With them living in Madrid, it gave us a place to stay while we were there ourselves. Asher insisted that we didn’t have to pay rent, but we paid it anyway. Camryn didn’t want to be a “moocher,” as she put it.
“One dollar,” Asher said, just to appease her.
“No,” Camryn said. “Six dollars and eighty-four cents a week, and not a penny less.”
Asher laughed. “Girl, you are kind of weird. Fine. Six dollars and eighty-four cents a week.”
It started out that we were only going to stay with my brother for a couple of weeks, but one night, Camryn and I had a heart-to-heart.
“Andrew, I think maybe we should stay put for a while. Here, in Madrid. Or, maybe we should go back to Raleigh. I don’t want to, but…”
I looked at her curiously, yet at the same time it was apparent to me that we have been thinking along the same lines. “I know what’s on your mind,” I said. “It’s not as easy as we wanted it to be, traveling with Lily.”
“No, it’s not.” She looked off in thought, and her expression hardened. “Do you think we did the right thing? By taking her to so many places?”
Finally, she looked at me again. I could tell by the look in her eyes that she hoped I would say that yes, we did the right thing.
“Of course we did,” I said, and I meant it. “It was what we wanted to do when we set out on that first day. We have no regrets. Sure, we had to do things differently for her safety, bypass a lot of places we wanted to see, stay put in places longer than we wanted to so we didn’t give her whiplash, but we did the right thing.”
Camryn smiled softly. “And maybe we instilled a love for travel in her.” She blushes. “I don’t know…”
“No, I think you’re right,” I said.
“So what do you think we should do?” she asked.
We stayed with Asher and Lea for three months before we set out again. We had one last stop to make before we were to head back to the United States: Italy. Camryn finally admitted to me the reason behind her persistent desire to go to Italy. Her dad took her there once on a business trip when she was fifteen. It was just the two of them. And that trip with her dad was the last time she felt like his little girl. They spent a lot of time together. He spent more time with her than he did on business.
“Are you sure it’s a good idea?” I asked before we left for Rome. “What if you go back there and ruin the memory, like you did that day with the woods behind your childhood house?”
“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” she said, packing Lily’s clothes into our suitcase. “Besides, I’m not going there to relive those six days with my dad, I’m going to remember those six days with my dad. I can’t ruin something I can’t fully remember.”
When we got there I witnessed Camryn remembering everything. She took Lily and sat down with her on the Spanish Steps, I imagine much in the same way her dad did when he brought her here.
“We love you very much,” Camryn said to Lily. “You know that, right?” She squeezed Lily’s hand.
Lily smiled and kissed her momma on the cheek. “I love you, Momma.”
Then Lily sat between Camryn’s legs while Camryn worked her fingers through her blonde hair, twisting it into a new braid and laying it over her shoulder to look just like her own.
I smiled and watched thinking about a day so long ago:
“It would be a friendship thing, I guess,” she said. “Y’know, two people who happen to be sharing a meal together.”
“Oh,” I said, grinning faintly. “So now we’re friends?”
“Sure,” she said, obviously caught off guard by my reaction, “I guess we are sort of friends, at least until Wyoming.”
I reached over and offered my hand to her, and reluctantly, she took it.
“Friends until Wyoming it is, then,” I said, but I knew I had to have her. Longer than Wyoming. Forever would be sufficient.
It still blows my mind how far we have come.
After nearly three years on the road it was finally time to go home.
We went back to Raleigh and back to our humble little house. Natalie and Blake moved out and got a new place on the other side of town. Lily later started school, and for the next several years we were happy, but there was always a part of us that felt empty. I watched my little girl grow up into a beautiful young woman with dreams and goals and aspirations in life that rivaled mine and Camryn’s. I like to think that we—Camryn and I—are to take credit for how Lily turned out. But at the same time, Lily is her own person, and I think she might’ve turned out the way she did even without our help.
I couldn’t be prouder.
It seems like so long ago. And, well, I guess it was. But even today, I look back on the day I met Camryn on that Greyhound bus in Kansas, and it’s still so vivid and alive in my mind that I feel like I could reach out and touch it. To think, if the two of us hadn’t left like we did, told society and its judgments to piss off, we never would’ve met. If Camryn would’ve let fear of the unknown get to her too much, we might never have gotten on that plane to Jamaica. We truly lived our lives the way we wanted to live them, not the way the world expected us to live. We took risks, we chose the unconventional route, we didn’t let what anyone thought about our choices get in the way of our dreams, and we refused to settle doing anything for too long that we didn’t enjoy. Sure, we did things all the time that we didn’t want to do because we had to—worked in a few fast-food restaurants for a while, for instance—but we never let any of it control our lives. We found a way out eventually instead of letting it win. Because we only have one life. We get one shot at making it worth living. We took our shot and ran like hell with it.
