by Jen Klein
“Great, right?” I look over the hood of the car and see Milo watching me size up the store. “Wait until you see the inside. Come on.”
I follow Milo across the gravel, past a very old German shepherd that lifts its head at our arrival, and through the green doors. We step onto roughhewn oak floors and stop to breathe in the scents of wood and leather and something sweet and yeasty. Dust motes dance through the sunlight filtering in the front windows, and soft fiddle music plays from hidden speakers. Shelves line the walls, some metal and some made from a dark wood. A row of rusty file cabinets and old crates runs down the center of the room. From where we’re standing, I can see a sampling of the store’s wares: thick woolen socks, small barrels of old-fashioned stick candy, plaid flannel shirts, metal canteens, yo-yos, books about hiking trails. There’s no rhyme or reason to the place, so it should feel cluttered and crazy, but instead it’s a little magical. Like we’ve stepped into the past.
I turn to Milo and find he’s watching me again. “It’s one of my favorite places,” he says.
Milo’s words make me extra happy. This isn’t just a cool old store; it’s something special to Milo. And he wanted me to see it. Like maybe I’m special to him too.
Of course, I don’t say any of that. I only smile.
We wander around for a while, looking at postcards and old Coca-Cola signs and handmade candles before splitting up to use the restrooms. We meet up by the cash register, where Milo buys sodas for both of us and I buy a bag of assorted candies to share.
Back in the Impala, Milo pulls a tattered map from the glove compartment. He spreads it over the steering wheel and places a finger on what I presume is our current location. “Don’t be nervous,” he tells me. “I’m sixty percent sure I know where we’re going.”
“Then I’m only forty percent nervous.”
Milo flashes me a grin, then goes back to the map. He leans closer to the paper, his narrow shoulders hunching toward his ears as he traces his finger along a line. A flop of black hair swings in front of his forehead, and I fight an urge to reach out and tuck it behind his ear. I cannot have these feelings about Milo. I cannot.
And yet the reason I’m out here with him is—clearly—because I was already having them.
Shit.
With a flourish, Milo folds the map in half and hands it to me. He turns the key, and the Impala’s engine groans to life. “I’m up to seventy percent.”
“I think I’m still at forty.”
This time, he laughs out loud.
It’s a nice laugh.
Shit shit.
We go another ten minutes down the road before Milo pulls off again, this time into the dirt area beside a tiny white church. “Are we here to pray?” I ask.
“Nope, just to park.”
Poked into the ground is a bent metal sign telling us that the church is called Round Wheel Baptist. “Wait a minute.” I look at Milo. “Is this town…or whatever…called Round Wheel?”
“Yep.” His eyes dance as he nods. “Cute, right?”
“Yes. And redundant.”
“And repetitive.”
“It also repeats itself.”
“Exactly.”
This time when we exit the car, Milo opens the back door. He grabs something and looks over the roof at me. “Here.”
I manage to catch the plastic bottle he tosses. “Bug spray?”
“Unless you wish to be eaten.”
“Does it keep away bears too?”
“No. But that’s what I’m here for.” Milo makes what I think is supposed to be a fierce face, and I burst out laughing.
“Very scary,” I assure him. “No bears would dare come near us.”
“Thank you.”
After we’re both sprayed, Milo pulls on his backpack and slings a duffel bag over one shoulder. I offer to carry his tripod, and we strike out on a narrow path heading into the forest. The dogwoods at the edge quickly give way to tall maples, shading us from the hottest of the sun. The path is narrow, so I follow behind Milo. He’s wearing a black T-shirt over long gray cargo shorts and his standard Chucks. As I watch, he pulls his purple bandanna over his hair. I watch him tie a knot at the nape of his neck, and again, I squelch the desire to touch him. There’s something about the brown skin of his knuckles. And the long lines of his calves, moving rhythmically beneath the edges of his cargoes. He’s just…touchable.
