Alright, chat. I did it. I actually did it. It's done. Well, the first act, but that is ALWAYS the hardest thing for me. I think I have a title now, too. Anyway, this is very exciting. I didn't want to talk about it because hyping myself up always kills the muses but here we go!

ACT I

I Drove

I drove from Oceanside by myself.

Away from the water. Away from the deliberate nature of the trees. Away from the coast.

I crossed Kansas to be here.

Kansas. Flat, bumfuck-nowhere, whole-state-is-a-road Kansas, where every mile looks so much like the last that you forget you are driving until a mountain appears and you remember the continent has been changing beneath you.

I crossed the Appalachians, took a left, and came up through what Vermonters call southern Vermont, which I probably would have called southern Vermont too, but they said it with the faint embarrassment of people admitting they lived near Massachusetts.

I drove north, to where the wind smelled green.

The trees looked like the trees on sugar-shack postcards and college brochures, except there were too many of them. They did not frame anything. They were the thing. They came down the mountains, crowded the road, pressed up behind the gas stations and houses, and made the few open fields look borrowed.

The Green Mountains were old. That mattered to me. The Rockies were young enough to still look like they had something to prove, all exposed stone and difficult angles. These mountains had worn themselves down. They were low, green, and already there wherever I looked.

They did not need to announce themselves.

They just were.

I had come to Northbridge because I wanted to become a writer somewhere nobody knew me well enough to watch me try. I had not declared a major. Declaring it would have made the attempt public, and I had driven far enough to avoid that.

I took what the college told me to bring. Twin sheets. Towels. A desk lamp. A laundry bag. I did not bring a microwave because I figured I could buy one.

And I took my watercolors.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I prefer oil. I like that once oil dries, it has entered the world in a way that resists correction. But permanence is heavy. It requires jars and rags and solvents and a place you have agreed to remain.

Watercolor fits inside a little metal tin.

I wanted something I could carry.

Like I said, I had driven.

Small Breakout Groups

"Tell us your name, your major, and why you chose Northbridge."

It was me, maybe twenty other students, and a professor whose name does not matter. You would forget it if I told you, and so had I by lunch.

We went around the room.

A boy with a family name for a first name said markets fascinated him. A girl whose parents had clearly selected pre-med on her behalf said she wanted to help people. Someone said the campus felt like home. Someone else said community three times in one answer.

Everyone had rehearsed in the car.

Then it was my turn.

"Rowan," I said. "Undeclared."

"And why Northbridge?"

I looked through the tall classroom windows. The glass had gone wavy with age, so the trees outside bent when I moved my head.

"The trees, partly," I said. Then, because that sounded like an answer a child would give, I added, "I wanted something different."

The professor nodded as if those were the same answer and moved on.

Then we did the thing I would like to ban.

Small breakout groups.

Chairs scraped. People rotated. The room rearranged itself, and for a minute we all looked like furniture in a room that did not know what it wanted to be yet.

One girl did not move.

She had loose dark hair and a wool coat folded over the back of her chair. The coat looked less like clothing than equipment. Like boots, except I would later learn I did not understand boots.

Her hands lay flat on the desk. Still, without looking posed or tense. They were simply at rest, which should not have been unusual. It was. Twenty strangers were trying to prove they deserved to occupy the same room, and nobody else knew what to do with their hands.

She occupied very little space, yet the space looked arranged around her.

Someone in our group said, "Same prompt, I guess."

The boy beside me said political science. The girl across from him said environmental studies and something about sustainability.

Then the dark-haired girl spoke.

"Clara. Literature."

She offered her name like a handshake. Her voice was quiet, but not tentative. She expected to be heard the first time.

The environmental studies girl waited.

"Why Northbridge?"

Clara looked down at the desk for a moment.

"It's quiet," she said.

That was the whole answer.

Nobody pushed. We nodded because it made sense. Or because Clara had said it in a way that made asking for more feel like poor listening.

Then I realized she was looking at me.

Not strangely. Directly.

Like she had chosen one person in the room to pay attention to and, through no fault of my own, it was me.

I looked down at the desk. If a woman decides to look at you that clearly, the polite response is to develop a sudden interest in wood grain.

The lines ran long and dark beneath the varnish. Rivers viewed from high enough that what happened along them could not matter.

"Rowan," someone said.

I looked up.

"Sorry. What?"

"Your reason."

I had already given it once, but apparently small groups required smaller copies of the truth.

"I wanted something different."

Clara tilted her head.

"You said trees earlier."

And that was the moment the room became inconveniently small.

Clara had been listening to me.

I like women. Obviously. This was not new information in California, Kansas, or Vermont. But there is a difference between liking women as a durable fact about yourself and becoming aware of one particular woman in a room.

Unfortunately, that had happened.

Everyone was looking at me now because Clara had changed the question. It was no longer why Northbridge. It was why trees, which was worse.

"They're different here," I said.

Clara waited.

Most people would have rescued me. They would have said something about foliage or agreed too quickly and let us both move on. Clara did not seem interested in helping me escape an answer I had chosen.

"How?" she asked.

I looked out the window again.

"I grew up by the ocean. Trees there are landscaping. Even when they're old, somebody decided where they should go." I stopped, because I could hear myself saying something sincere in public. "Here, they feel like they were first."

For a second, nobody spoke.

Then Clara smiled.

It was small enough that another person might have missed it, but it changed her face with unreasonable efficiency.

"Yes," she said.

