She touched her collar around her neck. She’d almost forgotten about it. In less than an hour it already seemed like a part of her, a second skin.

“I will love you forever. I’ll wait as long as I have to for you, sir.”

“What if I make you wait one more year?”

“I’ll wait.”

“Two more years?”

“I’ll wait.”

“What if you find someone else?”

“Not interested,” she promised. “If you can’t have sex without pain, I don’t want it, either. And I don’t want anybody but you.”

“Are you sure of that?”

She leaned her head against his chest.

“Completely,” she said and meant it. There was no man for her but Søren, now or ever. “You really think some other guy is going to try to steal me from you?”

Ridiculous idea. If she’d said no to Kingsley in the back of his Rolls-Royce, who on earth could ever tempt her to stray from Søren? No one, that’s who.

“Eleanor,” Søren said, kissing her on the forehead, “I’m absolutely certain of it.”

27

Eleanor

“‘TWO ROADS DIVERGED IN A WOOD, AND I … I TOOK the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’” Dr. Edwards closed her book with a wistful sigh, and Eleanor fought the urge to bang her head against the wall. Sophomore American literature and they were reading the same poem she read freshman year of high school? Weren’t there a few billion other poems out there they could be dissecting other than “The Road Not Taken,” otherwise known as the only poem anyone remembered from high school?

“First thoughts on the poem?” Dr. Edwards asked.

A girl in the front row raised her hand—Rachel Something.

“I love this poem,” she said. “It’s about how you have to choose the path other people don’t take. Be a leader, not a follower.”

Eleanor felt her IQ dropping.

“Very good. Anyone else?”

A freshman raised his hand and parroted back almost the same interpretation. Guy walking in the woods. Sees two paths. He picks the road that fewer people had taken and that makes him a hero, blah, blah, blah. Eleanor mentally picked up a baseball bat and slammed it into the back of that freshman’s head.

“Great thoughts. Other first impressions?”

“Yeah,” Eleanor said. “You’re all idiots.”

The room went silent. Dr. Edwards’s dark eyes widened. She raised her chin and stared Eleanor down.

“You need to have a very good argument to back up a statement like that.”

“I have a great argument. Read the poem.”

“I read the poem, and I agree with them.”

“Then there is no hope left for humanity.” Eleanor sank into her seat with a sigh. At the age of nineteen, she had come to the realization that unless she was in the same room as Søren, Kingsley and Sam, she could count on being surrounded by idiots.

“Care to tell us what your interpretation of the poem is then, Elle?”

“Sure. Why not?” She held up her book and pointed at a line. “Did anyone happen to read something in the poem other than the last stanza? Lines nine and ten—‘Though as for that the passing there had worn them both about the same.’ Anyone else see that part? One wasn’t less traveled by. They were traveled the same.”

“Then why does the narrator call one less traveled by in the last stanza?” demanded Dr. Edwards. “Can you explain that?”

“I can.” A male voice piped up from the other side of the room. Eleanor turned her head and looked back at the guy who sat in the farthest corner of the room. She’d seen him before but never paid any attention to him. He had black hair with streaks of bright red through it, an eyebrow ring, black punk nail polish and tattoos on his hands.

“You can, Wyatt?” Dr. Edwards asked. “Tell us, then. Nice to hear you speaking in class.”

“I’m with Elle here. I can’t keep my mouth shut around so much stupidity.”

Wyatt. So that was his name. Seemed to fit him. Weird name. Weird guy.

“What do you find so stupid?” Dr. Edwards sounded less irritated with Wyatt than she’d sounded with her. Dr. Edwards always gave the boys in the class more attention than the girls. But in this case, Eleanor couldn’t blame her. Now that she looked at Wyatt she noticed for the first time how attractive he was. Piercings, tattoos, spiked punk hair and he read poetry and called people stupid to their faces? Her kind of guy.

“It’s obvious. This poem is in two parts. The first four stanzas are about the actual event. The fifth stanza is the speaker telling us how he will narrate the event in the future. And he’s an unreliable narrator. Like Elle says, in lines nine and ten he says the roads are the same. Neither one of them is more or less traveled. But in the last stanza he says that in the future when he’s talking about this moment, he’ll lie and say one of them was less traveled than the other. As a young man he made a totally arbitrary choice—left road or right road—and in the future he’ll make it sound like the choice wasn’t arbitrary. He’ll give it meaning that it didn’t have in the moment. He’s not a hero. He’s an old man telling lies to the younger generation.”

“There is no road less traveled,” Elle chimed in. “It’s convenient fiction to explain why he went right instead of left. We have to believe the choices we made were for a reason if we want our life to have meaning. This poem isn’t inspiring. It’s creepy and depressing.”