And I think we did pretty damn good.
I honestly don’t know what else to say. It’s not like our life is over now that our story seems to be. Nah. It’s definitely far from being over. Camryn and I still have so much left to do, so many places to see, so many of Life’s Rules to defy.
Today is the first day of the rest of our lives. It’s a special day, for Lily, for us, for everything the three of us stand for. Our story is over, yes, but our journey isn’t, because we’ll always live on the edge until the day we die.
Epilogue
Fifteen years later
Lily
“Lily Parrish!” Mrs. Morrison calls out my name from the stage in the auditorium. I hear my friends and family shouting from the crowd, followed by whistles and clapping.
I reach up and hold my graduation cap on my head as I ascend the wooden steps. It fits oddly. My dad teased me, said it’s because I have an oddly-shaped head, and it’s my mom’s fault because I couldn’t have gotten it from him.
As I walk across the stage more whistles and shouting and clapping fills the auditorium. My heart is beating fast against my ribs. I’m so excited. I think I’ve been smiling this big for the past twenty minutes.
Principal Hanover holds my diploma out to me, and I take it from her hand. The clapping gets louder. I look down at the front row at my parents, standing next to their seats, bright-eyed and animated with excitement. My mom blows me a few kisses. Dad winks at me and claps. They are both so proud of me that it’s choking me up. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them. I couldn’t have asked for better parents.
After the graduation ceremony is over, my boyfriend, Gavin, and I make our way through the crowds to find my mom and dad.
Mom engulfs me in her arms and kisses my head. “You did it, Lily!” She squeezes me. “I’m so proud!” I hear the tears in her voice.
“Mom, don’t cry. You’ll mess up your mascara.”
She rubs her finger underneath both eyes.
Dad hugs me next. “Congratulations, babygirl,” he says.
I push up on my toes and kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you, Daddy.” Then he pulls me around to his side and fits his hand on my waist protectively.
He gives Gavin the evil eye, looking him up and down, the same way he has every time he’s seen him in the two years we’ve been together. But this time, it’s all in good fun. For the most part, anyway. It took my dad a year to cut Gavin some slack and trust him enough to let me go out on a date with him without him or Mom going with us. So embarrassing. But the overprotectiveness never managed to run Gavin off, and I think that alone gave my parents more reason to respect him.
He is really a great guy, and deep down I think my parents know that.
“Congratulations, Gavin,” my dad says and shakes his hand.
“Thanks.” Gavin is still kind of terrified of my dad. I think it’s cute.
My parents throw a huge graduation party for me at home and everybody shows up. I mean everybody. There are people here I haven’t seen in a few years: Uncle Asher and Aunt Lea came all the way from Spain! Uncle Aidan is here, too, with my cousins Avery and Molly, and his new wife, Alice. My grams, Marna and Nana Nancy (she doesn’t ever want to be called anything with a GR in it) are here, too. Nana isn’t doing so well. She has multiple sclerosis.
“Oh my God, girl, you’re going to leave me!” my best friend, Zoey, says as she comes up to me. We grew up together, just like her mom, Natalie, did with my mom here in Raleigh.
“I know! I hate it, but you know I’ll visit!” I hug her tight.
“Yeah,” she says, “but I’m going to miss the hell out of you.”
“I told you,” I say, “you could always move to Boston to be closer.”
She rolls her eyes, her dark-colored hair falling about her shoulders as she steps away and hops up onto the kitchen bar stool. “Well, not only will I not be moving to Boston with you, looks like I won’t be staying in North Carolina much longer, either.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, surprised.
I sit down on the bar stool next to her. My uncle Cole walks into the kitchen with a few empty beer bottles in his hands. He chucks them in the trash.
Zoey sighs, props her elbow on the bar, and starts twirling a few strands of hair between her fingers. “My mom and dad are moving to San Francisco.”
“What? Seriously?” I can hardly believe it.
“Yeah.”
I can’t tell if she’s disappointed or just doesn’t know how to feel about it yet. “Well that sounds awesome,” I say, hoping to encourage her. “You don’t want to move?”
Zoey pulls her arm from the bar and crosses her legs. “I don’t know what to think, Lil. That’s a long way from home. Not like it’s just up the street.”
“True,” I say, “but it’s San Francisco! I would love to go there.”
She smiles a little.
Uncle Cole, in his tall, brooding glory, takes three more bottles of beer from the fridge and wedges them by the necks between his fingers. He smiles at me as he passes and slips into the living room with the house full of people.
He’s awesome. When he arrived, he slipped me a congratulations card with two hundred bucks in it.
“Zoey, I think it’s great. And honestly, I can’t wait to visit my best friend in California. Yeah. That even sounds good when I say it. California.” I gesture both hands dramatically.