Chapter 47

• It felt weird now, to be so near to him in a place so quiet. She thought that if she listened close enough, she might still be able to hear Dina’s voice ring down the street, Oscar’s booming laugh, but her ears buzzed with panic, with remorse, with guilt-with some kind of thrill that she tried to stop herself from feeling.
• His movement to sit beside Roxanne on the sidewalk was longer than Heather’s-his knees bending in a way that could very well have been painful for him (she held back a smirk), and the awkwardness of it all continued when he tried to arrange his stupidly long legs when his ass finally met the concrete (with a great, exaggerated ah that made Roxanne want to bury her head in her hands-“notably old” ). He tried keeping his feet flat, but his knees were bent at a drastic angle that couldn’t have been comfortable. She shifted, adjusted, and if Roxanne wasn’t so frightened for whatever was about to happen, she might’ve let herself bask in the endearingness of it all.
• The atmosphere was entirely different from when it was Heather beside her. Although she and Heather were not yet through the woods-the two women, though operating as some intermittent life raft for the other (or, more accurately, Heather doing so for Roxanne) over the course of the day, there was still a familiarity to fall back on, a kind of certainty that Roxanne only realized existed until she toppled backward and didn’t hit the ground.