“I’m not really trying so hard,” I said with a laugh. “We talked things over, and—we’re good now, I guess.”
“How did that happen?” Oliver asked, eyes wide.
I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter.” I had no wish right now to expose all of Heather’s secrets, which she’d spent carefully like precious currency to win my trust or make me believe she’d suffered enough. “People change. Apparently people change more than I thought.”
“You’re smiling.”
“Yeah, I guess I am.” Suddenly I felt blushy and embarrassed and I didn’t want to say anything more about it. “What, I’m not allowed to smile?”
“Okay, okay.” Ollie held his hands up in surrender. “I am officially not pressing the issue anymore, starting now.”
I wanted to say something to him. I almost did. But it was still too complicated, still the wrong time. Maybe after the play was done, I would let myself think about this again, and say something, to someone.
Not now.
But at home, curled up on my bed with a bowl of apple slices, I took the beat-up script for
Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad
out of my backpack. And I pushed myself through all the parts that used to make my stomach clench up because I couldn’t take being reminded that much of Julia, the ninjas who could divide by zero and every other silly joke that almost no one but us would have understood.
It was hers. And it was for me too. And it hurt, but I found that I could bear it after all. I found that I didn’t want to hide from those memories.
When I was done, and I’d checked to make sure that absolutely no one was at home, I opened up to the sheet music and started singing.
THEN
I
woke up on Maggie’s futon and, for the first time in weeks, spent the morning doing absolutely nothing. It was wonderful to be so lazy, just this once—I was not so cold or hot or restless or tired or melancholy or lonely that I had to push myself forward to whatever was waiting for me next. It was already past eleven by the time I managed to get showered and dressed, and even then Maggie had to make a pointed comment or two about when her shift started.
She cruised slowly down the main street, pointing out the Market and the creepy toy store and Pedal Power, the local bike shop, where she dropped me off. It was a small enough town that it only took three minutes to see what there was to see, but it felt bigger and more interesting than that. Because of the university close by, Maggie said—it was swarming with grad students and college burnouts.
“So, um—” I hauled my bike out of the truck bed, and it clattered on the ground. “I guess I’ll drop by the Market after I’m done here, and then when you get off work I’ll go get my stuff from your place.”
She shook her head. “May as well stay the night. It’ll practically be dark by then.”
“It’s too much of an imposition.”
“Then you can walk the dog. But this is the last outpost of human civilization for the next fifty miles. No reason to rush through it.”
I did miss civilization. And human beings. I didn’t want to admit it, but I did.
“Okay,” I said finally. “If you say so. Thanks.”
I spent an hour in the back room of Pedal Power. It was a comfortable place, like the shop I’d once visited every weekend to see the blue-green Bianchi in just my size. They sold practical city bikes with racks and fenders, not just slim feather-light racing bikes and mountain bikes that were unlikely to ever see a mountain, and they had cycling advocacy pamphlets on display racks and a Help Wanted sign in the window. The owner let me in back to put on my new chain, and I spent the rest of my time rubbing off the mud caked onto the frame and dripping oil into the moving parts. It didn’t matter too much that my bike would only get muddy again in a couple days; I felt bright inside, with the urge to do a million things at once. In the absence of a million things that needed doing, I could at least take proper care of my bike.
Later I traced my way back to the Market. It was a big store bordering a lawn, with a tin awning sheltering a patio with metal tables and chairs. Old hounds were lounging under trees, their tongues hanging out; a shaggy-haired boy was strumming a guitar badly. Which reminded me of Kris, and made me feel complicated. Shouldn’t I care more about that? Shouldn’t I feel something more than a twinge of uncertainty?
I ducked into the store and wandered among the aisles picking out the things I’d forgotten or run out of, sunscreen, just-add-hot-water meals, gas for the little camp stove, pomegranate-flavored ChapStick, an extra pair of wool socks hand-knit somewhere in the Andes; then Maggie waved me over and led me to a little table in the café. She brought me a slice of peach cobbler and vanilla ice cream and collapsed into the chair beside me.
