Sarah Dessen (35 page)

I looked up to see my roommate, Angela, standing in the open doorway of our room. “Yeah?”

“Mail call.” She came over and sat down beside me, dealing out envelopes into two piles. “School crap. Credit card offer. Something from the Jehovah’s Witnesses . . . that must be yours. . . .”

“Finally,” I said. “I’ve been waiting for that forever.” Angela was from L.A., taught aerobics part-time, and never made her bed. She wasn’t a perfect match for me, but we got along okay.

“Oh, and this big one’s yours,” she said, sliding a large manila envelope out from under the calculus textbook she was carrying. “How’s the book?”

“It’s good,” I said, marking my page and shutting it. It was only a bound galley of Barbara Starr’s newest,
The Choice,
but already three girls on my hall had asked me to borrow it when I was done. I was thinking, though, that they would be surprised by the ending, just as my mother’s editor and publisher had been. I’d been a little shocked myself, reading the manuscript on the plane on the way out to school. I mean, in romance novels you just expected the heroine to end up with a man, some man, at the end. But Melanie, instead, made the choice of no choice, packing up her Paris memories and heading across the world to start anew with no lingering loves to hold her back. Not bad for an ending, I thought. It was, after all, the one I’d planned for myself, not too long ago.

Angela left the room, headed to the library, as I picked up the manila envelope and opened it, dumping its contents into my lap. The first thing I saw was a bunch of pictures, bound with a rubber band: the one on the top was of me, squinting, the sun bright in my face. There was something wrong with the picture, though: it seemed out of balance. There was also a blurred edge on the top, and a weird kind of afterimage splayed across the left side. They were all a bit off, I realized, as I flipped through them. Most of them were of Dexter, and a few of me, with several featuring John Miller. Some were of inanimate objects, like a tire or a tangerine, with the same defects. Finally, I realized what they were, remembering all those warped wedding cameras Dexter and the rest of them had been toting around most of the summer. So the pictures had come out, after all, just as Dexter had predicted. They weren’t perfect, though, as I’d maintained. In the end, like so much else, they were good enough.

The other thing in the envelope was a CD wrapped in cardboard, taped carefully. The label on it said RUBBER RECORDS, and, beneath that, in smaller letters, TRUTH SQUAD. I knew the first cut well: it was called “Potato Song, Part One.” I knew the second song even better.

I picked up my Walkman and slid on the headphones, pressing the CD in and hitting play. It made that little whirring sound, finding the tracks, and then I pressed past cut one, as I knew most people would eventually do, to call up the second song. Then I lay back across my bed, hearing the opening chords, and picked up the last picture in the stack.

It was of Dexter and me, at the airport, the day I’d left for school. The top edge was a bit blurry, and there was a weird sun-burst of color in the bottom right corner, but otherwise it was a good shot. We were standing in front of a window, and I had my head on his shoulder, both of us smiling. I’d been sad that day, but not in a final, end-of-story way. Like Melanie, I was heading off to my new world. But I was taking a part of my past, and the future, along with me for the ride.

The song was building in my headphones, the first words about to begin over the new, jazzy, retro-style start. I turned the picture over, and saw there was something on the back. Scrawled in black ink, smeared (of course), it said,
D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Austin . . . and you. I’ll be there soon.

I reached over and turned up the volume, letting Dexter’s voice fill my ears, smooth and fluid. And even though I had heard it so many times already, I still felt that little catch of breath as it began.

But for now, I just sat there on the bed and listened to my song. The one that had been written for me by a man who knew me not at all, now sung by the one who knew me best. Maybe it would be the hit the record company predicted, striking a chord in our collective past, prompting a wave of nostalgia that would carry Dexter and the band everywhere they’d ever dreamed. Or maybe, no one would hear it at all. That was the thing: you just never knew. Right now, though, I wanted not to think forward or backward, but only to lose myself in the words. So I lay back, closing my eyes, and let them fill my mind, new and familiar all at once, rising and falling with my very breath, steady, as they sang me to sleep.

a cognizant original release september 29 2010