The professor clapped his hands behind us.

"All right. Let's come back together."

Which is how all small human rituals end.

Chairs moved. People stood. The room filled with the ordinary noise of twenty people existing in public. Someone laughed. Someone asked about the reading. A backpack zipper was used with unnecessary violence.

I packed my notebook slowly. Not to buy time to look at Clara, exactly, but slowly enough that when I did look, she was gone.

Outside, the air had cooled. It was still August, but the wind already had an edge Oceanside air did not possess. Students spilled onto the paths in groups and began discussing lunch as if they had known each other for years instead of forty minutes.

I was halfway to the dorm when Clara came up beside me.

I had not heard her approach.

"Good trees here," she said.

Then she kept walking.

I stopped on the path and watched her go, which was not staring because she had initiated the interaction and therefore, legally, I was allowed.

She moved without hurry. People stepped around her. She did not alter her pace.

The Green Mountains had seemed old because they did not need to prove they were there.

Clara had been in my life for less than an hour, and already I resented the comparison.

How Small Human Rituals End

My roommate was sitting cross-legged on her bed when I opened the door. Her laptop was open, and a granola bar had stopped halfway to her mouth.

"You're Rowan, right?"

"Yeah."

"I'm Elise. I claimed the outlet by the window, but you can have the good chair."

She gestured at the room like she owned fifty percent of it, which I suppose she did.

"Sounds good."

She nodded. A contract had been signed.

"Orientation class?"

"Yeah."

"How was it?"

I considered explaining the trees and the literature major who had listened too closely.

"Icebreakers and small breakout groups."

Elise winced in immediate solidarity.

"Those should be banned."

This was correct.

Over the next few weeks, campus settled into a rhythm. Morning classes. Coffee taken like an early cigarette. Students crossing the quad with the determined expressions of people who had recently discovered backpacks. As someone from Oceanside, I was deeply and regrettably familiar with people who had recently discovered backpacks.

Northbridge was small enough that faces became familiar before names did. The same people at the café. The same people in the dining hall. The same people pretending they understood the reading.

And Clara Mercer.

By accident, or because Northbridge was too small for true accidents, Elise and I landed in the same introductory literature seminar. She sat near the door so she could leave quickly. Clara sat two seats from the window.

I learned Clara's last name from the seminar roster. This was not research. It was directly in front of me.

She was always there before I arrived. The same wool coat hung over her chair. Her hands rested on the desk. She answered when Professor Bailey called on her, but she never filled space just because it was available.

When she spoke, people listened.

I did too, but with less academic purpose.

Sometimes I caught her looking at me. Not for long, and never with enough expression to establish what she wanted. She would meet my eyes, hold them, then return to the page as if the exchange had completed something.

She never stayed for lunch.

Seminar ended at eleven-thirty. Most of us drifted toward the dining hall because we had meal plans and nowhere better to be. Clara left in the other direction, toward the oldest edge of campus where the buildings thinned and the trees came down close behind them.

Always alone.

I noticed this.

That is not the same as investigating it.

Northbridge had one café, so everybody eventually ended up there whether they liked coffee or not. One wet afternoon I found Clara at a table beside the window.

A cup sat in front of her. Steam moved off the surface. She had taken the paper sleeve from it and flattened the sleeve beneath one finger.

She watched students hurry through the rain.

I ordered my coffee and waited near the counter. Clara did not lift her cup.

Five minutes passed. Then ten.

The steam thinned. The rain ran down the window and broke her reflection into pieces. She watched the door, the path, the people coming in wet and leaving warm.

Once, her gaze moved to me.

I looked at the menu, which I had already used and which contained eight items.

When I looked back, her chair was empty.

The coffee remained where she had left it, full and cooling.

Sitting or Standing

"Are you sitting or standing?" is still the strangest question my mother ever asked me.

I was on the beach the first time she said it. Fifteen, maybe. The wind was loud enough that I thought I had misheard her.

The problem was that the question never concerned posture. It concerned whatever came next. Sitting meant bad. Standing meant worse. Either answer gave her permission to say the thing, and once she said it, I would be expected to respond while she listened.

So I stopped answering it straight.

Later, I stopped telling my mother things. I stopped telling my father things for much the same reason. Information was easier to keep before it became a conversation.

When they called in September and asked whether I had met anyone interesting, I almost said Clara.

I did not say Clara.

I thought about her, though.

After all, who buys coffee and does not drink it?

It Won't Stick

I had never seen snow fall before, and this made me unusual.

Not globally. Regionally.

If you grow up near San Diego, snow exists as a place people drive to. Like a glacier or Wisconsin. You plan for it. Take time out of your day to acknowledge it. Then you go home.

At Northbridge, snow was weather. Barely even weather, according to the girl from Vermont standing beside me at the dining hall doors.

"It won't stick," she said.

She was right.

The flakes were small and slow. They landed on sleeves, backpacks, and stone, then disappeared. The ground rejected every one.

The trees kept them longer.

Snow caught in the dark branches and rested there in thin white lines. It gave the woods a shape I had not been able to see while everything was green. Trunks behind trunks. Limbs crossing limbs. Distance becoming visible because white had found every edge.

I stood there longer than necessary, watching something arrive and fail to remain.

Inside, Elise waved a fork at me.

"Did you see it?"

"The snow?"

"Yeah."

I sat across from her.

"It didn't stick."

"This one didn't."

The phrase contained a threat I did not yet respect.

