Roger just sighed. “So here’s the thing,” he said. I immediately felt myself tense up. “I should tell you something. I should have told you before, actually.”
“Okay,” I said, really beginning to get worried now. Was he sick of me, and just planning on staying here with his friends? Was he backing out of the trip?
“So the reason we’re here,” he said, still not looking at me, “is that … I heard Hadley was here.”
“Oh,” I said. Suddenly it made sense that Roger had been so focused on his phone all morning. “Is she?” I asked, as casually as possible.
“No,” he said, and I felt myself relax a little bit. “I’d heard from one of my friends that she was here taking summer courses. But apparently, she’s back home in Kentucky.”
“Oh,” I said again, feeling out of my depth.
“She hasn’t been returning any of my calls or e-mails. So I just thought that maybe if I came here, and saw her, we could talk, and we could maybe …” His forehead creased. “I don’t know.”
Amy! would have known exactly what to do here. She wouldn’t have felt so tongue-tied and awkward and annoyingly young. “Um,” I finally said. “What … I mean, what happened with you two?”
There was a honk behind us, and I turned and saw a minivan waiting for the pump, clearly wondering what we were doing just sitting in the car. Roger started the car and steered us back onto the interstate. We’d been driving in silence for a few minutes when he started talking again. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “If I knew that, I don’t think we’d be here.”
“Well,” I said. I wondered if we should do this like Twenty Questions, with The Reason Hadley Broke Up with Me being the answer. “So what did she say?”
Roger clenched and unclenched his hands on the steering wheel, his forehead still furrowed. He looked preoccupied and unhappy, which only highlighted just how cheerful he normally seemed. Like so much else, I hadn’t fully realized this until it was gone. “It was during finals. We were supposed to meet at the library—I was going to help her study for her history final. I’d made note cards,” he said, sounding disgusted with himself. “But she came to my dorm and …” Roger paused, and I noticed a muscle pulsing in his jaw as he clenched his teeth. “She said,” he continued, “that it was over between us. That she’d been feeling this way for a long time, and she needed to get it off her chest, because it was interfering with her studying.”
“She said that?” I asked, stunned.
“Yeah,” he said, with a small, unhappy laugh. “Hadley never really was one for sentiment. Well, needless to say, I didn’t do so great on my finals. And then she left me a voice mail saying that she was sorry about the way she left things, and told me when I could come by her sorority house, so we could say good-bye.”
“And?”
“Oh, I didn’t go,” said Roger, changing lanes. “I don’t say good-bye. And she knew that. I’d told her a hundred times.”
I sat up a little straighter. “You don’t say good-bye?”
“Nope,” he said. “Not since I was eleven. It’s a superstitious thing,” he added, a little unnecessarily. “Three of my grandparents died that year—bam, bam, bam. And each time, it was almost immediately after I talked to them. And said—guess what? Goodbye. So now I don’t do it. It’s stupid. But the one grandparent I have left is still alive and kicking and I haven’t said good-bye since. So there you go.”
“But,” I said, as Roger took exit 143 for Uintah Street/Colorado College, “what does saying good-bye have to do with it?”
“It has everything to do with it!” Roger said, some of his old energy coming back into his voice. Things were starting to look less developed now, and I could see the mountains again. And they were stunning. They were backlit by the setting sun, so I could basically only see their outlines—but the mountains actually looked purple, just like in the song. Roger was driving down what seemed like a main street—clothing boutiques and pizza parlors and record stores. It could have been Raven Rock—it had that college-town feel to it—except for the mountains in the background, which were far more impressive than California’s. “Saying goodbye is basically an invitation not to see a person again. It’s making it okay for that to be the last conversation you have. So if you don’t say it—if you leave the conversation open—it means you’ll have to see them again.” I just stared at him, and Roger looked over at me and laughed, a normal-sounding laugh this time. “I know it doesn’t actually make sense,” he said. “But it’s pretty much ingrained now.”
“But sometimes,” I said, feeling my throat begin to tighten, but forcing the sentence out anyway, “sometimes you don’t say goodbye and you never see the person again anyway. Sometimes that happens.”
“I know it does,” he said quietly, and from his expression, I knew he knew what I was talking about. “I guess it’s just my residual guilt for the grandparentcide.”
I felt myself smile at that. “You didn’t kill your grandparents.”
“I know that now. But you try telling that to eleven-year-old me.”
I looked out the window at the darkening purple mountains and thought about that. Good-byes didn’t seem as important to me as they once had—I’d found out that when you’re never going to see someone again, it’s not the good-bye that matters. What matters is that you’re never going to be able to say anything else to them. And you’re left with an eternal unfinished conversation.
“Anyway,” Roger said, turning down a street that was lined with small houses, most with Greek letters nailed to their doors, “I’m sorry to lay all this on you. I should have told you earlier why I wanted to come here.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
Roger smiled at me, then pulled the car over to the side of the street and parked in front of a dilapidated two-story house with peeling white paint and a half-inflated plastic palm tree drooping on the lawn. “Want to check out our digs?”
We found the common area of the Colorado College International House deserted, except for a skinny, shirtless guy sprawled on the couch. He had spiky black hair and appeared very involved in a video game. It seemed to be set in a forest and featured a much more buff version of the guy on the couch.