We walk for another twenty minutes or so. It’s quiet except for the sounds of our feet on the path, the occasional scurry of wind in the trees, and the songs of thrushes and warblers. Then the trees fall away and we’re out in the sun again, in a giant meadow with scattered patches of grass. It’s warmer now, and a trickle of sweat runs down the middle of my back. The tripod, which felt so light when I took it out of the car, has become hot and heavy. I keep switching it from arm to arm.
Ahead of me, Milo stops walking. He’s looking at a dribble of water running across the way we’re going. It’s not really even enough to call it a stream, but Milo shakes his head in frustration. I touch his arm. “If you’re worried about me, you should know that I’m capable of jumping over two feet of water.”
“We came the wrong way.” He looks at me. “Are you good to keep walking?”
Even though I’m hot, I nod. Milo must read my mind, because he takes off his backpack and unzips it, pulling out a metal water bottle. He unscrews the lid and hands it to me. I take a sip and nearly gasp at how cold it is. It still has tiny chips of ice from the cubes Milo must have put in this morning. I take three more long gulps before handing it back so he can do the same. We pass the water back and forth until it’s gone. “Good?”
This time when I nod, I mean it.
We double back on our path. We’ve almost returned to the edge of the forest when I hit my foot against something and trip, catching myself before I fall. Milo turns around. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Other than feeling a little stupid, that is.
Except Milo’s not looking at my face anymore. His eyes have dropped to my shoes. “Hold on.” He sets his hands on my shoulders and gently pushes me back a step so that he can look at the ground beneath my feet. I stay where I am, staring up at him because…well, because I can. What Milo sees makes him suck in his breath quickly and then jerk his gaze back to my face. “You found it!” In one motion, he pulls me in, wrapping his long arms around me. The hug lasts only a second, but that’s enough time for me to clearly feel the hardness of his rib cage against my own, and his chest muscles beneath his thin T-shirt. When we part and step away from each other, I duck my head to see what he was looking at.
And also to hide the flush staining my cheeks.
There, barely visible beneath the grass, are metal rails and a broken wooden slat. It’s an old train track, cutting across the middle of the meadow. “You’re a genius.” Milo sounds excited. “Come on, this way.”
We walk, side by side now, following the tracks. They lead us back to the edge of the forest. There are no huge mature trees here, only saplings and shrubs. The track—and we with it—cut along the periphery until Milo points ahead. “There it is.”
I shade my eyes with my hands, and after a moment I see what he’s looking at. It’s a building, crouched in the shade of the large trees that stand beyond it. As we get closer, I can see that it’s actually only part of a building. The rest has fallen down and fallen away, gotten lost in time.
“It was a train station,” Milo tells me.
“Does that mean there’s a town here too?”
“There used to be. We’ll see what’s still around.”
The station is tiny, smaller than Annette’s apartment. It was once yellow, but now most of the paint has peeled away, exposing gray slats. It sits on a slab of concrete atop a crumbling brick foundation. A wooden roof still sags over the tiny porch area. There are spaces for two doors. Only one still exists, tilting forward from its hinges.
“Do you think it’s safe?” Milo turns toward
me, and I say it automatically. “Don’t make the face again.” But he does, and because it’s oh-so-fierce, I laugh and he laughs with me. Then I give him a stern look. “But, really, I don’t think we should go inside.”
“You’re probably right. If there’s even a floor left in there, it can’t be stable.” He heads around the corner of the building. “Besides, that’s not what I’m interested in, anyway.”
“Then what?” I call after him. He doesn’t answer, so I lift the tripod from where I rested it on the ground and go after him.
I catch up with him behind the building, finding him staring in awe. “Look.” He points to something on the rear wall of the station: a crude marking made long ago with black paint. It’s a square: missing its top line, faded from the sun and the years.
Milo nudges me. “You know what that is?”
“A…‘U’?”
He shakes his head. “A vagabond mark. Probably a hundred years old. They’re also called hobo codes, but ‘hobo’ is pejorative. You know.”
