Chapter Two

On a calendar in his room, Gus was tracking the days until he got his driver’s license: November 6, his sixteenth birthday, dangling in the distance like a beacon. His eagerness was a little bit about gaining his freedom, but mainly, he just couldn’t stand riding the bus anymore.

It was a long, slow ride, the air heavy with the fruity perfumes and musky colognes of girls and boys eager to attract one another, combined with the pungent odor of the kids who couldn’t afford daily showers, let alone designer fragrances. Add in the pervasive scent of vinyl—and the threat of slicing yourself open on one of the many seats that featured torn vinyl—and it was a nauseating experience. Thankfully, it was still summer, and Gus usually won his battle with the finicky bus windows. A little ventilation took the edge off the bus bouquet.

Ridge Road was narrow, so the bus had to stop and start any time another car came along. This was much more frequent in the morning than at night. And they had to pick up all the other kids on the route, which slowed them down even more.

Unionville was less than ten miles away, an easy twenty minutes by car, even on these back roads. On the bus it was an hour-long slog—two hours, once you added in the return trip in the evening. He had tried killing time doing his homework or reading, but the bumpy roads meandered up and down hills. It made him sick.

Freshman year it hadn’t been so bad. He could use the two hours for time alone with his thoughts. But since August, his thoughts were about one thing, and stuck on the bus, away from The Spot, they were more infuriating than enlightening.

Gus could have shared a seat with a friend, which would have passed the time more easily, except he didn’t particularly like any of his bus-mates. Gus had hoped Deb would give him a lift in his car, but since Deb and Meghan had started dating, Deb was not the least bit interested in lugging Gus along. Mom wouldn’t make him, either, because Deb had bought his old Ford Focus himself, from saved-up allowances over the years. Gus also planned to use allowance savings to buy his first car come November, so as much as he wanted to complain, he kept his mouth shut. Gus wouldn’t want Mom forcing him to drive anyone around.

Gus had his eye on a particular vehicle: Dad’s 2001 Ford F150 pickup truck, bought used in 2011, but still silver underneath a layer of dusty work. He didn’t want Mom to give it to him. He wanted to buy it. There was a problem, though, and it wasn’t Mom. The truck was a manual transmission. Gus didn’t know how to drive a stick, and didn’t know who would teach him. Besides, Mom would probably sell the truck before November. No need to keep a truck worth $3,000 or so (Gus had looked up the blue book value) when no one could drive it, despite its sentimental value.

Gus slumped in his bus seat and stared mindlessly at the green hills of West Virginia, just as he did every day. The hills were beautiful—Gus knew they were—but you can only stare at the same scenery so many times until you’re not really seeing it anymore. It was the same view going to school and coming back, for two hours every day. Nothing ever changed.

Unionville High School was a study in renovation. Arriving buses first passed the hundred-year-old field house, essentially a stone castle with an old basketball court inside. As the buses continued left to right, the building gradually advanced through the twentieth century, culminating in the new arts wing and even newer sports complex. At the far end, buses disappeared into the parking lot behind the building, where they dropped off their student cargo.

As he entered the school near the main office, Gus could see Meghan Bartlett down the hallway, transferring textbooks from her backpack to her locker. Whenever Gus spied Meghan, it was pure cinema: her luscious black hair seemed to sweep and swell like she was in a shampoo commercial. The school hallway was a wind tunnel, but its gusts touched only Meghan’s onyx locks.

Meghan’s mother was Black, a point only relevant because practically no one else in Unionville, West Virginia, was. As best Gus could ascertain, Meghan’s mother had died a few years ago. It wasn’t something Meghan talked about much, but then, she and Gus hadn’t had any lengthy conversations.

Gus was not the only guy enamored of Meghan, as a glance around the hallway would confirm. In fact, there were at least two girls equally enthralled with her. But for Gus, the cinematic sequence always ended abruptly with his brother lumbering into frame.

Deb planted a light kiss on Meghan’s cheek. Meghan smiled and caressed Deb’s face.

Gus knew he would never have a shot with Meghan. She was a year older than Gus—a junior—and she was obviously going to prefer the senior “star athlete” Deb to the sophomore “not-star nerd” Gus.

