“It’s one of the top five prep schools in America. This lady from Alabama named Adriana Vu, who made hundreds of millions in biotech, went to Middleford. She donated a shitload of money to the school to fund this amazing lab and STEM program. She contacted me and said she’d talked to Middleford and she’d pay for me to go there.”
We let ourselves forget the inevitability of things. I guess it makes us feel in control over our lives. And I’d let myself forget that no one with a mind like Delaney Doyle’s stays in one place forever. Much less a place like Sawyer, Tennessee. The only thing worse than her leaving would be her staying.
She starts to put the side of her thumb to her mouth. Stops. Squeezes her eyes shut and sits on her hand again. “I told her I wouldn’t accept unless she could make it happen for you too. Said we’re a package deal. So she said okay, and so did Middleford.”
My brain replays her words, like when you’re watching TV half-asleep and you’re not sure you heard something right. “What?”
“I told her I wouldn’t go unless you could come with me. Said it would be too hard to go alone to a new boarding school junior year, where everyone’s got their friends already. So she came through. Full scholarship. Just like mine. Middleford said okay too. You can come with me.”
I scrutinize her face for some hint of a joke. But neither the timing nor the nature of the joke is her normal sense of humor. “Come on.”
“I wanted to pick a better time to tell you, but.”
“Is this for real?”
Delaney looks away, out her window. Watching the people milling around in front of the store. “Yep.”
“You’re gonna go, right?”
“I don’t want to go alone. That was true when I told her that.”
“You saying that if I don’t go, you won’t?”
“I said I don’t want to.” Delaney toys with the end of her ponytail.
“That’s what you meant when you said we might not have to worry about Cloud.”
“Yeah.”
I stare out the window for what feels like a long time. “You know my papaw’s not good.”
“Yeah,” Delaney says quietly. “That would still be a thing if you stayed.”
Silence falls between us like an axe sinking into wood.
“I didn’t earn this,” I murmur.
“Whatever,” Delaney replies. “Without you I never could have found that mold. You were as important as the microscope I looked through.”
“Is this even a thing? People who deserve scholarships getting them for friends who don’t?”
“Athletes do it. This hot-shit basketball player named DeMar DeRozan told USC he wouldn’t accept a scholarship unless they gave one to his best friend. So they did. It’s not like you don’t deserve to be there. You’ve gotten good grades.”
“At Sawyer High.”
“Still.”
“This was never remotely part of my plan.”
“You had a plan?”
“I mean…no.”
After our laughing subsides, I say, “Know what the farthest north I’ve ever been is? Bristol damn Virginia. Papaw took me to a NASCAR race when I was little.”
Delaney giggles. “Johnson City for me.”
A convoy of three black Dodge Sprinter vans pulls into the gas station. In the weeks since Delaney’s discovery was announced, Sawyer’s been crawling with rented vans full of men and women laden with caving gear. Can’t exactly patent something that grows in a cave, Delaney explained, so they’re all coming for their piece: The universities. The pharmaceutical companies. The Gates Foundation. Delaney told me the other day that she served a team of French biologists at DQ. They had no idea who she was.
“Don’t tell me you’re only going to do this if I do it. Don’t be telling me that,” I say.
Delaney eyes the people getting out of the vans. “They should try boiled peanuts while they’re here. Bet they don’t have boiled peanuts wherever they’re from.”
“Red.”
“Don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Mr. Hotchkiss is a good science teacher, and he does his best, but you need more than a key to a high school lab where the teacher has to buy microscopes with his own money. You need to do this.”
“So do you. There’s a big world outside East Tennessee. You don’t like it? You can always come back. Everything’ll still be here. You know that.”
“I’m happy here.”
Sometimes Delaney looks at me like my skull is transparent and she can see the thoughts forming on my brain’s surface. “There are ghosts here,” she says quietly.
There are indeed.
I’m dazed, like I just woke up from one of those long Sunday afternoon naps, when it’s a moment or two before you can remember where you are or even your own name. The light is waning. I glance at the time on my phone. “We better get you to Noah and Braxton’s.” I start my truck and jam it into gear. I pull out of the parking lot.
“You’re pissed,” Delaney murmurs. She starts to lift her thumb to her mouth, but we lock eyes and she grabs the end of her ponytail instead.
“Just don’t know what to think.”
“You still haven’t thanked me,” Delaney says after we drive for a while without talking.
I shake my head, defeated. “Thanks. I think.” None of this has quite sunk in yet. I know this because I’m feeling numb, rather than completely panicking at the thought of possibly losing her.
Delaney stares forward with an unreadable expression.
I’ve always thought she had a strangely elegant beauty. Of something being pulled in each direction toward perfect and broken. I once saw a bird that had been run down in the road. It lay there, pulverized. But the wind caught two of its feathers and lifted them free of the destroyed body, breathing life back into them. I watched those feathers dancing in the wind for a long time, such unexpected grace amid ruin.
Delaney reminds me of that. Couldn’t say why.
We met at a Narateen meeting a few years ago. It wasn’t the first time I’d ever seen her. We both went to Sawyer Middle School. She was considered a weirdo and a loner. No friends. Everyone vaguely understood that she was uncommonly intelligent. She wasn’t known for getting amazing grades, but when she showed up for class, she would perform so well on tests that—as she later told me—teachers accused her of cheating. She certainly wasn’t famous for her social skills or really much else, except spending a lot of time surfing the internet in the school library and hanging around the science lab. Rumor was she had a photographic memory (true). In another time, she’d probably have been called a witch (hell, maybe now too).