Free High and Dry by Sarah Skilton Page A

and sushi.
    For our first date, at her request, I’d taken her to Wahoo’s Fish Taco.
    I’d been wolfing my food down, but she’d kept rotating her plate, taking a bite from each section of rice, guacamole, and taco, and when I asked her why, she said she was trying to plan it so she ended with a piece of avocado. She’d decided in advance what shewanted the last bite to be; she liked to end her meal on just the right note.
    I ate that way now. Sometimes. Just because it reminded me of her.
    She wasn’t my alcohol; she never had been. She was my water, the thing I’d been thirsting for, the thing that would save me.
    But how do you hold on to water? It never stops moving. It flows away, it changes shape, it returns to its source.
    It evaporates.

IN THE BACK OF THE BUS
    THE NEXT DAY, TUESDAY, I WONDERED IF BRIDGET WAS RIGHT . That I didn’t move fast enough, hadn’t moved fast enough with Ellie. But we’d talked about it—a lot. Neither of us wanted empty sex, or stressful sex, or covert, rushed sex in a car or on the couch while her parents and brother were out. We didn’t want all the time we’d spent together, all the hours we’d talked on the phone, to end up being nothing more than a prelude to Getting It On. I was afraid if we did it, the whole relationship would become about sex, the way it had with Bridget and me.
    Bridget was the kind of girl you dated because everyone else seemed to want her. I’d loved the idea of her, and I’d loved having a girlfriend, but I was never
in
love with her. She was pushy and abrasive, and she was always pointing out my supposed flaws. We went parking at Devil’s Punchbowl hiking preserve on our first date, and when I walked her to her door, she made fun of me for not getting to second base. I didn’t think it was okay to just go ahead and grab a girl’s tits. I figured you had to build up to it. She decided I needed coaching and I was a willing student, but when she showed me the condom in her purse a few weeks later, I didn’tfeel excited; I felt dread. We’d barely been together a month. I didn’t want to have sex with someone I wasn’t in love with, at least, not for my first time, so I told her no thanks, and she was insulted, so she broke up with me.
    When Ellie moved here, I knew instantly what I’d been missing. We moved slowly, but that was hotter because instead of feeling rushed, like I had with Bridget, I felt like Ellie and I were testing boundaries
together
. I just wanted her to be happy and relaxed, and I didn’t care if sex happened in a month or a year.
    Bridget didn’t think I was aggressive enough, and Ellie thought I was too aggressive (at least, on the soccer field). How the hell was someone both too much and not enough?
    Like a cat with burrs on its back, I tried to shake my dark musings loose, but some of them stuck. If we’d had sex, would Ellie still have broken up with me? Or would we have been tied together in some stronger way that was more difficult to undo?
    At breakfast, my dad shoveled in his Shredded Wheat like he was halfway out the door, so I asked quickly, “Did the sheriff’s department call with an ETA about when I can get Amelia back?”
    â€œNot until Thursday. And I can’t drive you this morning because I’m already late for a faculty meeting. Sorry.”
    Maybe this makes me sound like I was still drunk, but for the first time since my car had been impounded, it dawned on me what the situation really meant.
    It meant—oh Jesus God—I had to take the bus.

    I hadn’t ridden the bus to school in two years. I wasn’t even sure where it picked people up. Squinting in the January sunlight, I looked in both directions and saw a couple of underclassmen hunched over their smartphones across the street and down a block.
    I adjusted my backpack and strolled over to wait in line, trying to look like I