Free Harder by Robin York

fine. I can go live my life the way I want now
. It’s not going to happen, any more than I’m ever going to get my sex pictures off the Internet. You can’t wait for it to happen. What you have to do is find a way to get out from under it, knowing it’s never going away. You have to make your own life, because if you don’t, you just won’t get to have one at all, and that’s the worst fucking thing I can imagine.”
    He makes a sound in his throat. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know how he feels, but this is the only chance I’ll get. I’m going to lay it all down in front of him, because
he
taught me how to cut through the bullshit, and it’s one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned.
    “You know, that’s the thing that made me cry the hardest last night, even after what you did to me? Even with how mad I am, how fucking gross I feel every time I even look at your mouth or think about hearing what I heard—thinking about how
you made me hear it
—it’s even worse to think I’m going to leave and you’re going to drive back to Silt and die there. Die there every day.”
    I swipe at my face. Mascara all over my hand. What a disaster.
    “It’s sick, you know that?” I say. “This heart of mine, limping along?”
    “I don’t get it,” he says. “I don’t get why you’re being …”
    “Because I love you. I don’t want to, okay? I think there are some things that are so hard, you shouldn’t have to do them, only no one can take them from you. There are feelings so sick, so obviously unhealthy, you shouldn’t have to feel them. But there they are. I still love you, and I’m not ever going to see you again, not
ever
. You did that to us. Not your dad or your family, just
you
. So I could hit you. I could rage at you right now, and call you every ugly name I know, and I know a lot. I could tell you how much I’m hurting, or I could get out of the car, slam the door, hitchhike to the airport because fuck you, fuck you,
fuck you, West, how could you do this to me? How?
”
    He wipes his palms up the back of his head. Drops his forehead onto the steering wheel and covers his face with his forearms.
    “What I can’t do is pretend I don’t know what you did,” I say. “Or pretend I don’t still care about you.”
    I look one more time at him. All of him. His lowered head and his shoulders, his torso wrapped in a blue T-shirt, those long legs sticking out of his shorts.
    We’re so far from where we were when we met.
    Lost in the wilderness, and there isn’t any way back.
    “Don’t waste your whole life,” I tell him. “You’re not going to get another one.”
    Collapsed over the wheel, he turns the ignition.
    I can hear him breathing. Thick, deep breaths.
    It’s five full minutes before he’s got it under control.
    I’m calm now. Emptied out.
    When he lifts his head, he flips open the glove compartment, careful not to touch my knee, and extracts his cigarettes. The lighter is out of reach.
    I pluck it out and give it to him.
    I find his bracelet in my purse and leave it in the glove box while he watches. It looks like a child’s token.
    “Give up the fucking cancer sticks, too,” I say.
    When he exhales smoke out the window, I watch it disappear into the sky.
    I remind myself that this place we’re in now—every green thing I see—all of this came after the fire and ash.
    There’s hope in the world.
    I just have to find it.



West
    Fade to black.
    That was my plan.
    Some fucking plan.
    Caroline left the morning after my dad’s funeral. I spent the next four weeks in Silt, and the screen of my personal Wild West movie was supposed to darken from the edges to the middle until there was nothing left but a quarter-size hole, a nickel, a dime, nothing.
    Show’s over. Welcome to the rest of your life. Enjoy your time in this paradise of emotional numbness.
    Drink some beers. Fuck some chicks. Rock on.
    I was delusional. I can only guess, now, that my delusions