Free Places No One Knows by Brenna Yovanoff Page B

obligation. I think maybe if a person is asking—
begging
—for attention, it’s because they need it.
    When I leave the kitchen, I can almost feel my mother’s eyes flick to the doorway after me. She knows I’m not there anymore—it’s not that the information hasn’t registered. It just doesn’t mean anything.
    In my room, I dust a pair of crickets with mineral powder and feed Franny and Zooey, watching them stalk delicately around their terrariums.
    After the carnage, I sit with my knees drawn up and my physics notes scattered around me. I consider lighting the candle again—whether I should, whether it’s safe. Whether I imagined what happened on Friday. If it’s even possible to just
imagine
something as inarguable as a pile of dirt in your bed.
    Maribeth would say that anything is possible if you set your mind to it. Except she’s talking about acing the SAT, not late-night interlocational travel. I try to picture what she’d say if she knew I dreamed a dream so real I woke up with mud on my feet.
    Maribeth has always been a believer in the power of persistence in the face of ambiguity. Don’t understand a social situation or a sample set in pre-calc? No problem. Learn by doing. Want to be one of the most powerful girls in school, but don’t know how to get there? Enlist a friend’s help, devise a system and a plan, never look back. Pedal to the metal, full speed ahead, you’ll figure it out. One thing follows another.
    But I know something else, and it is this:
    The world is under no obligation to be sane or orderly.
    There was a regional meet in Baker once, freshman year, and the whole cross-country team stayed up way past curfew, crammed into a block of group-rate hotel rooms, eating Skittles and talking about who’d done it and who hadn’t, the
it
in this context being sex. (It always is.)
    I’d been rattling all day and was just getting worse. No one was remotely close to sleep, and I was beginning to feel jagged, like if I didn’t get away, I was going to fly into shards like a dropped cup.
    I took a dollar bill and a keycard. I went out to get a Coke and then kept going. My ears were ringing, my hands were tingling, and I walked faster. Out in the porte-cochere, the bellhops were wrestling with people’s luggage, hurrying to get it off the curb because it looked like rain. Over the street, the clouds were dark and towering.
    My pajamas were a rayon shorty set with tiny ducks all over them. I should have been shivering, but the sidewalk was warm. The wind gusted as I stepped off the curb. The street felt gritty under my bare feet and I started to run.
    I’d gone six blocks when the lightning started, cutting the sky into a blinding network of cracks like a broken windshield, and I understood I was doing something reckless—dangerous, even. But it’s so hard to tell when something’s actually dangerous, or if it just feels that way.
    I came around the turn at the end of a wide, residential street, and the sky seemed to open in one colossal thunderclap, so close the pavement shuddered. For a second, the world lit up white, and in an instant, the street was full of moths. They came plunging down out of the trees and surging up from the wheel wells of parked cars, like the night had exploded around me in tiny silver pieces. Then the wind tore down through the street, scattering leaves and branches. Scattering the moths. Thunder clapped like hands, and they were gone.
    Afterward, I never knew if they were there at all, or something I’d told myself to make the night seem magical, or just my eyes. I raced myself back to the Hyatt. No one had noticed I was gone. I wiped the grit off my feet and climbed into the bed I was sharing with Kendry, not sure if the memory was real or imaginary. If I’d even gone out into the storm at all.
    I push my homework out of the way and get out the candle. This is the world, and nothing in the world is ever truly inexplicable. But my heart beats harder just