But even though he wasn’t on Meghan’s radar, the simple maturity of her caress still struck him. Before Meghan dated Deb, Gus had assumed she fit his idea of a cheerleader stereotype: basic, extra, and dumb. But now he knew she didn’t. For one thing, basic extra dumb people don’t take a week off from school to attend to every need of her boyfriend and his family while they mourn.

Meghan was put-together, poised. Strong. Sharp. Gus couldn’t figure out what she saw in Deb, but he knew it wasn’t just the athleticism.

It should also have occurred to Gus that, perhaps, none of the cheerleaders fit his skewed and sexist idea of a cheerleader, and that he should abandon the stereotype altogether. Alas, it didn’t.

Deb gathered Meghan’s history books—Gus knew they were history books because he shared first period with Meghan. She took Deb’s free hand and led him down the hall, toward Gus.

The most infuriating thing about Deb wasn’t that he was oblivious to Dad’s death, and it wasn’t that he wouldn’t give Gus a ride to school. It was that, as much as Gus hated to admit it, Deb was completely decent to Gus.

“What’s up, bud?” Deb extended his fist. Gus bumped it.

“You know, long time on the bus.” Gus couldn’t resist a subtle dig at Deb for refusing him a ride.

Meghan gave Gus a playful shove. “Two more months, huh?”

Gus swallowed hard. He didn’t understand what she meant, and he was terrified of making a fool of himself. He stammered, “Two months?”

“Your birthday, twerp,” Meghan laughed. “Take that whole driver’s test thing? Get a license? Run down squirrels and pedestrians?”

Meghan knew when his birthday was? Gus was flattered and a little weirded out. What did she and Deb talk about, anyway?

“Yeah, if I pass the test,” Gus answered. “Dad’s not….”

Meghan flinched almost imperceptibly and Gus hesitated. Deb didn’t notice, possibly on purpose.

Gus changed direction. “I mean, Mom isn’t gonna wanna teach me how to drive.”

This time, Deb heard. “You know how to drive. You drive the tractor.”

Tractor. Another word nobody wanted to hear.

“It’s totally different,” Gus said.

“Yeah. Car’s easier. There’s only one brake and there’s no clutch or gears or anything.”

Perhaps, Gus could have explained that the vehicle he wanted did have a clutch and gears and everything. Or better yet, perhaps he could have just nodded and said nothing. But unfortunately, Gus hadn’t heard anything after “easier.” That word triggered a spasm in his gut, as well as a short-circuit in his brain that switched off all sense of reason.

“What do you mean, easier?” Gus’s tone caught Deb’s attention. “If driving a tractor was so easy, how did Dad wind up under it?”

Deb looked like he’d been slapped. Gus stole a glance at Meghan, who was looking determinedly the other direction. She waved at a cheerleading friend a dozen lockers down.

The spasm in Gus’s gut passed, and his brain resumed normal operation. In the cold light of reason—and the warm glow of empathy—Gus had no idea why he had reacted so harshly. He supposed it was because Deb didn’t miss Dad enough, or didn’t appear to. But Gus still regretted the outburst.

After a moment’s silence, Deb mumbled, “That’s a helluva thing to say.” He didn’t sound pissed, and he didn’t sound hurt. It was closer to disappointment.

Gus tried to rationalize his tantrum, though the words sounded hollow, even to him. “You don’t understand. You had Dad to teach you how to drive. Who’s going to teach me?”

“Do what you always do.” A slight grin at the corner of Deb’s mouth told Gus he was forgiven, or at least that Deb was letting it go. “I’m sure the library’s got a driving book.”

To his surprise, Gus saw Meghan was beaming at Deb. He had no idea why. Deb hadn’t said anything particularly funny, or profound, but there wasn’t any doubt about it: Meghan adored Deb.

“I can’t read while I’m driving,” Gus quipped, but it was obvious that neither Deb nor Meghan heard him. They were sharing a moment.

Meghan suddenly wheeled from Deb to Gus, almost catching Gus gawking at her. “Did you write the Seven Years’ War thing for Mrs. Miller yet?”

“Some of it. How many pages did she say it had to be?”