“Nice place, right?”
I nodded. “It’s been nearly a month since I’ve stayed anywhere more than long enough to do laundry. I started day-dreaming about dry socks and food that isn’t rehydrated.”
Which was only the uncomplicated part of the truth.
“Aren’t you sick of it by now?”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter if I’m sick of it or not. I’m here because I have a job to do and I’m too stubborn to give up on it. And also,” I admitted, “it beats the alternative.”
“Really? July temperatures and complete strangers versus central air-conditioning and friends and family?”
“I’ll take complete strangers right now.” I poked with my fork at the caramelized remnants of peach cobbler. “The problem when you know people is that they know you, or they think they know you, and suddenly you can’t dye your hair or say a curse word without them all getting together to work their Freudian mojo and figure out what’s wrong with you and how to fix it.” Pause. “And whether you can be expected to put the moves on your best friend.”
Maggie smiled a pained smile at me. “God, I’m glad I’m not in high school anymore.”
“Don’t be the eightieth person to tell me it’s going to get better. I’m getting tired of that line.”
“Seriously. You can be a Marxist stamp collector if you want to be a Marxist stamp collector and anyone who would give you a hard time for that is out getting tattooed and protesting homework or the sweatshop that makes the student clothing or the war.”
I beamed at that. “You know, I had the best war protest signs ever, when I was twelve. They were pink and blue and covered with glitter. Like a really outraged Hello Kitty. My parents’ hippie friends thought I was adorable.” My parents too, though they complained for weeks that they were still vacuuming up glitter.
Maggie’s eyes widened for a second, and she let out a small, embarrassed laugh.
“What?”
“You were
twelve
when the war started. That’s so young. I don’t think I know anyone who went to a protest with their parents’ hippie friends.”
“So? What difference does that make? I mean, I know I’m not sophisticated enough to name my dog Virginia Woolf—”
“Hey, me neither,” Maggie said with a shrug. “My ex was the lit major. It doesn’t make a difference, I guess. As long as your folks know where you are and aren’t hunting all up and down the Midwest for you.”
I said they weren’t. I checked my voicemail just to make sure. The automatic voice said no new messages, and I didn’t want to admit the twinge I felt, of being just a little bit lonely and unsure and wanting to hear a familiar voice. It was too childish.
“You spend a long time wishing that your parents would just get out of your life and leave you alone,” Maggie said. “But then they do, and you wish they’d get in your face again. Maybe just once, so you can remember how rotten it felt.”
“Really?” I asked, and it occurred to me that she wasn’t just talking about me.
She shrugged, like maybe she didn’t want to admit it either, and let the subject drop until that night. I’d offered to walk Ginny before, but after I got the leash out of the closet the dog was bouncing around so much I couldn’t manage to clip it on.
Maggie grabbed her by the collar to hold her still. “I’d better go with you. She doesn’t get tired until she’s been out for two miles, and that’s far enough to get lost.”
“You don’t have to.”
But she went outside with me anyway. The air was still hot, the sky just starting to turn a deeper shade of blue. The dog picked her own direction, following the two-lane highway out of town, snuffling at the fast-food wrappers tossed from passing cars.
“Idiot drivers,” Maggie muttered. “You sure you want to bike on this road?”
“Mostly it’s not so bad if you ride like you know you’re allowed to be there. And I can react pretty quickly if I’m paying attention. Stupid maybe, but it’s not actively murderous.”
“Well,” she said dubiously. “Would you send me an e-mail every now and then just so I know you’re not dead?”
“I’m not going to die.” I said it before I had time to realize how wrong it was, the glib assumption that we were all immortal until proven otherwise. How Julia was probably certain that she wasn’t going to die either. “Okay, though. I will.”
I should’ve sent an e-mail to everybody by now. An e-mail, at least, even if I wasn’t going to call them. I’d said I would, but somehow whenever I stopped at a library and managed to get time on a computer, I froze up and spent the half hour gathering my courage. And then I posted my GPS coordinates in my journal online, and that was it.
