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behind to the beat of “Long Train Runnin’.” J.C. is relentless and annoying, like the song, which she will never be able to listen to again.
    She thinks of Roland. This is his fault. Because of him, nothing is special.

She Leaves
    All year, Sam watches his sister leave.
    He watches her leave for school every morning—the same time as him, but not the same school.
    He watches her graduate, orange sash across her gown.
    After graduation she leaves for the beach. A week later she comes home sunburned and won’t talk to anyone.
    That summer she leaves every morning for her job at the library. She goes out after work every night, he doesn’t know where. Weeks go by when he doesn’t see her at all.
    At the end of summer she leaves for college.
    â€œWrite me letters,” she tells him.
    He does. In the beginning he writes to her almost every week.
    Dear Addie, we got a new TV with a remote control. Now Bryce can change his own channels .
    Dear Addie, they won’t let me try out for sports .
    Dear Addie, I took my bicycle apart, cleaned and lubricated all the parts and put it back together. It flies .
    Dear Addie, Bryce fell. In the kitchen. He hit his head on the counter. We picked him up and Claree put a cold washcloth on his head .
    Dear Addie, thanks for the sweatshirt. What exactly is a Spartan?
    Dear Addie, the Davenports came over for a cookout and Bryce set the poplar tree on fire .
    Dear Addie, they have a new rule at school. Everybody has to be in a club. I was in the chess club but there were only two of us and it got boring. I joined the travel club but we never traveled, we just sat around looking at slides. So my friends and I started our own club, the Apathy Club. For homecoming we made a banner, MAY THE BEST TEAM WIN. It won for Most Appropriate, but no one went to pick up the prize .
    Dear Addie, this time he fell in the street and Mr. Davenport had to help us bring him in .
    Dear Addie, when are you coming home?
    Dear Addie, I can’t wait to be the one who leaves .

Greensboro
    The university is forty minutes and a world away from Carswell.
    A world of books—at the heart of campus is a gleaming new library tower, big as God.
    A world of flyers—on every wall in every building, on every telephone pole on every street corner, flyers advertise readings and concerts and lectures and rallies and auditions and art openings and roommates wanted and things for sale, cheap.
    A world of rolling lawns and majestic shade trees and people reading, arguing, laughing, making out, working calculus problems, playing guitar, playing Frisbee, playing Hacky Sack. There’s always someone to talk to, someone to go to the new film festival at the Janus with, wander the bars of Tate Street with, smoke pot and eat Mexican food with. Addie is infatuated with all of them. Jimmy the physics major, who cooks her pancakes in his dorm room. Stephen, who does yoga and smells faintly of patchouli. Geoff with a G, who shows her his poetry, which is so raw and wild and charged she decides to give up trying.
    No one gives her the deep-down panic of real love, the jolt she always felt with Roland. But Roland would not fit in this place. She thinks of him only rarely, and with only the smallest tug of sadness—for him or for herself, she couldn’t say.
    She studies literature—the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, the Germans in translation. She studies history and Latin and logic, which she loves for its perfect reliability. She studies the philosophy of literature, the philosophy of science. All of her philosophy classes are taught by the same professor—a compact, muscular man with round glasses, neatly combed hair, and neatly pressed shirts tucked into neatly pressed pants. He never lectures without a piece of chalk in his hand and never strays too far from the board.
    He lectures about retrocausality. He draws pictures of the space-time continuum on the board to show how