She asked what winter clothes I owned. I told her I had a jacket.

"A jacket does not count."

"Then I'll wear a bigger jacket."

"You'll get too hot, sweat through your clothes, take it off, get hypothermia, and die."

"That escalated quickly."

"So does hypothermia."

She said this with the authority of someone explaining gravity, then added, "I am from Vermont," in case I doubted her credentials.

I looked around the dining hall. Everyone appeared alive. No visible hypothermia.

"You need boots too," Elise said.

I looked down at my shoes. They were normal shoes, perfectly functional in every environment where I had previously existed.

"When your car goes into a ditch and nobody finds you, your toes will freeze off."

"I don't love that," I said. "A lot of people like those."

Elise stared at me.

"My toes," I clarified.

She blinked once, slowly.

"California is weird."

I was not going to argue with her about that.

On Saturday, she took me into town. I bought black boots that looked like winter boots to me and like an actionable grievance to Elise.

"Those are fashion boots."

"The box says winter."

"The box is lying."

I bought them anyway.

Back in the dorm, I set them beside the door and left the tags on.

The Fourth Line

The second snow arrived two weeks later.

It began overnight and stayed through morning. Not much, according to Elise. Enough to whiten the grass, fill the cracks between stones, and turn the quad into a version of itself somebody had lowered their voice to describe.

Northbridge kept shovels inside the dorm vestibule. Facilities had not reached the narrow path beneath our window yet, so Elise took one outside.

"It'll freeze," she said.

"It is currently frozen."

"Different kind."

Vermonters had several kinds of frozen and no patience for explaining any of them twice.

I stayed in bed with my notebook.

The window beside my pillow faced the path, and through the screen came a sound I did not know yet. The blade bit into slush, scraped stone, lifted, emptied. Shovel in. Snow out. Again.

I had been trying to write for an hour.

White across the stone paths,Winter concealing,Everything settling inFor a long winter's sleep.

I read it twice.

It was dreadful.

I crossed out the last line, then the third, which left me with two lines about white snow and winter. A genuine contribution to literature.

I turned the page.

Autumn gave way,And I stayed much the same.Brisk as I walk,And I,To speak her name.

The line was not working. The poem was not working. I scratched through both and tried again.

The shovel kept time outside.

Shovel in. Snow out.

"What are you writing?" Elise asked through the screen.

"Poems about women."

"Really."

The blade scraped the path.

"Who?"

"No one."

The shoveling stopped.

I looked up. Elise leaned on the handle and studied me through the screen.

"How long have you known me?" I asked.

"Six weeks."

"And already you can tell when I'm lying."

"Not when you're lying. When you're editing."

This was worse.

"I am not editing."

"You are editing a girl out of the answer."

The shovel went back into the snow.

"I write poems about women all the time."

"Yes. This one has a woman in it."

I closed the notebook.

Elise scraped slush from the edge of the path and pushed it onto the dead grass.

"Does she know?"

"Absolutely not."

"Is it the literature girl?"

I looked at her slowly.

"What literature girl?"

"The one who stares at you."

"She does not stare at me."

"Fine. The one you stare at."

That was less defensible.

"I observe people generally."

"Specifically her. Dark hair. In your seminar. Always sitting before everybody else gets there."

I opened my notebook again, mainly to have somewhere else to look.

"Rowan," Elise said.

"What."

"You're writing poems about the vampire girl."

I looked up.

"The what?"

"The obvious eldritch lesbian."

I should not have known who she meant.

Unfortunately, I did.

"That could describe a lot of women at a liberal arts college in Vermont."

"No. It describes one woman, and she looks at you like she knows what color your bones are."

"That is an insane thing to say."

"And yet."

She returned to the path.

I looked down at what I had written.

Eldritch,In a way I understand.And when I see her face

A fourth line eluded me.

"Why vampire?" I asked.

Elise took a moment. That should have warned me.

"She's never in the dining hall."

I opened my mouth, then closed it.

"She's pale."

"It's Vermont."

"She never wears enough for the weather."

"It is barely winter."

"She blinks wrong."

I frowned.

Elise reconsidered. "She blinks like she remembered to."

That sentence was strange enough that I wanted to reject it on principle.

I could not.

"She's quiet," I said.

"Not the same thing."

"Reserved."

"Also not the same thing. It's how still she is. Like she doesn't get bored or cold or fidgety. Like she could stand in one place all day and not need the day to do anything for her."

Something tightened under my ribs because I had noticed exactly that.

Her hands on the desk. Her coat on the chair. The sense that she arrived already composed while the rest of us assembled ourselves in public from whatever pieces we had brought.

I said none of it.

Elise saw enough in my face.

"Oh, no," she said. "You agree."

"I think she's different."

"Exactly."

"That does not make her a vampire."

"No. It makes her the kind of girl people write poems about, then lie about writing poems about."

I could not defend against this, so I changed the subject.

"Why are you shoveling if it isn't deep?"

Elise pointed with the blade.

"Because this melts today, freezes tonight, and becomes the place where you fall tomorrow."

"You spend a lot of time imagining my death."

"You give me material."

She pushed a ridge of wet snow off the path.

"May I muse for a second?"

"Can I stop you?"

"One of the biggest differences between where I'm from and where you're from is that people here are interested in each other. I think it's the weather."

Elise considered this.

"If I don't clear the path and you fall, I have to take notes for both of us."

"So this is self-interest."

"Correct."

She resumed shoveling.

