When I Am Through with You

  DUTTON BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Stephanie Kuehn.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kuehn, Stephanie, author.

  Title: When I am through with you / Stephanie Kuehn.

  Description: New York, NY : Dutton Books, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016040902| ISBN 9781101994733 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101994740 (epub)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Survival—Fiction. | Hiking—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.K94872 Wh 2017 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040902

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket photos: Getty Images/Julen Garces Carro; Shutterstock

  Jacket design by Theresa Evangelista

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Before Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Day One Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Day Two Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Day Three Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Day Four Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Day Five Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  After Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Acknowledgments

  For Tessa, whose heart belongs to the wild

  Long had I loved you; why I know not.

  —Vladimir Nabokov, “Beneficence”

  BEFORE

  1.

  I DIDN’T PICK Rose, by the way, if that’s what you’re wondering. I didn’t choose anything about her. No doubt that says more about me than it does about her, but she was the one who approached me at the school theater that morning, sometime in the early fall of our sophomore year. I used to study every day before classes in the theater lobby, on that dusty stone floor amid the mottled mix of shadow and sun falling through the plate-glass windows.

  She knew I sat there, I guess. She knew a lot of things about me before we even met. In fact, the first words she ever spoke to me were, “Where were you yesterday?”

  I’d looked up, startled, from the messy stack of papers surrounding me, to see a girl with bright eyes and brown skin and very short hair staring back at me. “I was sick,” I told her and not all that nicely, if we’re being honest. Something in her tone felt like an accusation. Like I’d done her wrong by not meeting her expectations.

  “And now you’re not sick?” she asked, and she bounced on her feet a bit. She was a small girl, I realized, all bones and empty space.

  I scowled at her question. “Why do you care?”

  “I care, because you’re the only one who’s ever here this early, and you’ve missed four days this semester already. When you’re gone, I’m alone. Who knows what might happen?”

  Do you see how that might sound? How I might interpret her words to mean she relied on my presence to keep her safe?

  “I get migraines,” I told her, which was true, but not the only truth.

  At this the girl shrugged. She flopped beside me and chewed her nails, watching while I did my homework. I was frantic, really. Forty minutes to first period and my essay on Lord of the Flies remained unfinished. I was attempting to say something pithy about anarchy and fascism really being two sides of the same coin—both because I believed I was clever and because I believed my cleverness made me who I was.

  “I’m Rose,” she said after a moment.

  “I know.” I didn’t bother looking up this time. Brash, pixie-like Rosemarie Augustine was the new girl, relatively speaking. Her parents were the ones who’d taken over the historic Eel River Inn, and the whole Augustine family had moved up to Teyber from San Francisco three months prior. In our sleepy, dead-end Humboldt County town with a population of fewer than 2,500, it would’ve been hard not to know who she was, even if we hadn’t yet been formally introduced.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me your name?” she asked. “It’s Ben Gibson, I know, but the rules of proper discourse require you to tell me.”

  “I’m Ben Gibson,” I told her.

  “You’re a sophomore like me, right? And your birthday is in April and you live with your mother.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend, Ben?”

  I still didn’t look up. “I have homework to do.”

  “This book’s shit, you know.” She reached into my lap to tap the cover of my school-loaned paperback—it was the one with the drawing of a crown of leaves tied to a boy I supposed was Ralph but longed to believe was Jack. “It doesn’t say anything about humanity. All it does is give boys an excuse to be assholes when it suits them.”

  “Okay,” I said because I liked the book. I liked to imagine what it would be like to be trapped on that island, far from home, desperate and competing for survival—although I knew I’d never have the charisma or strength to lead anyone anywhere, not even into darkness. Besides, if boys really were assholes when it suited them, didn’t that mean the book was right?

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” Rose asked again.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, now you do.”

  —

  So that’s how we met. And while I wasn’t sure whether to take her seriously, I figured if Rose wanted me to be her boyfriend, then that’s what I would be. Fighting the force of other people’s wills might be something I fantasized about, but it wasn’t anything I ever did in real life. What would be the point? It wasn
’t until I found Rose leaning against my locker after school that I realized just how serious she was.

  “Take me somewhere,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because that’s what boyfriends do.”

