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is.
    “Good luck.” He chuckles again, turns around. His son has become a small figure in the distance, still searching.
    I put my earbuds back in and bite into my apple. It’s probably the best apple of my life, and I try to enjoy it. I watch for a long time as the man gets farther and farther away and catches up to his son. Eventually, they move out of sight.
    A few minutes later, in the quiet space between songs, I hear footsteps in water and smell cigarette smoke. Bevstands next to me but doesn’t say anything. The next song starts and I act for as long as I can like her proximity is nothing significant.
    After a while I take out one earbud and say, “I can’t believe you started smoking again.”
    Bev runs her free hand over her hair.
    “I’ll quit after the tour,” she says, and takes a drag.
    She exhales and I step away from her and wave the smoke out of my face.
    “What?” I say. “Why are you standing here?”
    But I feel like I’m playing the part of an angry person, because here she is: Bev. My best friend. And even though I’m almost trembling with anger all I want is for her to change her mind.
    So I just say it: “Just because you got in doesn’t mean you have to go right now. You could defer for a year.”
    She doesn’t say anything.
    “Just think about it,” I say.
    “Believe me,” she says, her voice sad, “I’ve already thought about it.”
    “Why did you wait so long to tell me?”
    “I needed to be sure. I didn’t mean for it to take so long.”
    “Was it because of the tour?”
    “You would have come anyway.”
    “Why would you think that? There are better things I could do than be a roadie for the worst band in history.”
    I want to hurt her, but she doesn’t flinch.
    She just says, “You should come on with us tonight. Play tambourine or something. You don’t need to be a roadie.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Anyone can play tambourine. You just hit it on your hand.”
    “Yeah, well. I don’t want to be anyone.”
    She shakes her head. “That isn’t what I meant.”
    We’re quiet for so long. I can hear a song playing in my headphones, distorted and far away. It feels forever ago, that Dad and Pete were standing there waving, and I was pulling onto the road, confident in what was happening next. And now this trip is the beginning of nothing. We’re not going to the Archipelago or the Hilton in Amsterdam where John Lennon and Yoko Ono stayed in bed for a week to promote peace. We aren’t going to spend days in Paris, drinking coffee with my mom, or see the actual paintings that we’ve spent years studying in books.
    “Why?” I ask her. “Why did you pretend that we were going to do this?”
    She stays quiet, just like she did at the gas station.
    “Are you fucking kidding me?” I say. “Bev. You really aren’t going to answer me?”
    She looks down into the water.
“I’m sorry,”
she whispers.
    “Well, thanks,” I say.
    “Please come with us,” she says. “I need you to come.”
    She reaches for my hand. I don’t jerk away like last time, but I don’t hold hers back, either.
    “I’ll only come if you explain it to me.”
    “Okay,” she says. “I will.”
    I wait.
    “I can’t do it now,” she says. “But I’ll do it.”
    “Before we get back home,” I say.
    “All right.”
    “It’s the only way,” I say.
    “Okay,” she says.
    We stand in the water for a few minutes longer, not saying anything, not looking at each another.
    “Colby,” she finally says, “you have to find something to love.”
    I don’t know how she can say that. I shake my head. Look away.
    “Something else,” she says, quietly.
    I turn to her but she’s looking at something far away.
    So she knows.
    Our school didn’t want us to get too comfortable in the areas of art we chose, so we had to take at least one class outside of our focus every semester. Our junior year, Bev and I took theater. All the drama kids wanted to act, so Bev got to be the