Kevin song, began to play.

“Did they play it?” I asked, nodding toward the stereo.

“Third song,” she said, as she smiled at me and settled back into her seat, tucking her legs up underneath her. “And I think it must not have been on the set list, because the drummer was totally off until the bridge. . . .”

She started talking me through the night, moment by moment, the adventure she’d had without me, pausing only to sing along to the refrain. And by the time the last chorus played, I had joined in.

“Penelope Entwhistle,” I muttered under my breath. I hadn’t had the same good luck this time, and I’d had to park in one of the ten-dollar lots. I’d gotten cash out of the ATM on the way over, when I’d realized halfway there that I couldn’t use my debit card, since the name printed on it wouldn’t match my ID.  And I had a feeling that leaving a paper trail was not the best idea, considering that I was about to break the law. “Penelope Entwhistle,” I said as I walked down the street on shaky legs toward McKenzie’s, trying to make it sound like it was a name I’d said for years and years. “Twenty-one Miller’s Crossing, Reno, Nevada. Eight nine five one five.”