The scrape settled back into its rhythm. I opened the notebook and stared at the missing line.

Minutes passed.

Then Elise stopped.

Actually stopped. Her hands stayed on the shovel. Her shoulders did not move. Her attention had gone past me, into the room or through it.

"What?" I asked.

She tipped her chin toward the quad.

I turned.

Someone was walking between the trees.

No hat. No scarf. Dark coat buttoned high. Bare hands.

Even through the screen, I knew Clara by the way she moved. Everybody else crossing campus had entered some negotiation with the cold. Shoulders raised. Hands tucked into sleeves. Heads down. Clara moved at the same pace she kept indoors.

The path was wet where Elise had cleared it. Snow still covered the grass and lay thin across the steps. Clara did not test the ground. She did not hurry.

A low branch crossed her path. Without looking up, she lifted one hand and brushed the snow from it. Her fingers met the branch at exactly the right place. The snow dropped beside her shoulder. The branch barely moved.

Elise made a small sound through her nose.

"What?" I asked.

"That was weird."

"Maybe she has good reflexes."

Elise looked at me through the glass.

"Do not make me explain how branches work."

Clara reached the edge of the shoveled path and stopped.

She looked down at the line between clear stone and untouched snow. Her attention stayed there long enough that I wondered what I was missing.

Then she looked up.

At the window.

At me.

Being caught already looking produces a particular kind of embarrassment. Heat rose into my face. My hands became newly visible to me and had nowhere useful to go.

Clara held my gaze as if this arrangement had been intentional.

Then she smiled.

Not broadly. Not enough for Elise to call it flirting without sounding deranged. Enough that I sat straighter before I knew I had moved.

"That is a vampire," Elise said under her breath.

"Stop."

Clara stepped closer to the building and touched two fingers to the glass beside the frame.

She did not knock. The gesture was lighter than that. An announcement without the presumption of entry.

I stood.

Elise watched with open delight.

"You have to let your vampire in."

"She is not my anything."

"Mm."

I crossed the room, unlatched the window, and pushed it up a few inches. Cold air came through the screen, carrying the mineral smell of wet stone.

"You know there's a door," I said.

Clara's eyes moved briefly past me to Elise, then returned to mine.

"Yes."

Her voice sounded lower outside the classroom. Or perhaps I noticed it more without fluorescent lights and twenty other voices around it.

"Then why are you at my window?"

She took a moment to answer.

"I was passing by. I saw you."

This was not an explanation.

Her gaze dropped to the notebook in my hand.

"Writing?"

"Sort of."

"Poetry," Elise supplied.

I nearly died in a warm room before winter got the chance.

Clara looked at her.

"Does she always volunteer information this recklessly?"

"Elise is from Vermont," I said.

One corner of Clara's mouth moved.

"I had guessed."

Elise looked personally complimented.

Clara returned her attention to me.

"Professor Bailey uploaded the wrong reading packet Thursday night."

I blinked.

"Oh."

"I thought you'd want to know."

"That is useful."

"Yes."

Neither of us spoke for a moment. Snow slid from the roof and scattered through the shrub beneath the window. Clara did not react.

Her eyes moved to the notebook again.

"What are you writing about?"

This was an unfair question in front of witnesses.

"Nothing."

I answered too quickly.

Clara looked at my face.

"Nothing," she repeated.

"Yes."

"Is it good nothing?"

Elise turned away and studied the shovel with religious concentration.

"It's unfinished nothing."

"That can still be good."

Some women make conversation feel like stepping onto known ground. Others make it feel like handing over a small, warm animal and hoping they understand the concept of care.

Clara managed both.

I tightened my grip on the notebook.

"Why aren't you wearing gloves?"

It was the first defense available to me.

Clara looked at her hands as if she had not assigned them any significance.

"I forgot them."

This felt improbable.

"You'll freeze."

"I won't."

She said it plainly enough to make it sound, for one second, like a fact.

Elise looked at me with the expression of a researcher whose worst hypothesis had survived testing.

Clara noticed.

Then her attention moved past my shoulder to the boots beside the door.

"Are those yours?"

"Yes."

"They still have tags."

"I have not had occasion to wear them."

"Those aren't winter boots."

"The box says they are."

"The box is wrong."

Elise made a vindicated noise behind me.

Clara's eyes stayed on mine.

"Get different boots."

There was no joke in her voice. No invitation to argue.

Then she stepped away from the window.

The cold reached farther into the room after she moved, though that made no physical sense.

"I'll see you Monday," she said.

Before I answered, she turned and crossed the path toward the trees. No hurry. No visible objection to the wind. She moved as if she and the weather had settled the terms of their relationship a long time ago.

I kept one hand on the window frame until Elise came up behind me.

"Well," she said.

I closed the window.

"Well what?"

"She came to your bedroom window through the snow to tell you about a PDF."

"A reading packet."

"Without gloves."

"She forgot them."

"After looking through the glass like she was deciding whether to enter a chapel and ruin a nun's life."

I stared at her.

Elise raised both hands.

"I'm from Vermont. This is how we talk."

I sat on my bed and retrieved the notebook before she could reach it.

Outside, the cleared path had gone dark with water. The trees held white along every branch, patient with the weight.

I read the unfinished poem again.

Eldritch,In a way I understand.And when I see her faceI forget the fourth line.

It was not good.

I did not cross it out.

Stick Season

By the end of October, Vermont had become unreasonable.