Actually, I didn’t know, but I accept it.
“Quick history lesson.” Milo drops to his knees, setting his backpack and duffel bag before him so he can pull out equipment. “Vagabonds didn’t have homes. They stowed away on trains, going all over the country looking for work.”
It sounds romantic. Romantic and dangerous, that is.
“They had a code of honor,” Milo continues. “They would help each other out because they were all in the same boat, so they’d leave messages for the travelers who came after them. Except that most of them were illiterate, or they came from somewhere else and didn’t speak English. So they had these symbols instead. Like ‘be careful of guard dogs’ or ‘someone here might feed you.’ ”
I tilt my head, sizing up the unfinished square. “What does that one mean?”
“I think that it’s ‘safe to camp,’ but I’ll have to check online once we’re back in cell range.”
I watch Milo select a lens and carefully attach it to his camera. I’m intrigued. Messages left in plain sight for each other. Information you only get to know if you’re accepted into the brotherhood. And everyone else—those outside the secret circle—could look right at a sign and not even know they were missing something. “How did you find out about vagabonds?” I ask Milo.
He’s squatting before the symbol now, taking pictures. “My great-grandfather was one.”
“Wow.” I try to imagine it. Leaving your family for the dream of a better life far away, unable to communicate with anyone. And then finding a community of fellow wanderers. Amazing.
We spend several hours at the train station and nearby, stopping only once to eat the lunches Milo packed for us. Deeper in the forest, we find a little group of other abandoned buildings and a bunch of other marks. Most are in discreet areas on the buildings—the corner of a porch railing, the support beam on a collapsed fence, a brick of an old well—but there’s also one barely visible on a big oak tree, and another painted on a boulder. That one looks fresh, and I wonder if it’s a true vagabond mark or if it was put there more recently. “Do people still do this?”
“I don’t know, maybe.” Milo runs his finger along the arrow symbol on the boulder. “But there aren’t as many train stowaways these days. The hobo lifestyle is kind of a faded institution.”
I’m listening, but my gaze is drawn to a pile of fist-sized rocks near the base of the boulder. I plop down and lift one, then hold it up for Milo to see.
“Oh wow.” He looks awed again. “You found a nest of them.”
“They’re vagabond eggs,” I tell him before continuing to look through the rocks. There’s one with a triangle and another with an ‘X.’ One looks like a top hat and another has a stick-figure cat. “Do you think this one means they’ll feed pets too?” I start to ask Milo, but when I look up, he has the camera lens pointed at me. I instinctively duck my head away, holding my hand up to block his sight of me.
“No, don’t do that.” Milo pulls the camera away from his face. “You’re this modern girl looking through messages from another time. It’s awesome.”
I hope the camera can’t pick up my sudden blush.
I look back at the pile and try to ignore the clicking sounds coming from Milo’s direction. I consider taking the cat rock when we leave, but I decide it should stay where it is. It’s a little piece of history. I don’t have any right to it.
We’re going past the train station on our way back to the car when Milo stops. “Hold on, come here.” I follow him to the porch area, where he drops his bags on the lowest step. “We should leave our own mark,” he tells me. “Nothing permanent. Like with a stick in the dirt.”
I like the idea. An impermanent telling of our incomplete story.
“Of what?”
Milo turns to me, and suddenly I’m all too aware of how close we are to each other, standing there beside the old train station. He reaches out and takes my left hand.
I let him do it.
He turns my hand over and runs his finger in a circle over my palm. My heart speeds up, and I absolutely cannot lift my eyes to meet his. I keep them fixed on my hand as Milo traces a line through the center of the invisible circle. “What does it mean?” I hope my voice sounds normal, because I suddenly feel very not normal. I feel hot and excited and terrified.
“The road is safe,” he says. I manage to raise my chin to look at him. Even though his eyes are a dark, dark brown, out here in the sun they have flecks of lighter brown. Those eyes are crinkled up at the corners. He’s smiling. “Either a safe road, or get out fast because it’s dangerous.”
