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good-bye party. It seemed so simple, so foreign. In the face of my parents’ deaths, it was strange to think that things like parties were still taking place. I smiled and threw my arms around Annie again, speaking into her hair. “I’m going to miss you so much.”
    Behind her loomed a tall silhouette of someone I had barely allowed myself to think about. Wes. Annie gave me a coy look and turned to talk to some of our friends as he approached me.
    “Surprise,” he said softly.
    He looked like he had just stepped out of a surfing catalog, his frayed shorts and faded T-shirt blowing casually against his body in the breeze. Just the sight of him made me nervous. I swallowed and smoothed out my bangs, hoping I didn’t look like I hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in a week, even though that was the truth.
    “You look great,” he said.
    I blushed. “Thanks.”
    “I was worried about you.”
    “It was really”—I tried to find the right words—“busy. I didn’t mean to—”
    “Don’t worry. You don’t have to explain.”
    I let out a sigh of relief. Wes had an unbelievable way of making things easier.
    “Take a walk with me?”
    I nodded, and he slipped his hand in mine.
    We wove through the crowd of people, saying hi to everyone as we passed. It was overwhelming to think that they had all come just to say good-bye to me. After walking across the field, we reached the bleachers and climbed up to the top row, the metal popping beneath our sneakers. Wes tried to talk about the summer, about soccer, about school, but I couldn’t think of anything to say back to him. So I told him about Gottfried instead.
    “So it’s just a different school, right?” Wes said after an awkward silence. “We can still see each other.”
    “It’s in Maine.”
    “Oh,” he said, and went quiet. “Well, you’ll be home for breaks. We’ll talk. And before we know it, it’ll be summer again.”
    Voices floated up from below on the night breeze. Those people were part of a world I could never go back to again. I couldn’t talk to them about school and sports and classes anymore; that place was gone for me, buried with my parents. I wanted to tell Wes that I missed my parents so much my insides ached; that I felt so alone I couldn’t eat or sleep because I didn’t see the point in it anymore. I wanted to tell him about the way my parents had died and how scared I was that there was someone out there evil enough to have taken them away from me. I wanted him to say that I couldn’t leave, that he would save me from my grandfather and we could run away together.
    Wes asked me if I was cold, and wrapped his sweatshirt around me. We sat in silence, listening to our friends laughing, wishing it wasn’t our last night together, both trying to convince ourselves that if we wanted it badly enough, we could will everything away. I was afraid to speak; afraid I would ruin the delicateness of the moment.
    “I’ll miss you,” he said finally.
    It wasn’t an answer to all of my questions, but it was enough. “I’ll miss you—” I started to say, but he placed a finger over my lips. His skin was warm, his upper lip beading with sweat. I gazed at him, curious, confused. He laced his fingers in mine, and before I could close my eyes, he leaned forward and kissed me. A cool, wet kiss that tasted of summer, of dew and freshly cut grass, of all the things that now seemed too simple to be real.
    That was my last night in California.
    We landed in Massachusetts, where Dustin was waiting for us. I squeezed into the backseat of my grandfather’s custom Aston Martin, and Dustin drove us through the New England countryside, snaking over hills and ravines, through vast areas with nothing but trees for miles.
    “This is western Massachusetts,” my grandfather said. “The home of the Transcendental movement.”
    Transcendental? It sounded vaguely familiar from English class. Emerson, maybe, or Thoreau? I couldn’t remember, and I