People called it beautiful, and of course it was. That was the problem. The hills around campus went red, orange, and gold all at once. Tourists appeared in slow cars with out-of-state plates and no sense of urgency at stop signs. Girls from Connecticut stood under maples in expensive sweaters while their boyfriends took photographs they would later pretend had not required twenty-seven attempts.

It looked too much like the idea of itself.

If someone had searched for Vermont in October, this was the result they would have been given.

I wrote in the margin of my seminar notes:

Girls in red sweaters,And lovers who letter.Bright, pretty smiles,But I touch her better.

This was not about Clara.

It was also not good.

The weather app sickened me more reliably than the foliage. A few weeks earlier, I had left the dorm with wet hair. Now the air bit the back of my neck before I reached the steps. Frost stayed in the shade after sunrise. My breath showed in the mornings. I understood the science, but it still looked like a special effect.

The trees changed posture as they emptied. Leaves that had spent September making a point of themselves let go without ceremony. One gust passed through and a branch was bare. Another came, and the ground wore what the tree no longer needed.

There was probably something meaningful to say about that.

I was tired of finding meaning in everything.

Especially Clara.

She had become an unreasonable amount of my internal life.

It was one thing to notice a woman and continue existing like a normal person. It was another to arrange small behaviors around her possibility. To know which mornings her coat would already be hanging over the chair. To know she flattened the sleeve of a coffee she did not drink. To feel my shoulders loosen when I saw her in seminar and tighten when I did not.

I knew the shape of her hands at rest.

I knew how often she looked at me.

These were not facts I wanted.

They were the facts I had.

Nothing had happened since the window. This should have helped. No confession. No kiss. No intimacy beyond a conversation about boots and the wrong PDF.

Instead, there was nothing new to hold. I replayed what I had. The pause before "I saw you." The way she had asked whether it was good nothing. The attention she gave my boots, as if my feet had become her concern by being attached to me.

I tried to be rational until the effort became its own confession.

By the last week of October, even Elise had stopped teasing me every time Clara's name came up. It wasted both our time.

We were walking back from breakfast beneath trees the color of lit coals when she said, "You could ask her out."

Wet leaves had been pressed flat against the path by rain. The sky showed through the branches in pale, uneven pieces.

"Elise."

She interpreted this as an invitation to continue.

"I'm only saying there are more efficient ways to suffer."

Someone from my seminar passed us and said hello. I waited until he was gone.

"I am not asking Clara out."

Elise looked at me.

"Why?"

I put my hands in my jacket pockets. The morning air had a dry edge, and I had become too aware of each breath entering me.

"If she wants to go out with me," I said, "she can ask."

Elise opened her mouth.

"No."

"I haven't said anything."

"Your face has."

She let me keep walking without the answer.

In seminar, Professor Bailey asked whether a character's refusal to confess was meant to read as discipline or cowardice.

A classmate answered first. I do not remember what he said. I remember Clara's wrist resting on the desk. I remember knowing the exact pitch of her voice before she spoke.

Another private failure for my collection.

"It depends on whether you think restraint is the same thing as fear," Clara said.

Everyone wrote it down.

I hated them for it.

She did not look at me for the rest of class.

That was not unusual. What was unusual was how much I noticed.

Afterward, I packed my bag slowly. Then fast, when I realized I was being slow on purpose.

By the time I reached the hall, Clara was halfway to the stairs. Her coat was already on. She walked like she had somewhere to be that was not here.

I could have called her name.

Instead, I listened to two juniors argue about parking permits while Bailey fought with his keys.

By the time I decided what my voice would sound like, Clara was gone.

Fine.

If this was what people did to each other, I would stick to strangers. Strangers began at zero.

That night I downloaded an app I had deleted in September.

The campus Wi-Fi loaded people in pieces. Name. Age. Distance. Then the face.

A woman in Burlington had dark hair. I looked for Clara in her and did not find her. A woman in Montpelier owned a record collection that was too cool for me. Another had written convince me you're not boring, assigning homework before we had met.

Vermont is gay, but it is not that gay.

I matched with two people before I could reconsider and call the whole thing research.

One of them wrote the next morning.

Lena. Twenty-four. Worked at a record store in Burlington.

Are you really from California?

I stared at the message.

Yes. Sorry.

You'll have to make it up to me.

I looked at that line for a while too.

Not because it was good.

Because it was not Clara.

That was the point.

By Friday, I had almost convinced myself.

The day began clear and cold. Around noon, the light flattened. Wind chased leaves across the quad and lifted them against doors. Everybody discussed the weather with the alert, practical interest Californians reserve for earthquakes after they happen.

At lunch, a woman from my history class said her mother had called about snow coming up the valley. Someone else said Route 7 would be awful after dark.

I stopped listening.

By dinner, the sky had gone the color of dishwater.

Elise looked through the dining hall window.

"Don't drive tonight."

I had not told her I was driving.

"The roads are going to be bad," she said.

"I didn't ask."

She put down her fork.

"It's October. The road surface is warm, the air isn't, and everything freezes unevenly. You can't see where."

I returned to my food.

She watched me for a moment.

"You're going somewhere."

"Burlington."

"Tonight?"

"That is usually when dates happen."

"You are not driving to Burlington tonight."

"No, I'm walking."

She did not laugh.

"I am not making fun of you for being from California. I am telling you that you do not know how to drive on this. What is so important?"

I almost said, I need one night that is not about a woman who will not ask me for anything.

"Pussy," I said.

