After she fails a biology test, a boy tells her not to worry about it and brings her out behind the school. He shows her how the gravel pit is eating away at the grass behind the school and explains that soon the school is going to slide down the gullet of the gravel pit and it won’t matter then that she failed her biology test. He has a tape measure in his pocket and they measure the distance: thirty-three feet, four inches. She’s been in school with this boy since kindergarten, but she has never spoken to him before, she’s not sure she’s even looked at him, and now she’s kissing him by the edge of the gravel pit and she lets him put his hands up her sweatshirt, too.

Every year after they go out back behind the school and measure the distance between the brick wall and the gravel pit and every year the distance is the same, which seems impossible because now a whole tree has a slid down the side of the pit, leaves brown and roots sticking straight up in the air. Maybe the school is moving too, she says, but then they both graduate and it doesn’t matter anymore if the school is swallowed up or not because they have been released into the big, wide world.

I should get a job, she thinks, an adult job, and then she’s working at the gas station, which is not what she previously considered an adult job, but that still qualifies because everyone she works with is old, older than her. One woman has gray hair down to her butt and her manager wears a burgundy necktie cinched tight against his Adam’s apple.

She doesn’t want to live at home anymore, so she moves in with the boy from school. He gets a job doing oil changes and car repairs and every five thousand miles he changes her oil right out there in the driveway where she can see him and in the winter when it’s cold he comes back inside with hands so red and dry that they crack open and bleed at the knuckles. They still have some friends in high school and sometimes they get invited to high school parties and she’s angry and embarrassed when he wants to go. She dyes her hair a dark brown. She starts going to the nail salon in case one day she receives a ring. She learns how to make lasagna. She finds out her little sister is pregnant, and she cries because her sister is still in high school and then she cries harder when her sister tells her not to cry, she is happy to be pregnant, she did it on purpose.

I want to go on vacation, she tells her boyfriend. Okay, he says, and they drive to a car show in a neighboring state for a long weekend. She orders a blackberry margarita at the liquor tent. We couldn’t do this if we had kids, she says, and orders another margarita. When she starts to get dizzy, starts to lean on the cars for support, leaving greasy palm prints, her boyfriend takes her back to the hotel and holds her hair while she throws up and strokes her roots, which are growing back coppery and thin. She needs to close her eyes now, but when she wakes up, she thinks, they’ll have sex on the hotel comforter. Only when she does wake up, sour drool crusted down the side of her face, she sees that her boyfriend is sitting next to her in bed, already touching himself. He’s looking at something on his phone and she yells at him to quit watching porn, but he shows her, and it isn’t porn, just old pictures of herself, pictures she didn’t even know he still had, and somehow this is worse than porn. How had she ever been so skinny?

She wishes she was home and then she is and it isn’t any better except that her manager at the gas station gives her a fifty-cent raise. Without meaning to, she starts to cry and she tells him she’s sorry, this is the best thing she can remember happening to her in so long, as long as she can remember, and he puts his hand on top of her hand and pretty soon she is unknotting his tie and her finger is tracing a circle around his Adam’s apple and she feels herself both inside of her body and very far outside of it, thinking of the gravel pit behind the school and her boyfriend’s hands beneath her sweatshirt for the very first time, and she’s so distracted that afterward she couldn’t tell you if she orgasmed or not, though it couldn’t have been too bad because by the end of it all she gets a full dollar raise and bumped up to shift supervisor.

Her sister has her baby and it’s an ugly little thing with huge bags under its eyes like it’s exhausted just from being born. Her manager picks her up from the hospital because her boyfriend is at work. He brings a little bottle of Barefoot merlot to toast the baby and they drink it right there in the parking lot, making a game out of guessing what’s wrong with the patients in the ambulances that go screaming by. I shouldn’t be in this car alone with him, she thinks. Her stomach hurts sometimes when she looks at him and he smells, always, of the breakfast pizzas they sell in the heated case beside the coffee pots.

Pretty soon her sister has another baby. Irish twins, her manager says, and then explains that he’s part Irish so he can make jokes like that, but it’s not a joke he wants to hear her repeating. She doesn’t know where her family comes from. This time, when her sister’s baby is born, her manager brings two bottles of wine and blows through a stop sign on the way home. Her boyfriend is waiting in the driveway when they pull in. Her manager locks the doors and puts the car in reverse, but she pries the lock up with her fingers—three times because he keeps trying to lock her in—and when she finally gets out, she has a chipped nail and no job to go to in the morning.

Her boyfriend doesn’t yell at her, but he doesn’t speak to her either. He just sits on the couch staring at the wall. She has a headache from the wine. She pours herself another glass, but it doesn’t help. Sometime after midnight she goes to bed, she can hardly keep her eyes open. He stays on the couch all night and the next and when her car passes the five-thousand-mile mark he doesn’t change her oil and she doesn’t ask him to and when she finally takes her car to a Jiffy Lube a few towns over the oil is almost black. The mechanic makes her look at it smeared on a piece of paper next to a smear of fresh oil and he tries to upsell her on a new air filter that she can’t afford.

Even though they’re barely speaking, they can’t survive on his income alone, so her boyfriend gets her a job answering phones at the auto shop where he works. Maybe he wants to keep an eye on her. It’s easier work than the gas station and the pay is better, too. No more stink of breakfast pizzas and hotdogs and spilled gasoline tracked in on the linoleum. She’s careful not to flirt or cry, even when she gets a raise, even when she becomes eligible for a 401k. She brings her sister’s oldest by the auto shop and lets him touch the tires of all the cars and when customers come in she pretends that he is hers. He still has those terrible bags under his eyes. So does she. He cries when he gets hungry and she has nothing to feed him.

When her boyfriend finally goes out front to change the oil in her car and sees that she got her last oil change at Jiffy Lube, he comes into the kitchen and stands behind her with his hands on her shoulders. He leans forward, puts his face in her hair, and tells her that he wants to forgive her, that he will forgive her, that he does forgive her. She does not let herself cry. She waits to see if it’s true.

They decide to book a vacation together, a real one. They select a cruise that will take them to five islands in the Caribbean: Bermuda, St. John, and three others whose names elude her when she calls to tell her sister. The room they pick is at the bottom of the boat, underwater, but she tells her sister that she’ll be waking up to ocean sunrises. Long after she has purchased a new swimsuit—the old one is several sizes too small—and a straw hat, they receive an emailed cancellation with options for rebooking. An oil spill has slicked the water rainbow, turned seabirds black. It’s unsafe to swim. It’s okay, she says, we’ll rebook for another time. She’s careful not to voice her worry that it’s too late, that the water will only ever get dirtier.

She drinks three glasses of wine and tells her boyfriend she thinks she’d like to have a baby. Their five-year high school reunion is approaching, and they get an email requesting a life update to share in the reunion event program. She responds for them both. They are high school sweethearts, she says, and are now expecting their first child together. Expecting can mean a lot of things, she tells her boyfriend when he isn’t sure about the update. She thinks it’d be sweet to bring the tape measure to the reunion, to measure once more the distance between the school and the gravel pit out back. She has only just learned that gravel pits have lifespans, that once depleted they are rehabbed into fishponds and landfills, that they almost never make it past thirty-five without having to become something else.