She sits in the passenger seat with the box in her lap. Her hands have not left the box since he picked her up. She holds it tightly over her closed knees, looking out the open window of the truck. Her hair, frantically blowing in the wind, covers her face. She has not said anything. 

 

The summer air is ripe with the scent of wet soil and grass. In the darkness he can make out the large, rounded shapes of mountains as they drive down winding roads. The enormity of them makes him feel smaller than small. He feels nonexistent. His hands are loose around the steering wheel and he looks at them and can’t feel them and contemplates if he is real. Is he really here, driving them through these backroads, their parents asleep miles behind them? He wants only to pull the truck into the grass and open the door and walk down slopes of hills until he becomes lost in the trees and the darkness and when he gets too tired he will lay down between two slopes of blue Appalachian ridge and fall asleep there and never get up. 

 

But he continues to drive, because he knows he cannot do that to her. She who is holding the box. She, who just yesterday, waited for him in the steaming parking lot of their high school with waving hands and a smiling face. He picked her up and played her favorite songs and drove her home and danced with her in the field behind her father’s house. That was before she knew. Her face was softer then, her laugh audible and loud over the mountain wind like a lovely bird. 

 

She looks older now. Lines have grown on her face that have aged her. She doesn’t smile, and her eyes are a purple, bruised color. He wonders if she has slept. She continues to look out the window and says nothing. She is far off from him and here–so far he feels nothing he can say will reach her. Anything will become a deep echo, like talking down an abandoned hallway. 

 

He pulls the truck to the side of the road. The gravel beneath the tires makes a low crunching sound. The walk down to the tree is not far from here. He turns the engine off, and the inside of his truck is filled with a stifling silence. 

 

“Do you want me to hold it?” he asks.

 

“No.” She doesn’t look at him. Still holding the box, she opens the passenger door and clumsily climbs out. He does the same. 

 

The last time they came to the tree was on their junior prom night. That was months ago. The memory is so distant now, he wonders if it even happened.  He remembers the musky, rosy way she smelled, and the way she chattered like an excited parakeet all the way to this very parking lot. Chatter about how Claire and David danced together even though they hadn’t shown up to the prom as a couple, or how Roy Hill arrived drunk, and how Mr. and Mrs. Hill would probably find out he was stealing their booze. Then she talked about the stars. She had rolled down his window and stuck her head out, laughing like a child. Oh look how pretty they are, she had said. Oh how small they make me feel. And she laughed again. 

 

They had parked the truck and followed a path down to a clearing in a large, mountain borderedmeadow. It had been dark then, just as it is dark now, so they stumbled and tripped and giggled all the way down the rocky slope. Her dress became caked with mud, as did the shoes he borrowed from his father, and neither of them cared. 

 

They trudged their way beneath the large–and the only–tree in the meadow. There had been no hesitation. Their hands found one another in the dark. Soon they laid together, covered in wet grass and dirt. It was unnatural and clumsy, but they laughed the whole time, and he figured that what they had together was the closest thing he could feel to love. She was soft beneath his rough hands. He found her hair and her neck and her lips beneath the dark sky and kissed her fingertips afterward. The act made them pregnant with emotion. He ached with longing for her. She held him in the grass and they watched dozens of fireflies. He couldn’t tell how much time had passed since they arrived. He thought maybe he would weep. 

 

He thinks maybe he will weep now, but he cannot. 

 

In silence they buried the box beneath the tree. The soil was damp from rain and easily malleable under their fingers. Now they stand, a foot apart, staring at the bare area of grass. Their hands are dirty. Their bodies smell of muck and sweat, though there was little exertion in burying it. Suddenly, he has a terrifying vision of rain pouring down and wetting the soil and eroding the dirt, causing the box to peek through the earth and become swollen with water until its contents appear. Then his vision shifts and moves towards animals–animals gnawing and tearing at it then eventually eating the cardboard down through the box and then–

 

“Why don’t we put some rocks on it,” he says. He feels moisture run down his back. He brings his hand to his neck and finds goosebumps there. “Just so it does not get rained on.” 

 

She agrees. They gather small and large rocks from the trail and place them over the patch of dirt before standing in the same place they were originally. Neither of them say a word. Neither of them reach out to touch the other. 

 

The night is quiet. Not even a cricket makes a sound. The silence hangs between them like a living, heavy being that will not go away. 

 

“What do you think we would have named him?” he asks. 

 

“You think it was a boy?” 

 

“I guess I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe. Or maybe not. I don’t know.” 

 

He catches a glimpse of her face in the moonlight, and she appears lifeless. Her skin looks waxy and thin and pale. She does not appear to be breathing, and her eyes, fixed on the ground, do not blink or move. He feels his hand twitch, raises it towards her for a second, and then lets it drop back down. 

 

Time goes by. He sees her occasionally, standing against the lockers at their high school. She smiles with lips parted only halfway–not showing any teeth or laughing. Her eyes will flicker to him for a second before focusing back on her friends. He has forgotten what she smells like, or the sound of her voice in the passenger seat of his truck with the windows down. She moves like a ghost through the cafeteria. He has forgotten how she danced, or how her hands felt against him. 

 

He never went back to the tree. Sometimes, he sits in his truck in the violet haze of night and wonders where the mountain would take him if he kept driving, driving, driving away and down those long roads, past the meadow and the tree and the box. He wonders what would have happened if there never was a need for the box. He wonders if he would still be with her, or if she would be happier then. 

 

With heavy eyes he stands and watches her make her way down the hallway. He stares and watches the place where she walks, though she has long turned the corner and vanished from his sight.