Elise stared at me.

"That is not a reason."

"It is one of the oldest reasons."

"Not here. Not tonight."

I laughed because everybody in Vermont acted as if I was not merely unprepared but morally deficient. The jacket. The shoes. The road. The car. All the small ways this place wanted me to apologize for not already knowing how to live here.

I was tired of it.

"I don't need your permission."

I pushed my chair back.

"Rowan, please don't drive."

I stopped.

Elise had warned me about a dozen possible deaths since August. She had never said please.

The dining hall was too bright. People ate pasta and discussed their weekends beneath fluorescent lights while weather gathered outside as if it were another obligation on the calendar.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked. "Rearrange my whole life because Vermont has moods?"

"Yes."

She did not blink.

"That is exactly what I want. That is how it works here."

No one had ever said anything less Californian to me.

"Tell me when you're coming back," she said. "So I know when to start looking."

"Sunday."

I left.

Wind hit me in the face outside. I stood in it for a moment because at least it did not have an opinion.

By the time I reached the dorm, cold rain had begun. It was too fine to follow drop by drop and too steady to ignore.

My phone lit.

Lena.

We can reschedule if the roads get bad.

I sat on the edge of my bed and read the message until the screen dimmed.

I had returned the black fashion boots after Clara's visit. The pair beside the door now was waterproof, insulated, ugly, and approved by Elise. I had removed the tags, but the paper was still stuffed inside them.

I put on my sneakers.

Then, after a moment, I picked up the boots and carried them to the car.

That felt enough like listening.

I Drove

The parking lot shone beneath the lamps. Wind dragged leaves in circles along the curb. My Subaru sat under a half-bare maple with two yellow leaves pasted to the windshield.

I put the boots in the back seat.

The engine started at once. It sounded cheerful and untroubled, far too confident for the evening ahead.

A window opened on the second floor of the dorm, then shut again.

I should have gone back inside.

Instead, I pulled out as wet white flecks began to cross the headlights.

By the time campus disappeared behind the trees, the sky had become winter.

For the first twenty minutes, everything was fine.

In hindsight, this was what made the rest possible. If the road had been dreadful outside the village, I might have turned around. If the car had slipped before I found Route 7, I might have accepted that Elise knew something I did not.

Instead, the pavement was wet.

I had driven on wet pavement.

The wipers worked. The heater blew warm air at my hands. The radio found three stations in town, lost two in the hills, and finally gave up beneath a voice discussing high school football.

Snow came and went in thin fits. It crossed the headlights, looked decorative for one second, then vanished behind me.

See, I thought. Fine.

The road curved through the trees. Houses appeared in small groups, their windows yellow against the early dark, then stopped. Somewhere beyond the trunks, the last leaves still held in pockets of red and orange. Along the shoulders, the world had already begun losing color. Wet black pavement. Dark wood. Gray sky. A field going dim beneath uncertain snow.

I loosened my grip on the wheel.

The first hour passed without incident, leaving me foolish and vindicated in equal measure.

At a red light in a town with a French name I forgot as soon as I left it, my phone lit in the cupholder.

Still coming?

I typed, On my way.

Another message appeared before the light changed.

Be careful. It's getting bad here.

I turned the phone facedown.

A woman in Burlington. A bed in a room I had never seen. Proof that my internal life had not become a private shrine to Clara Mercer.

That was the version I required.

The road climbed out of town. Streetlights ended. The pavement narrowed to two dark lanes with a yellow line between them and trees on both sides.

The snow changed.

It was finer now and moved sideways. It collected where black surfaces met: the shoulder, the base of a sign, the seam between pavement and whatever lay beyond it.

The temperature on the dashboard dropped from thirty-four to thirty-two. Then thirty. Then twenty-eight.

I watched it happen.

The road still looked wet.

Mostly.

Here and there, a patch answered the headlights differently. It held a dull sheen instead of water's gloss. The tires made a flatter sound for half a second, then returned to normal.

I sat straighter.

On a shallow bend, the steering answered late.

Barely. The wheel turned beneath my hands, and the car considered the request before following it.

My stomach tightened.

I corrected. The tires found the road again.

Nothing happened.

That was the problem with every warning Vermont had given me. Nothing happened after it, so I kept going.

I thought of Elise at dinner. I thought of how relieved she would be if I called and told her she was right. Then I thought of having to make that call.

The next town was somewhere ahead. Turning around on a narrow road felt no safer than continuing until I found a lit parking lot.

This was probably true.

It was also useful.

I eased off the accelerator and kept both hands on the wheel.

I drove carefully.

Careful had become a method applied inside a decision I should not have made.

The snow thickened until the headlights seemed to end a few yards in front of the hood. White lines rushed toward the windshield. Looking directly at them made the car feel faster, so I fixed my eyes on the road and tried not to follow any one flake.

A yellow curve sign appeared.

I lifted my foot from the gas before the bend. No brake. Slow hands. Everything Elise had said, everything I had heard other people say, arrived at once and without order.

The car entered the left curve.

For one second, it remained a car on a road.

Then the tires found ice.

There was no shriek. The wheel went light. The car continued forward while my authority over that fact disappeared.

The rear moved right.

I turned too far against it, felt the tires catch, and made the second correction before the first had finished.

The Subaru snapped the other way.

Headlights crossed the center line, found trees, crossed back. The right wheels left the pavement. The drop into the drainage cut pulled the rest of the car after them.

The passenger side struck earth.