  True as that might’ve been, I couldn’t imagine where I might take her. I’d never been a boyfriend. Plus, my house wasn’t an option.

  I hedged. “Well, where do you want to go?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “You decide.”

  “But I don’t like deciding.”

  “You don’t like it or you’re not good at it?”

  “Both.”

  “Fine.” She grabbed my hand. Yanked me through the crowded hallway in a way that was less pixie and more bull shark. “I’ll choose. But let’s get out of here. This place is making me sick.”

  —

  I’m not sure what else to say about Rose. If you know me at all, then I doubt that’s surprising. I suppose I could tell you more about how we got to know each other. How she took me to the inn that afternoon, where we sat outside in the shade of the redwood trees, and I told her how much I liked her shoes—they were made of this bright camel-brown leather and were shinier than anything I’d ever seen. Rose smiled when I said this, pleasing me that I’d pleased her. Plus, she was pretty like her shoes—shiny and rare and right in front of me; I was entranced, watching feverishly as her lips moved and her legs crossed while she rambled on about life with her French-Peruvian parents and dour-faced twin brother, who, she hinted, in a provocative voice, had serious issues of some mysterious nature.

  I could tell you how she pined daily for the city she’d left behind. The people. The music. The food. The culture. Being able to see a first-run movie every now and then. Owning the inn might’ve been her parents’ dream, but Rose thought for sure she was going to leave this place someday. The town of Teyber was just a way station on her march to Somewhere, and I supposed I was, too. Rose had plans for college. Graduate school. To be special. Be the best. That’s one way we were different. From my vantage point, there was no hope for escape; I’d reached my zenith, a dim, low-slung, fatherless arc, and had long stopped believing in more.

  I could also tell you how, in the two years we dated, Rose was my first everything. First kiss, first touch, first girl to see me naked and lustful without bursting into laughter (although she was the first to do that, too). We did more eventually. We did everything. Whatever she wanted. Rose dictated the rhyme and rhythm of our sexual awakening, and I loved that. I never had to make up my mind when I was with her.

  By the way, I have no problem admitting I was nervous as hell the first time we actually did it—both of us offering up our so-called innocence during an awkward Thanksgiving Day fumbling that happened on the floor of the locked linen closet at the inn. For an awful moment, right before, as I hovered above her on the very edge of a promise, I feared I wouldn’t be able to—my ambivalence runs deep—but Rose stayed calm. In her steady, guiding voice, she told me what to do and just how to do it. I was eager to listen. I was eager to be what she needed.

  I don’t know. There’s more to say, of course, much more. Two years is a long time in a short life, especially when you’re in high school. But that’s not the Rose anybody wants to read about, is it? Tragedy is infinitely more interesting than bliss. That’s the allure of self-destruction. Or so I’ve found.

  But I’ll end with this: I miss Rose. I’m even glad I met her, despite what happened on that mountain. There were bad parts, yes; if I had my own days of darkness and suffering and pain-imposed sensory deprivation on account of my headaches, then in between her moments of verve and brashness, Rose had her own kind of darkness—bleak and savage, like a circling wildcat waiting to eat her up. What she needed during those times was for me to keep her alive, and for two years, that’s exactly what I did. And whether I did it by making her laugh or making her come or shielding her from her fears of tomorrow by giving her all my todays, I did it because she told me to and because I loved her. Truly.

  So why’d I kill her?

  2.

  IT STARTED LIKE this: the summer before our senior year, Rose and her twin brother, Tomás, were supposed to spend six weeks in Peru with their grandparents. It was their first time traveling to South America alone, and honestly, the trip sounded fucking awesome—even if Tomás had to be there (he was a real dick—a total snob about all things Teyber, and as much as I hated the place, I hated the way he hated it more). But Rose didn’t want to go and I didn’t understand this and my not understanding made her not want to go even more.

  “You won’t miss me,” she growled, as we lay face-to-face on her queen-size four-poster bed. “You want me gone.”

  I winced at what I could tell was the first tightening surge of an oncoming migraine. “What are you talking about? I’ll miss you. Of course I’ll miss you. More than anything.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Things will be different when I get back.”

  “Why will they be different?”

  Rose kicked her legs. Her bare heels made smudges on the wall. “Because we’ll be different people then. We won’t be who we are now.”

