Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

“Heard what?” I asked, but my stomach was already curdling.

“He’s gone,” Nina said.

It spread through the dining hall within minutes. The rumor was that Gabe had been asked to leave after he ditched our history exam, but that didn’t make sense — Mills would never expel someone because of such a minor transgression. Everyone asked me what had really happened, and the fact that I was just as clueless made me burn with resentment. How could he have told me nothing? I was convinced his departure had something to do with Keller, but I shared this with no one and couldn’t prove it even to myself. After dinner, I ran to Gabe’s room, but when I burst inside, it was empty: his bottom bunk stripped of sheets and his dresser bare. Beneath a pushed-up window, one open drawer rattled in the wind.

Hannah was the only one who wasn’t shocked by Gabe’s disappearance. The rest of our group picked over the rumors in the dining hall, hushing in sympathy when I sat down. But she was silent and evasive. One night, while doing homework in our room — Hannah sitting in the chair by the window and I in her bottom bunk, leaning against her enormous frog-shaped pillow — she swiveled abruptly to face me.

“I’m glad he’s gone,” she said. “There — I said it. Everyone acts like this whole thing is some Shakespearean tragedy, but he wasn’t exactly a great guy to begin with.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “You didn’t even know him.”

“Neither did you!” burst out Hannah. Her curly, corn-silk hair was wrapped in a towel; below it, her cheeks were the color of strawberries. “No one else will come out and admit it, but he was using you, Sylvie. You think it’s a coincidence that he only came over at night? That he left before you woke up the next morning?”

“We were talking , those nights,” I said, but Hannah only raised her eyebrows. “What? You think he was using me for sex?”

“He wouldn’t be the first guy to do it.”

“That’s a really shitty thing to say, Hannah.”

“I’m not saying it to hurt your feelings,” said Hannah. “I just don’t want you to look back through rose-colored glasses.”

It was one of our inside jokes, a phrase our English teacher favored. (“Now, it’s Gatsby’s nostalgia that gives him life, but it’s also what destroys him — he can’t help but look back through rose-colored glasses.”) But I didn’t laugh.

“I’m not,” I said.

I turned back to my math sets and looked down at them, hard. I could feel Hannah’s eyes on me.

“It’s not like you were in love with him, were you?” she asked.

A wave of heat washed through my body. My cotton pajamas felt like wool, and Hannah’s blanket was stifling. Hannah stared at me, but I couldn’t answer her; I pushed out of bed and ran to the bathroom in my socks, slowing as I passed the hall monitor’s office. At the sink, I splashed cold water on my face until the heat passed. I had never been in love before, and I couldn’t explain to Hannah how I knew I was now. But my love for Gabe was as tangible and recognizable as anything I had seen with my own eyes. Mr. Keller’s garden, for instance: its unlatched gate, its shapely darkness, and that strange doubled flower, so vivid a color it could be seen without light.

For months, I was sure I would hear from him. But he didn’t call or write, and my own calls to his mother’s house went unanswered — there was only her drawl on the machine, the cool beep, and then my own voice, cryptic, tentative (“Gabe, it’s me…”). It would have been easier to move on if I thought our relationship had been a fling, but I knew that wasn’t true. Our conversation in bed, that final night, was a hook in me; I returned to it again and again, searching for meaning I hadn’t found before, trying to tease it out of the skin.

Hannah and I returned to our old group of friends, but the girls on our hall seemed colorless and uninteresting now, their conversations petty. At mealtimes, I dragged my fork in circles until Hannah asked me if I was hypnotized. When I went home for winter break, I couldn’t sleep. I was groggy during the day, prone to mistakes that startled my family: I put scissors in the refrigerator, ketchup in the freezer, dishwashing soap in the laundry machine.

“It’s a breakup, Sylve,” said Rodney, “not the zombie apocalypse.”

But I couldn’t snap out of it. When I got back to school in January, I left my duffel on the floor and climbed onto my bunk, spreading my arms and legs like a starfish. With Gabe gone, there was too much space. It was raining outside, sloppy and plashing; when Hannah walked in, her hair was slicked to her cheeks. She stood in the doorway — huffing from the stairs, a puddle pooling at her feet — and looked at me with her eyebrows raised. Then she dropped her bags.

“Okay,” she said. “No.”

“No what?”

“No,” she repeated, climbing up the ladder to my bunk. “You are not doing this all semester.”

“You’re getting everything wet,” I said in protest.

“Try to stop me,” said Hannah, and then she was tickling me as I yelped for leniency, both of us laughing so hard the bed shook. “Come on, Sylvie. You don’t want to spend your last semester of high school as some miserable blob of longing.”

Over dinner, we plotted a self-betterment program. We took frigid runs before physics, dragging ourselves out of bed at six thirty, racing so fast downhill we were practically falling. We spent even more time in the workshop, using charcoal to draw our hands open, shut, twined together. Over spring break, we drove to her family’s farm in the Sacramento Valley. We sped down Route 101 with the radio turned all the way up, howling at the redwoods, sugar-high on Blizzards from the Petaluma Dairy Queen. Hannah’s sisters had all left home, so we had our pick of bedrooms in the farmhouse. During the day, we helped her mother, Ingrid, in the nut orchard. I preferred the almond trees: their hulls fuzzy and green as unripe peaches, their delicate ecology. They needed five years of pollination to bear fruit. It was our job to find and shuck the seeds, tapping each shell with a hammer until it split in two along the seams. At night, we spread out in the unused barn with our charcoals and worked in easy, simpatico silence.

There, I felt peaceful — not ecstatic or despairing, as I had with Gabe, but fine. Even content. It’s the physical sensations I remember most: the sun close as a hand pressed to my neck, the relief of a crack in the almond’s stone shell. Each nut was a small adversary, a minute-long accomplishment. By the time we left Sacramento, I had almost convinced myself it was possible to let go of him. I could live on my own, I thought, or on a farm with Hannah; maybe I didn’t need the highs and lows that came with love. Maybe this quietude — these small, daily pleasures — could be enough.

•••

That April, I got into UC-Berkeley, and I began to map the pillars and floorboards of my new life. I missed Gabe most in moments of camaraderie among us seniors — reading by the lake in early June, or crowding around someone’s computer, looking at photographs from a college visit. But I tried not to dwell on his absence, and with each month, it became a little bit easier to leave him behind.

By the time graduation came around, I had almost done it. After the ceremony, everyone congregated on the lawn in front of Keller’s house, eating cheese cubes and drinking out of plastic cups — champagne for the adults and sparkling cider for us. I stood with my parents and Rodney at a center table, talking with Mr. Keller, when I felt something soft brush against my leg.

I jiggled my foot, thinking it was the tablecloth. But then I felt it on my other leg, and when I reached down, I found a moving, velvety body, its muscles rippling against my calf.