Glass burst inward. Dirt hit my cheek. The airbag opened against my face with a flat explosive crack, filling my mouth with powder. My seatbelt locked. The car rotated around me, metal folding beneath sounds too large to separate.

The rearview mirror tore free and struck the center console. I watched it go into the back seat, absurdly intact, a small piece of ordinary life promoted to debris.

The car's nose hit a berm.

My chest met the belt and airbag. The steering wheel came back toward me as the column collapsed, and after the bag emptied, the rim held me against the seat.

Something in my chest gave in a line of small, wet clicks.

Then the car stopped.

The engine tried to continue. It made a grinding cough, caught once, and died.

My body did not understand that the movement was over.

My hands remained locked around the wheel. My right foot pressed the brake to the floor. Every muscle waited for another impact.

None came.

Snow entered through the broken passenger window.

I tried to breathe.

Nothing.

I tried again and made a small wet sound. Pain spread from my sternum into my ribs. I expected blood in my mouth. There was only airbag powder, bitter and mineral, clinging to my tongue.

The need for air overcame the fear of finding out what breathing would cost.

I pushed my shoulders into the seat, forcing space between my chest and the wheel. The pain sharpened. Something shifted under my breastbone.

My lungs opened.

The first breath came in broken pieces. The second went deeper and hurt more. The third convinced me I was not suffocating.

I did not know whether my ribs were broken. I could feel each one where it joined my sternum. That seemed like information I had not been meant to possess.

The dome light had come on.

Its weak yellow circle showed the windshield, cracked from the upper driver's side to the lower corner. The dashboard had split. Dirt covered the passenger seat and floor. One of my boots lay in the back seat with white packing paper hanging from its opening.

I was still wearing my sneakers.

I forced my fingers from the wheel one at a time. The joints popped. My hands shook hard enough that I had to press them between my thighs.

The car leaned toward the passenger side. The driver's door was pressed against the cut bank. I pulled the handle and pushed.

It opened the width of my hand.

Cold air entered. The car shifted beneath me with a low complaint.

I let the door close.

The passenger side was worse. Earth filled the lower half of the broken window, and the door had folded inward around the impact. Even if I could crawl across, there was nowhere obvious to go.

I looked for my phone.

It had been in the cupholder. The cupholder was empty.

Reaching down pulled against my chest. I stopped, waited for the pain to settle from sharp to heavy, then tried again.

The phone lay facedown on the passenger floor beneath a scatter of safety glass and dirt. I could not reach it from the seat.

I stretched until the belt cut into my shoulder. My fingers touched the case and pushed it farther away.

"No."

My voice sounded unfamiliar inside the damaged car.

I tried again. Hooked one finger through the ring on the case. Dragged it over the floor and into my lap.

The front glass was intact. The back had cracked around the camera.

I pressed the side button.

Nothing.

Pressed again. Held it.

An empty battery icon appeared, then went dark.

"No. No, no."

I rubbed the phone between my palms. Held it under my jacket against my stomach. Waited. The cold had already entered the device or the crash had damaged it or I had failed to charge it because I had assumed the car would do that for me. The reason did not matter.

I tried again.

The screen lit.

11:47 PM.

Two percent.

No service.

I dialed 911 anyway.

The call failed before it rang.

I tried again. Held the phone toward the windshield. Toward the open passenger side. The screen dimmed while it searched.

Call failed.

I opened my messages and typed to Elise.

Car went off Route 7. I don't know where. Call police.

The message stayed green beneath a thin line that never completed.

I sent the same words to Lena.

Nothing.

The phone died in my hand.

For a while, I kept pressing the button.

The dome light flickered. The frame settled around me with small metallic ticks. The temperature display had gone dark, but the last number I had seen was twenty-seven.

I had checked the weather before leaving. I had seen twenty-seven degrees and thought I would drive carefully.

Without the heater, the car lost warmth quickly. Cold rose through the floor and pressed against the glass. Snow collected on the passenger seat, each flake surviving longer than the one before it.

I tried the horn. Nothing.

The hazard button produced one weak flash and quit.

Outside, no headlights passed. I could not see the road from where the car rested. The ditch and trees had taken it away.

I looked at the boots in the back seat.

Proper boots. Waterproof. Insulated. Close enough to see and too far to use.

The steering wheel held my chest. The seatbelt held me upright. If I released it, I would fold forward against the rim. I could not turn far enough to reach behind me. I could not get through either door.

I had brought the boots.

I had mistaken that for wearing them.

My feet went cold first. Not painful yet. Cold through the thin canvas and socks, entering from the soles.

I pulled my arms inside my jacket and put the phone against the skin beneath my shirt. If I warmed the battery, perhaps I would get one more attempt. I tucked my hands into my armpits and pressed my knees together.

The dome light flickered once and went out.

Dark filled the car.

The crash returned whenever I closed my eyes. The wheel going light. Dirt through glass. The mirror breaking free. I opened them again, although there was nothing to see.

I had read that you should stay awake in the cold.

I bit the inside of my cheek. Pain came sharp and immediate.

After a while, I checked the phone.

The screen lit long enough to show 11:49.

Two minutes.

That could not be right. I had been in the dark much longer than two minutes.

The clock had stopped updating, or I had lost time, or time had become another thing inside the car that no longer worked.

I tried 911 again.

Call failed.

I returned the phone to my chest.

People would notice I was missing.

Not tonight.