As Meghan pulled her notebook from under Deb’s arm, Mark Skinner, the star quarterback, strutted by and slapped Deb’s backside. “Nice ass, Marsha!”

Deb joked back. “Least I can tell mine from my face, Skins.”

Mark Skinner guffawed so loudly that the whole hallway turned to look, which of course was exactly what Mark wanted them to do. Part of Gus couldn’t comprehend the testosterone-fueled stupidity of jock talk. The other part of Gus desperately wished someone would include him in it.

Meghan pointed to her notes. “Doesn’t say pages. A thousand words.”

“How many pages is that?” Gus asked.

“Two? Fifteen? A million? I don’t know.” Meghan was no help.

Gus tried working it out. “Double-spaced, maybe what, three hundred words on a page? Four hundred?”

“You can just track the word count, you know,” Meghan teased. “You don’t need to know how many pages.”

Deb interrupted. “I could stand here and listen to you nerds talk words and pages and fonts and margins, or I could escort my lovely girlfriend to class.”

“This particular nerd is your girlfriend, jerk,” Meghan smiled.

“And the other nerd wants to remind you that jocks aren’t supposed to know what ‘fonts’ or ‘margins’ are.” Gus didn’t want to like his brother, but damn it, he just couldn’t help it.

Deb grinned. “Fonts and margins are the things you use to make it look like you wrote more than you did.”

Meghan was beaming again. It occurred to Gus that maybe what Meghan saw was that Deb was a nice guy. But didn’t girls always fall for the bad guy?

Meghan Bartlett. Breaking down Gus’s stupid stereotypes, little by little.

Judy Miller was Gus and Meghan’s first period history teacher.

Mrs. Miller had the aura of someone who believed in auras. She wore long skirts with floral prints, and her hair was always pleasantly untidy. She went out of her way during class to present “the other side of the story,” championing history’s underdogs and humanizing its villains. Behind her back, Coach Logan and his football staff—not known for their sense of social justice—called her a “libtard.”

Gus wasn’t sure what to make of Mrs. Miller. Since the first day of class, she treated him differently from the other students. In itself, that wasn’t unusual: everyone was handling him with kid gloves—his dad had just died. And even before Dad died, Gus’s relationships with some teachers were affected by Deb’s status as a star athlete.

Sometimes that was good, as when Coach Logan’s wife Mrs. Logan—she probably had a first name but Gus didn’t know it—took special care to make sure Deb’s nerdy younger brother didn’t feel overshadowed. Freshman year in Algebra II she would praise him in front of class at least three times a week. At first, his fellow algebra students dogged him about being Mrs. Logan’s pet, but he always deflected it with a laugh, so eventually they just laughed with him.

Sometimes, though, being Deb’s brother was bad. The Spanish teacher, Dr. Patty Lyell, loathed all things athletic. No one would ever mistake Gus for an athlete, but he was Deb’s brother, so Dr. Lyell took every available opportunity to go after him. Gus got a small measure of revenge when he Googled her and discovered that her doctorate was in psychology, not Spanish. Gus taught himself how to ask, in Spanish: If your doctorate is in psychology, shouldn’t Spanish students just call you Mrs. Lyell?

One day she finally annoyed Gus enough that he asked his prepared question, and he spent the next period in the principal’s office. His parents weren’t pleased, but they elected not to punish him once Deb confirmed how nasty Dr. Lyell could be.

With Mrs. Miller, though, it wasn’t like anything Gus had experienced. The way she observed him, the way she treated him. It was as though she was trying to figure something out, and Gus found it unnerving.

The class was American History from Jamestown to Appomattox, the first of two American History requirements at Unionville High. Three weeks, and they had already covered—and been tested on—Jamestown, the beginning of the American slave trade, the Mayflower, Puritans, and a bunch of explorers who claimed land for France, England, Spain, the Netherlands, and such. That was the curriculum, at least. Mrs. Miller made sure to address the history of native nations as well. That would have earned her a “libtard” from Coach Logan, but to Gus it seemed right to learn about the people the country was stolen from.

Mrs. Miller ended the class by discussing their Seven Years’ War papers, reiterating the thousand-word requirement and not mentioning pages. Gus assumed that was her way of thwarting “font and margin” rogues like Deb.