“Maybe we should pick something else, then.” Impossibly, my voice is steady.
“Hmm.” He looks back down at my hand. “Okay, I remember this one.” He brings his finger to my wrist, drawing what looks and feels like a little snowman next to three triangles. My skin tickles when his finger moves across it, and even when he lifts his hand, I can still feel his touch.
“Shovel snow for food?” I guess.
“No. It means there’s a nice lady here.”
“Are you saying I’m a nice lady?”
“Not at all.” But he smiles in return.
“Why the triangles? I don’t understand that one.”
“That’s because you’re not the intended audience. You’re not supposed to know what it’s saying. Like this.” He slides his left hand farther up—like he’s erasing the snowman and triangles—to just inside my elbow. My entire arm tingles in response. He touches the tip of his right index finger there and scribbles something—it might be words—down the length of my arm. It burns under his touch, and I have to swallow to collect myself before I can ask the question: “What was that?”
But Milo only positions my arm a little higher in the air. “Hold still.” I keep my arm extended as he pulls his camera back out and click-click-clicks at the blank space on my skin. When he’s done, he flashes me a grin that is brighter than the sun overhead. “Hidden messages.”
•••
I think we’re both tired from the walk and the heat because we mostly listen to music on the way back through the mountains. The few stations we can pick up come in and out intermittently, so we’re subjected to easy listening, nineties pop, and, for one tragic stretch of time, country. As we cross the border into Olympus, Milo stops paying attention to the music. I can tell because he’s not drumming on the steering wheel with his thumbs anymore, and as we cruise down Nine Muses Street—bright and bustling in the afternoon sunlight—the radio goes to static, and Milo doesn’t change the station. I reach over and click it off as we turn past the Blue Ridge University sign. Milo doesn’t say anything and neither do I, because somehow the silence has suddenly become its own entity, filling the space between us. We head onto Crestline Drive, and as the gray apartment building comes into view, Milo clears his throat. “I have to tell you something.”
A million thoughts spin through my head, many of them having to do with what
Milo invisi-scribbled on my arm and what he does or doesn’t know about my feelings for Tuck.
Never mind that I don’t even understand my feelings for Tuck anymore.
“What?”
“I didn’t know Ella was upset about last summer. It didn’t even occur to me that she would be.”
Oh, so we’re talking about Ella, then.
“No offense, but that sounds ridiculous.” I frown at him. “You cheated on her. Who wouldn’t be upset about that?”
“No, I get that.” Milo pulls off his bandanna and wads it in his right hand, steering with his left. “Except that I didn’t think I was cheating on her. We weren’t a thing. We definitely weren’t a boyfriend-girlfriend thing. At least, I didn’t think so.”
Well, that’s surprising.
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He shoves the crumpled bandanna under his thigh so he can use both hands to turn the car into the parking lot. “We didn’t—” He stops, choosing his words very carefully. “We didn’t do much. Like…” He stops again, and I decide to help him out.
“Physically, you mean?”
“Yes.” He slides a grateful glance at me. “Like, not really anything. And it was only two times, kind of.”
“What does ‘two times, kind of’ mean?”
“I don’t want to—” He swings wide and pulls into a spot facing the building. “We’re in a gray zone here, you know? It’s her privacy, and I’m not an asshole.”
“You’re the one who brought it up.” I fold my arms in front of my body. “And you’re the one saying it’s not a big deal, but apparently she thinks it is. So explain.”
Milo puts the car in park and kills the engine, staring in the direction of the apartment. After a moment, he turns to me, crooking one knee up onto the console between us. “Fine.” His dark eyes are fixed somewhere over my shoulder. “Once was backstage, on that bench near the bulletin board. It was near the end of the summer, after the show. Almost everyone was gone for the night. My dad was in tech, writing his end-of-season list. Ella’s uncle got held up in the company office, so we were both stuck there. We were just waiting, and then we were…kissing.”