I had told Elise Sunday. Lena expected me, but Lena knew only my first name, my face, and that I had left a college somewhere south. She might report it. She might assume I had changed my mind. Both possibilities felt equally reasonable.

Snow pushed through the broken window and gathered in the dirt.

I kept my eyes open until keeping them open became a task with no visible purpose.

Then I slept.

Of Things Ancient and Primordial

I sat in the dark, and then I was not sitting anymore.

I moved through rooms without walls. A hallway became another hallway whenever I reached its end. Someone called my name from behind me, then from somewhere inside my chest.

The cold went deeper.

It left my fingers and ears and face and found the places heat was supposed to remain. My lungs. My blood. The space behind my sternum where the phone lay against skin I could no longer feel.

I stopped biting my cheek.

I stopped counting.

Fear did not grow. It wore itself out. It curled somewhere in the back of my head and became too tired to move.

When I thought of Clara, it was not the real Clara.

It was the one I had made from available material. Clara at the desk. Clara at the window. Clara looking at me because she knew what I wanted, smiling because she wanted it too, remaining mysterious only long enough to be beautiful.

That woman did not exist.

The real Clara had told me to buy boots.

I had wanted a metaphor and she had given me instructions.

I found the phone beneath my shirt. My fingers would not close around it, so I pressed it between both palms and found the button with the side of my thumb.

The screen lit the car in a weak rectangle.

3:18 AM.

No service.

My hands had gone white. The fingers curled toward my palms and would not straighten. I watched them fail without feeling as if they belonged to me.

My feet were farther away.

The boots remained in the back seat. One had tipped over. The paper had fallen out onto the upholstery.

I tried to move my toes.

Nothing answered.

They were still attached. I knew this as a matter of anatomy. The rest was between them and the dark.

The phone slipped from my hands.

I rested my head against the seat and closed my eyes.

When I opened them, a woman stood outside the passenger window.

At first she was only a shape beyond cracked glass and packed earth. Snow moved sideways across a dark coat. Her head was bare.

No hat.

No gloves.

She bent toward the opening, and I saw her face.

Clara.

Her mouth moved. I heard the wind. I heard metal strain beneath her hands. Her words did not reach me.

I had built a Clara in my mind before, so I assumed this was another one.

Then she gripped the passenger door.

The metal gave.

Not all at once. First a hard pop near the upper hinge. Then a tearing sound ran down the frame. Clara pulled again. The door bent outward through the earth holding it, glass spilling from its channel.

The opening widened.

Cold air entered the car and filled my lungs. I tried to cough. My chest folded around the attempt.

Clara put one knee into the dirt and leaned inside.

Snow had darkened her hair. Her face was pale because her face was always pale. Her bare fingers closed around the door frame, long and steady, without any tremor from effort or cold.

She said my name.

I tried to answer. My lips moved against each other and produced nothing.

Her face came close to mine.

Her breath touched my cheek.

Warm.

I felt that. I had stopped feeling almost everything else, but I felt her breath.

Clara looked at my hands. Then my shoes. Then the boots in the back seat.

Her expression did not change.

She studied the wheel against my chest, the belt, the crushed door, the angle of the car. When she spoke again, her voice was ordinary. It was the most ordinary thing left in the world.

"You need to get out of this car."

I tried to move.

The seatbelt tightened. I had forgotten it was there. I had worn it so long it had become part of my body.

Clara saw where I looked.

She reached across me. Her arm passed between my chest and the steering wheel. Her shoulder pressed against my mouth. She smelled of wet wool, snow, and something green beneath both, like a branch broken open.

Her fingers found the buckle.

She pressed.

The belt released.

I folded forward.

Clara caught me beneath the arms before my chest struck the wheel. Her hands closed over my shoulders.

They were cold.

Colder than the car. Colder than the air coming through the missing door. So cold that my body found enough feeling to recognize them.

But they held me upright.

"Can you walk?" she asked.

I tried to shake my head.

Perhaps I did. Her eyes moved down my body and stopped at my ankles.

She did not ask again.

Clara drew me across the center console. My hip caught on the brake lever. Pain moved through my chest, bright enough to clear my vision for one second. I saw dirt beneath her knees. Snow in her hair. The passenger door lying several feet away.

Then I was outside.

The cold bit every place my clothing had torn. My feet dragged through snow and gave me no information about the ground.

Clara lowered me against the side of the car. One arm remained behind my shoulders while she unbuttoned her coat with the other hand.

"Stay awake."

I tried to laugh. It became a breath.

She pulled the coat from her body and wrapped it around mine. Beneath it she wore a thin black sweater, already wet at the shoulders.

"You'll freeze," I managed.

The words stuck together.

Clara looked at me.

"I won't."

The same answer she had given at my window.

This time, I believed her.

She put one arm behind my back and the other beneath my knees.

"Clara."

Her name was difficult to shape. She heard it anyway.

"I have you."

She stood.

There was no adjustment, no failed first lift, no strain passing through her face. One moment my weight rested against the car. The next, she carried all of it.

My head fell against her shoulder. Her skin was cold beside my mouth. Under it, something moved with a slow, heavy rhythm I could not count.

She stepped away from the wreck.

The road lay above us, past the ditch. I could see the pale break between trees where it curved out of sight.

Clara turned the other way.

Toward the woods.

I tried to raise my head.

"The road," I said.

She kept walking.

Snow closed over the marks her boots left behind us.

"Clara. The road is back there."

Her arms tightened around me.

"I know."