“And be careful, would you?”
“I know.”
“You’re lucky to have parents who don’t mind you doing your own thing for a while. Mostly, the kids I knew who used to do crazy stuff were the ones whose parents were drunk or had their own problems or just didn’t give a damn. And I don’t know if there’s something you haven’t told me, but that’s not you, right?”
“No. They just trust me to figure things out for myself right now.”
“Yeah. I heard you talking on the phone before, with your mom.” She stuffed her hands in her pockets and sighed. “When I was your age—and that’s a terrible way to start off saying anything, but when I was your age I wouldn’t have been okay without my family that long. We were really close, all of us. I didn’t even fight with my dad about the usual stupid stuff like curfews and clothing. Didn’t want to go out of town for college.”
Maggie pointed vaguely northward. “I grew up over there, about twenty minutes away in a car. Haven’t been back in over a year now. Haven’t talked with my dad in months. And I hear you on the phone, just saying you’re fine, you’re in Missouri still, you got socks and a new chain for your bike. I miss being able to say that.”
I wasn’t going to ask about what happened. I was capable of putting the pieces together. Or they were different pieces, harder ones to talk about, and I didn’t see how it made sense to poke at it just to watch the carnage.
I remembered the fallout after Jon had come out of the closet, when he’d gone to stay with Julia’s family for a few days until things started to blow over. I went to her place the next afternoon and he said very firmly, “I’ve talked about what happened six times. Which is exactly six times too many.”
“Okay,” I’d said. “What should I do?”
“Help me conquer South America?”
So we gathered around the computer and gave him advice about how many tanks to build, and how many airplanes, and by the time he’d conquered our continental neighbors, he had stopped with the compulsive fidgeting and agreed to eat an actual meal.
I ended up recounting the whole saga, or as much of it as I knew, to my parents. I was fourteen then but still feeling out where they stood on some things, having gotten a long lecture a few months before for asking if we were Communists.
And what happened is that we invited Jon over for dinner, and talked mostly about computer games and hardly at all about how he didn’t want to go back home.
It was true, I was awfully lucky.
“The last couple of months,” Maggie said, “have been the first time in my entire life I haven’t been fighting with someone about when I could shower, or what was a reasonable time to turn the TV off, or who was going to wash the dishes. And it sucks. You would not think that a studio apartment could feel that big and empty, especially when you’re sharing it with a dog the size of a pony, but it does.”
“I know,” I said. “A person leaves, and—their goneness is so huge. You keep tripping into it.”
“So, it’s been good having you here. There’s something reassuring about just having someone else in the same room.”
We’d wound over the roads for a while by now, and made our way back to her apartment. She fumbled in her pocket for her keys, but didn’t unlock the door.
“I’m not asking you to stay for a while or anything. You’ve got places to go, obviously. It’s just. If you wanted to.”
I shook my head, and then I looked up at her and I realized this wasn’t really about whether I felt like taking another day or two doing as little as possible. And I felt very dense, all of a sudden, to have spent these past two days watching her like I’d been watching her, and not seeing that until now.
“Forget that I said anything.” She smiled ruefully. “You’re just a kid. You don’t need to be hearing at great length about my personal issues.”
“I am not,” I said—the stupidest thing I could have said. Of course.
But it made her smile.
And she brushed her lips up against mine.
I stood there blinking at her, motionless, trying not to say anything I shouldn’t say.
“I probably shouldn’t have done that,” she said.
“No,” I said. “You probably should’ve.” I felt quieter, and more certain, than the time before in the hotel with Kris. But I was grinning, too much, on the outside.
“There’s no way I can take responsibility for some poor confused kid.”
“No one’s asking you to take responsibility for me.” I stretched out and touched my palm to her chin, and I could feel my fingers tremble when I kissed her with all the enthusiasm of someone who’d only just discovered kissing. She kissed me back like she meant it, her breath hot and near.