The bell rang, and Gus gathered his notes into his backpack. To his shock, Mrs. Miller called his name. “Gus, may I speak with you a moment prior to second period?”

It was almost never good when a teacher asked to speak with you, so Gus instinctively avoided it. “Trigonometry is all the way on the other end of the school, Mrs. Miller.”

“You’ll have a note,” Mrs. Miller said. “I doubt Hank will mind.”

Gus knew he was screwed. If Mrs. Miller was on a first-name basis with Mr. Peters, then she also knew that “Hank” wouldn’t care even if Gus didn’t have a note.

“Okay,” Gus shrugged. He carried his backpack to Mrs. Miller’s desk.

Meghan tapped Gus’s shoulder on her way out of the room. She raised her eyebrows conspiratorially, which Gus took to mean he would have to tell Meghan what this was all about when he sat with her and Deb at lunch.

After the other students left, but before any second-period students arrived, Mrs. Miller invited Gus to sit.

She studied Gus in silence a moment. Gus shifted and put his bag down, anything to fill the tense pause. When the silence become oppressive, Gus asked, “Did I do something wrong?”

Mrs. Miller shook her head. “No, though I believe your work is weaker than it once was.”

Gus sat up defensively. “What it once was? You haven’t even had me for month.”

“Teachers do speak with one another, you know,” Mrs. Miller said, and Gus slouched. “But I’m not overly concerned about your work. Even merely half your attention is sufficient to get by.”

Gus wasn’t sure whether this was a compliment or a reprimand, so he just glanced at her and nodded, then quickly looked away.

Another extended silence. Gus wondered where on earth her second-period students were. Shouldn’t someone be here by now to spare him this silent grilling?

Mrs. Miller took a deep breath. “This may be a bit too personal, and I apologize for that, but I must ask. Your father’s death is weighing very heavily on you, isn’t it?”

Gus thought that was more than a “bit” too personal, but he was trapped in her room. “He was my dad and I loved him. And it only just happened.”

Mrs. Miller nodded. “Of course, your grieving is perfectly justified. Of course.”

The repeated “of course” made Gus uneasy. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but suddenly he dreaded her.

Mrs. Miller continued. “It isn’t simply grief, though, is it? There’s something, some aspect, that has hold of you and won’t let go, am I right?”

Reflexively, Gus scooted his chair back a little. “If we need a psychologist, I could go get Dr. Lyell.”

Gus had hoped this dig would push the conversation in a different direction, but no such luck. Mrs. Miller simply smirked, betraying a hint of sarcasm beneath her all-things-love-all-things exterior. Obviously, she shared Gus’s opinion of Dr./Mrs. Lyell.

Gus glanced to the door, practically begging second-period students to arrive and let him off the hook. Following his eyes, Mrs. Miller grinned. “This is my planning period.”

Gus thought, Sweet God, so intensely he nearly said it. Partly, he was upset that no students were coming to save him. But mostly—how did she know what he was thinking?! Maybe her deduction wasn’t rocket science, but still….

Mrs. Miller studied him a moment more. She opened her top drawer and pulled out a notepad and pen.

“Here is your note for Hank, or I should say, Mr. Peters,” she said as she wrote. “I don’t wish to sound as though I were your mother, Gus, and I don’t presume to tell you how to live your life.”

She finished the note and tore it from the notepad. Gus reached for it, but Mrs. Miller didn’t hand it to him yet. Awkwardly, Gus pulled his hand back.

Mrs. Miller gestured with the paper as she spoke. “Grieving is to be expected. But you must be vigilant about obsession.”

“I don’t really know what you mean, Mrs. Miller.” Gus wanted the note so badly he was leaning toward her desk, but Mrs. Miller wasn’t budging.

“I believe you do.” Mrs. Miller’s eyes were burning, like she was gazing through him. “How much have you seen?”

A fiery wave of panic swept through Gus. How much did she know? Did she know he was desperately trying to figure out how Dad died? Probably. She seemed to have guessed that obsession. Did she know about his nightly visits to The Spot? Maybe, but Gus thought he was bordering on paranoia here. She wasn’t a mind reader… was she? Did she know he had hallucinated a tractor? Surely not. How could she? Gus didn’t even believe in the tractor himself. But she knew something—that much was obvious.

