Kelly decides to leave the party with the Senator

Kelly decides to leave Buffy St. John’s party with The Senator, converting a developing attraction into a consequential departure. The choice is both hers and constrained: she wants to go, yet feels the weight of his desire and the need to respond to it. The planned ferry journey becomes the route toward the crash at Indian Creek, giving this decision its decisive significance in the novel’s plot.

The decision at the party

The plan was for Kelly and The Senator to slip away from Buffy’s at precisely seven in the evening and catch the 7:30 ferry to Boothbay Harbor. The plan did not unfold neatly. A new carload of guests arrived, and The Senator remained in intense conversation over another drink; they might miss the ferry, and Kelly wondered when the next one would leave. She nonetheless reassured herself that there would always be another. Her practical self-admonition—to expect nothing and accept whatever happened—made uncertainty seem manageable rather than a reason to withdraw.

The choice had begun before the departure logistics. While hiking in the dunes behind the St. John family cottage, The Senator gripped Kelly’s bare shoulders and kissed her. The surf and wind gave the encounter a physical intensity, while Kelly understood that he would kiss her again. Her decision to go with him for the ferry, rather than spend the Fourth of July night at Buffy’s as planned, made their changed relationship publicly legible. In her own interpretation, she was the woman he had chosen, and the passenger in the speeding car that would follow.

Attraction and conflicted agency

Kelly’s response cannot be reduced either to simple reluctance or to uncomplicated desire. She had not wanted to say yes, but she had wanted to say yes. That contradiction accompanies the decision from the outset: she is drawn toward the possibility of leaving with The Senator even as she recognizes that the evening may carry expectations she does not know how to refuse.

The narrative places Kelly’s sense of desire in relation to his. During their kisses on the beach, she experiences the man’s desire as an abrupt, galvanizing force, rather than identifying it as her own. She also feels a familiar wave of anxiety and guilt, fearing that having made him want her means she cannot refuse him. This distinction matters to the scene’s meaning: her decision to accompany him is real, but it does not erase the pressure she associates with male desire or settle what she wants next.

That pressure resonates with Kelly’s recollection of G-----, whose touch had sometimes hurt her unconsciously. It also sits beside the earlier handshake with The Senator, when he squeezed her hand just perceptibly too hard. These details do not make the departure equivalent to a single earlier experience; they show why physical contact and apparent intimacy can leave Kelly alert to pain and to the possibility that another person’s actions may exceed what she has chosen.

Leaving Buffy and anticipating what follows

As Kelly hurriedly packed her suitcase, Buffy pinched her teasingly and asked why she was leaving then, rather than a little later. Kelly apologized, embarrassed and flushed, but could not say what she and Buffy both understood. Her silence reflects more than a simple failure to explain the itinerary: she is reluctant to name the attraction and the consequences she anticipates. She believes that if she does not do what The Senator asks, there may be no later opportunity. The thought frames departure as a narrow opening, not as a settled promise of a future together.

The scene also makes the departure visible to Buffy, even though Kelly does not openly explain it. She knows Buffy may later remember the episode as a betrayal by a friend, and imagines that Buffy’s account will focus on Kelly rather than on The Senator. The tension between what Kelly chooses and what she can comfortably tell her friend gives the decision a social cost before the danger on the road has become apparent.

Kelly’s repeated effort to treat the plan as practical—there will be another ferry; whatever happens will be enough—works as a form of self-management. The optimism helps her move forward through uncertainty, but it cannot ensure that the evening will remain within the bounds she imagines. Her readiness to go is therefore neither a guarantee of safety nor a declaration that she knows what the journey will demand.

The journey and its consequences

The Senator and Kelly leave the party at about 7:55 p.m., with twenty-five minutes to reach the ferry if they drive quickly and take the right route. The Senator turns onto Old Ferry Road, an understandable mistake at dusk but a dangerous one: the badly rutted road had not been maintained by Grayling Township and should have been closed. He is heading in the general direction of Brockden’s Landing, but takes the old road rather than the newer paved Ferry Road.

The car skids on the sandy road and crashes into Indian Creek. In retrospect, the narration notes that, had it continued out of control on the hairpin curve, it might instead have struck the railing of a narrow bridge and fallen into the water; that alternative is presented as speculation, not as what happened. The actual crash turns the planned ferry trip into an emergency in which both occupants fight for survival. The Senator escapes the sinking car and leaves Kelly behind. Kelly understands his actions as blind panic, but that understanding does not undo the abandonment or its consequences.

The aftermath exposes a sharp difference between the two people’s situations. The Senator reaches shore, makes his way to a telephone, and calls Ray Annick, telling him that there has been an accident and that Kelly is dead. Ray tells him not to explain over the phone and offers to come get him. Kelly, meanwhile, remains trapped in the car and continues trying to survive. Her later bargaining with a hypothetical rescue team—offering her right leg, or both legs, if amputation is necessary—shows how radically the meaning of her earlier readiness has changed: the journey she chose in the hope of a shared departure has become a struggle to stay alive.

Narrative significance

The decision is a turning point because the novel presents it at once as an act of choice, a moment of unequal desire, and the beginning of a fatal sequence. The public act of leaving Buffy’s gathering follows the private beach encounter; the ferry plan leads onto a disused road; the drive ends in the creek. Each transition narrows the space in which Kelly can act, without making the earlier choice a sufficient explanation for what happens to her.

The contrast between Kelly’s hopeful practical reasoning and the consequences of the trip gives the episode its force. She believes there will be another ferry and tries to remain open to what may come. Yet she cannot control The Senator’s route, the road’s condition, or his response to the crash. The decision thus marks both Kelly’s movement toward a desire she partly owns and the precarious limits placed on her agency once she is his passenger.