  “We’ll be different tomorrow, too,” I said. “That’s the way it always is. You can’t count on anything to stay the same.”

  “Well, six weeks is a lot of different.”

  She was right, of course—plenty of small differences had a way of adding up to something largely unknown—but it seemed to me Rose was the one who would be doing most of the changing. I’d seen her photographs from her previous trips to Lima, vistas awash with sandy beaches and sparkling water. It would be winter there, but other than the frigid Humboldt current swirling up from the south, their winter consisted of foggy days and occasionally having to wear a sweatshirt at night. Not to mention Rose would be spending most of her time at the university where her grandfather was a linguistics professor. That did give me pause. I could easily picture all the Peruvian college men she’d meet, the handsome ones with perfect hair and dark eyes, who’d smoke unfiltered cigarettes and speak with her in Spanish and take her out for coffee, then maybe drinks, then dinner, then—

  You can understand my concern.

  Still, I thought, as my migraine settled in and really began to take hold, I’d never been anywhere outside of the county, much less the States, a fact unlikely to change anytime soon. To encourage Rose to stay here, in a town she hated, just to be with me while I went nowhere was foolish. Selfish, even.

  Still, I thought, maybe some separation would be good for us, a learning experience. After all, Rose would be going off to college the following summer. The promise of her future was bright, dazzling, while mine, on the other hand, consisted of staying in Teyber and taking care of my mother. Rose hated talking about it, but the fact of the matter was the boyfriend she’d picked out of her high school lobby was not only broke as hell but also bound by blood—and worse—to a woman who wasn’t her. So we needed to get used to being apart, to see if the long-distance thing would work.

  Still, I thought, maybe I just needed some goddamn time alone.

  For once.

  I thought a lot of things that day, I guess. But what I said was this:

  “Go.”

  —

  My mother got into a car accident two days after Rose left. It’s tempting to see that as an omen of some sort, proof of the intervening hand of fate, but it’s hard to read too much into something that’s happened before and is almost sure to happen again. This time she missed a turn on the interstate at around one in the morning and ended up twenty feet down the hillside embankment with the Ford’s front end smashed in. She, however, had nothing worse to show for it other than a broken wrist, a bad attitude, and cuts from the glass.

  I was mad at her for the accident. I remember that. There were no skid mark
s and my guess was she’d fallen asleep while drunk, although she insisted she’d swerved to avoid hitting a fox that had run into the road. She didn’t deny the drinking; the grim daughter of even grimmer Estonian immigrants, my mother learned young that the most effective form of rebuttal was silence. Regardless, the car she’d ruined wasn’t just hers but mine, and I knew I’d have to work two jobs to pay to fix it.

  After she’d taken a cab home from the hospital and gotten herself settled in bed with her bottle of Vicodin—all while willfully ignoring the ruined Ford I’d had towed that now sat in the street leaking antifreeze in front of our sagging bungalow—I slouched my way down to the auto repair shop on Bloomington to see if they would work with me on a payment plan or barter of some kind. I could do oil changes, at least. Rotate tires. Take out the trash.

  When I got there, Avery Diaz, the owner’s daughter, was standing behind the counter. I’d known Avery since elementary school; we’d been in most of the same classes. She was smart. We were friendly. Seeing her got my hopes up and I explained my plight as humbly as I could.

  Avery listened to me, her dark eyes warm, but reached to squeeze my hand when I’d finished talking. “Sorry, Ben. My dad won’t work that way.”

  I nodded and thanked her, then left the shop. That night I stayed out late, alone. It wasn’t like me, but I didn’t tell my mom where I was going and refused to answer any of her texts when she tried contacting me. Instead I walked through the woods to the empty cliffs above the Eel River. In good years, when the water ran high, people would party there, diving from those cliffs to knife the glassy surface below. But the cliffs were empty. The water hadn’t been high for a long time.

  I sat and watched the moon, the starry vastness of the sky. I was lonely, I suppose. But I wasn’t thinking of my girlfriend and all the ways I missed her. I was thinking of my mom. Of a fox caught in her headlights. My father had abandoned us both when I was two, never to return, and now she’d crashed our car on the only road heading out of town.