All Gus managed to squeak out was “Seen?”

Mrs. Miller allowed a few seconds to pass, then sighed through her nose. “Life is life and death is death, and those who have left us must be allowed to leave.”

“Okay, Mrs. Miller, I understand.”

Mrs. Miller was looking inside him, reading something that Gus couldn’t hide. “No, you don’t, but I am unable to make you understand, at least for today. Take this note, and tell Hank I said hello.”

Gus was on his feet with his backpack in world-record time. He snatched the note and bolted to the door.

“Though for heaven’s sake don’t refer to him as Hank,” Mrs. Miller called after him.

“I won’t,” Gus yelled, and burst out the door into the hall.

As he hustled to Hank’s—Mr. Peter’s—class, Gus replayed his conversation with Mrs. Miller. She knew about his obsession, and worse, it seemed she knew more about it than he did.

“That’s not possible,” Gus muttered. When he caught himself speaking aloud, he glanced around to see if anyone heard him. Lockers, floor tiles, bricks, but no people. He was alone.

Still, his next thought stayed only in his mind.

Over the course of the school day, Gus underwent an interesting transformation. What started as freaked out at first regressed to flat-out scared. But then, as Mr. Hank Peters explained sine and cosine, Gus’s mind ventured onto a new tangent. Mrs. Miller wasn’t just fishing for information. She knew something. From there, it was a simple jump of logic to there must’ve been some way for her to know. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know how she knew—she clearly did. And this meant that maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t hallucinated the tractor after all.

It was new hope—crazy hope, but hope nonetheless. Maybe his three weeks hadn’t been in vain. No longer scared, Gus couldn’t wait to get home and figure out how he had made the tractor appear. Was it the direction he had faced? Something in the sequence of his steps or his analysis? Could it be that the tractor was all in his mind? Not in a hallucinatory way: in a he-had-thought-about-it-so-much-that-it-was-manifesting way. Whatever that meant. Whatever the answers were—for that matter, whatever the questions were—the school day couldn’t end fast enough.

He was lost in thought all through third period Spanish II with Dr./Mrs. Lyell, and his mind was racing so fast as lunch began that he didn’t spot Meghan and Deb crossing the cafeteria toward him. Meghan plopped her tray down across the table. “What did Mrs. Miller want?”

It took Gus a moment to register what was going on. He shook his head to clear his thoughts. “Uh, something about the test.”

Meghan eyed Gus suspiciously, but Deb bought Gus’s clumsly lie. “Dude, you didn’t fail the test, did you?”

“Dude,” Gus mocked. “No. She just… one of my answers was so thought-provoking that she wanted to explore it with me.”

Deb stared at Gus like Gus was dancing the flamenco. From across the cafeteria, Mark Skinner called out, “Yo, Deb, ditch the nerd and get over here.”

“Better nerd than turd,” Deb called back, and Mark guffawed his trademark guffaw. Normally, Gus found Mark’s antics annoying, but this time he was grateful for the well-timed distraction.

Deb touched Meghan’s arm to lead her to Mark’s table, but Meghan stayed put. “Gus and I have a history project to work on,” Meghan lied. “I’ll be over in a minute.”

Deb was not difficult to fool. He kissed Meghan and joined Mark’s entourage.

Meghan sat down across from Gus. “You’re gonna need a fire extinguisher for your pants.”

Gus panicked—why was Meghan looking at his pants? He tensed and stole a glance at his crotch.

Meghan laughed uncomfortably. “Whoa, you’re out of it, aren’t you? You ever heard ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire’?”

Gus was part relieved, part humiliated. “Yeah, I guess I just heard ‘fire’ and freaked out. Sorry.”

Meghan squinted at Gus, genuinely concerned. “What did Miller do to you?”

Gus started to recount the conversation, then stopped cold. He couldn’t tell Meghan what Mrs. Miller had said without revealing his obsession with Dad’s death.

Meghan sensed his unease. “What’s wrong?”

Gus spoke cautiously, choosing his words like he was tiptoeing through a minefield. “She was concerned because Dad died.”

