Where She Went by Gayle Forman Page A

with a satisfying ache followed by the cold blast of a February night. The shock seemed to wake something slumbering deep within me.
    Because that was the night I picked up my guitar for the first time in a year.
    And that was the night I started writing songs again.
    Within two weeks, I’d written more than ten new songs. Within a month, Shooting Star was back together and playing them. Within two months, we’d signed with a major label. Within four months, we were recording Collateral Damage , comprised of fifteen of the songs I’d written from the chasm of my childhood bedroom. Within a year, Collateral Damage was on the Billboard charts and Shooting Star was on the cover of national magazines.
    It’s occurred to me since that I owe Kim either an apology or a thank-you. Maybe both. But by the time I came to this realization, it seemed like things were too far gone to do anything about it. And, the truth is, I still don’t know what I’d say to her.

SIX
    I’ll be your mess, you be mine
That was the deal that we had signed
I bought a hazmat suit to clean up your waste
Gas masks, gloves, to keep us safe
But now I’m alone in an empty room
Staring down immaculate doom
     
    “MESSY”
COLLATERAL DAMAGE , TRACK 2
     
     
    When I get onto the street, my hands are quaking and my insides feel like they’re staging a coup. I reach for my pills, but the bottle is empty. Fuck! Aldous must’ve fed me the last one in the cab. Do I have more at the hotel? I’ve got to get some before tomorrow’s flight. I grab for my phone and remember that I left it back at the hotel in some boneheaded attempt to disconnect.
    People are swarming around and their gazes are lingering a little too long on me. I can’t deal with being recognized right now. I can’t deal with anything. I don’t want this. I don’t want any of this.
    I just want out. Out of my existence. I find myself wishing that a lot lately. Not be dead. Or kill myself. Or any of that kind of stupid shit. It’s more that I can’t help thinking that if I’d never been born in the first place, I wouldn’t be facing those sixty-seven nights, I wouldn’t be right here, right now, having just endured that conversation with her. It’s your own fault for coming tonight , I tell myself. You should’ve left well enough alone .
    I light a cigarette and hope that will steady me enough to walk back to the hotel where I’ll call Aldous and get everything straightened out and maybe even sleep a few hours and get this disastrous day behind me once and for all.
    “You should quit.”
    Her voice jars me. But it also somehow calms me. I look up. There’s Mia, face flushed, but also, oddly, smiling. She’s breathing hard, like she’s been running. Maybe she gets chased by fans, too. I imagine that old couple in the tux and pearls tottering after her.
    I don’t even have time to feel embarrassed because Mia is here again , standing in front of me like when we still shared the same space and time and bumping into each other, though always a happy coincidence, was nothing unusual, not the slightest bit extraordinary. For a second I think of that line in Casablanca when Bogart says: Of all the gin joints in the world, she has to walk into mine. But then I remind myself that I walked into her gin joint.
    Mia covers the final few feet between us slowly, like I’m a cagey cat that needs to be brought in. She eyes the cigarette in my hand. “Since when do you smoke?” she asks. And it’s like the years between us are gone, and Mia has forgotten that she no longer has the right to get on my case.
    Even if in this instance it’s deserved. Once upon a time, I’d been adamantly straightedge where nicotine was concerned. “I know. It’s a cliché,” I admit.
    She eyes me, the cigarette. “Can I have one?”
    “You?” When Mia was like six or something, she’d read some kid’s book about a girl who got her dad to quit smoking and then she’d decided to lobby her mom, an