“That’s nice, I guess, but it’s not really her place.”

“No,” Gus said, “not really. And she wasn’t exactly concerned. Not for me.”

“Then what was she concerned about?”

At dinner a few months ago, Deb had told Dad and Mom that Meghan was considering law school after college. Gus wasn’t surprised he felt cross-examined right now, but he didn’t like it much. “Look, I don’t know. This isn’t really your problem anyway.”

Gus immediately regretted snapping at Meghan, but she wasn’t angry. “Don’t tell me anything that makes you uncomfortable. But you can seriously tell me anything.”

Gus was disarmed by her unexpected gentleness. “You can’t—I mean seriously, you cannot tell anyone about this.”

Meghan leaned forward. “Not even Deb?”

“What do you think?” Gus asked.

“I don’t like keeping secrets from him,” Meghan said, frankly.

“Then I can’t tell you.”

Meghan bit her lip for a moment, then hmmphed. “I won’t tell him. What’s going on?”

Gus told Meghan everything. About the three weeks, about the tractor, about Mrs. Miller’s prescience, everything. Though he was intensely aware of how absurd it all sounded, it was an enormous relief to be able to articulate what he’d been bottling up inside. If Meghan thought he was crazy, she didn’t show it.

When he finished, Meghan folded her hands. “Mrs. Miller is right. Obsessions aren’t a good thing.”

Gus’s face fell. “Great. You’re on her side.”

“No, I just felt I had to say that first. Sort of a, what is it? Disclaimer?” Now Gus saw that Meghan was all about this. Her eyes were wide and practically on fire. She was so into it that it made Gus a little nervous. Maybe jealous, too, in a weird way: this was his obsession, and he wasn’t eager to share it, even with Meghan. He didn’t need a sidekick.

“It’s probably nothing,” Gus backpedaled. “A delusion for me and some lucky guesses from Mrs. Miller.”

“How can you tell me all that and then say it’s nothing?” Meghan challenged him. “It’s something, I know that much. I don’t know what, but it’s something for sure. Can I come out with you?”

This was exactly what Gus didn’t want. “It’s been tough enough convincing Mom and Deb that I’ve suddenly taken up exercise. I think they’ll notice if you and I take twilight strolls together.”

“I’ll have to break up with Deb and date you instead,” Meghan joked.

“And the cheerleader dating the nerd wouldn’t raise any suspicion at all.”

“Do you think that matters to me?” Meghan scolded. Gus had hit a nerve he hadn’t meant to. “If I wanted to date you, I wouldn’t care what anyone else thought about it.”

“Sorry,” Gus said. “I just meant that you can’t go into the field with me.”

“I can’t leave your house with you,” Meghan plotted. “I could meet you in the field. You said you can’t see the house from there, right?”

“Every night you’re going to drive five miles to our place, park hidden in the woods, and sneak out into our pasture to meet me?”

“Maybe not every night,” Meghan answered, and Gus saw she meant it. If he wanted to keep this obsession to himself, he’d have to lock her in a basement or something.

“And if Deb wanders out and catches his little brother alone with his girlfriend next to a cow?”

“Deb is wonderful,” Meghan said, “and I love him. I mean, whatever love is, I think I love him, you know?” Gus was wildly uncomfortable with this turn in the conversation.

Meghan continued, “But you know him as well as I do—better than I do—and you know that if I told him I had been abducted by aliens and dropped off next to that cow, he’d say ‘glad you’re okay’ and that would be the end of it.”

Yep, Meghan knew Deb all right.

Meghan yanked out her phone. “What’s your number?”

Gus had occasionally pictured himself asking for Meghan’s number, but never the other way around. He enunciated his number precisely.

Meghan typed. “Cool. I’ll text you so you have mine.”

Gus didn’t tell her he already had her number: he had grabbed Deb’s phone over the summer and gotten it. Still, he enjoyed seeing his first text from Meghan pop up on his phone: It’s Meghan.

“Message me when you get home,” she said, then took her tray and crossed the cafeteria to Deb.

Gus certainly wasn’t happy with his current circumstances, but it wasn’t a terrible fate to be alone at night in a field with Meghan Bartlett.