by Amber Smith
I inhaled a sharp breath just at the of sight it, like for a moment his pain was mine.
I kept watching. At first I was curious about what had happened, how he got hurt, concerned about whether or not he was actually all right.
He nudged his sneakers off and pushed them aside with his foot, one right next to the other. Pulled each sock off and placed them on top of his sneakers. It seemed so methodical. Practiced. Like he had a routine and he would not deviate. He pushed down his running pants and folded them neatly on the edge of the bed. He was wearing those boy boxer briefs. I couldn’t see anything, but I knew I should look away at this point.
He stood there, very still for a moment, with his back to me. Like he was thinking. Then, at last, in one quick movement, he pulled his T-shirt up over his head and let it fall to the floor, so haphazard in comparison to the other articles of clothing.
He was wearing something underneath, like some kind of a vest, an undershirt. At first I thought it was a brace or something. He turned away from the mirror then, away from me. As he took it off, I could see, even from the other side of the door, the red marks it left on his skin, like it was tight, very tight.
I remember thinking how strong and slender his back looked as he maneuvered out if it. I shouldn’t be watching this. I was about to duck again when he turned, his arms folded across his chest. That was when I saw that his hands were pressed deep into a flesh I knew so well. And as he reached down into the open dresser drawer to retrieve a clean shirt, I could see in profile, the gentle curve of his chest as he bunched up the shirt and wrapped it across the front of his body, holding it in place as he exited the room.
I sank down under the window, against the door. I waited. I didn’t move a muscle, didn’t make a sound. I’m not sure I was even breathing. Close by, through the open window around the corner of the house where I couldn’t see, I heard the sound of water being turned on, full force. Then it switched to that unmistakable spray of a showerhead.
• • •
I don’t know how I made it back down the ladder, and I don’t remember crossing the field to get home. But I was in my room, Roxie sitting there patiently at my feet, as I looked out my window. I wasn’t sure what I had just done, or what had even just happened, or how I could ever justify any part of me being there.
I tried to break it down logically: Chris had breasts. Chris was a girl. But he also wasn’t a girl. He was . . . Chris.
Does it matter? Should it? Does it change anything? I didn’t have answers for any of the questions that were running on a loop in my head.
The one person I would have really liked to talk with about this—really, the only person in the entire world who could help me with those answers—was Mallory.
• • •
The alarm on my phone had been going off for over an hour and I never even heard it. It took me several minutes to realize why my alarm had been going off in the first place.
I had stayed up way too late the past two nights. But as soon as my brain put all the pieces together, I jumped out of bed, rushing to get ready, looking everywhere for my Bargain Mart shirt, only to find it in a ball at the bottom of my hamper, all wrinkled and gross.
I was going to be late to work. Again.
I grabbed my bag and put Mallory’s camera inside it. Then I raced my bike down the road and into town. The whole time, I was still thinking about what I had witnessed. It had only been two days since I’d last seen Chris, but it felt as if I’d lived through ten lifetimes. It had taken me that long to come up with answers, except they weren’t very helpful.
Does it matter?
I don’t know.
Should it?
I don’t know.
Does it change anything?
I don’t know.
I locked my bike up and tried to slip through the automatic doors without being spotted. I maneuvered stealthily, ducking down empty aisles to make my way to the back room, where I silently clocked in twenty-two minutes late for my shift. I was almost home free, but as I was coming out of the double doors, my manager was coming in. We both stopped short.
“Morning,” he said, not mentioning the fact that this was the fourth time in two weeks that I’d been late. He clicked his tongue and sighed, then brought his hand to his chin, regarding my wrinkled T-shirt with disdain, before semi-sternly instructing me: “I need you to go help out over in clearance today.”
I just shrugged.
For hour after mind-numbing hour, I was at it with another punished coworker. Our conversation faded quickly, overtaken by the clicking sounds of the pricing guns and the gentle soft rock humming over the speakers, interrupted every five minutes by a prerecorded movie-trailer voice announcement of the “Daily Deals.” The recording had just finished cycling through for about the seventy-fifth time when I heard my name.
“Maia?”
When I looked up, there was Chris. The person I had not stopped thinking about for the past forty-eight hours.
“Hey,” he said, smiling as he looked down at me.
“Hi.” I stood up quickly, suddenly very aware of my dingy Bargain Mart shirt, my dirty jeans and old sneakers, my glasses and my hair. More than any of those things individually, I was concerned about the fact that I honestly couldn’t remember if I’d even bothered to look in a mirror before I ran out of my house this morning.
He squinted and turned his head. “You’re wearing glasses.”
“I usually wear contacts, but”—I inadvertently pulled the trigger on the pricing gun, and a ninety-nine-cent sticker popped out—“I was running late this morning.”
“I like ’em,” he said, nodding.
“Oh, I don’t know.” I took them off and examined them as if I’d never even seen them before. I felt the need to avoid looking directly at him, for fear my face might give me away and show all the things I was not supposed to know. “I mean, thanks.”
“I used to want glasses when I was a kid,” he offered when I said nothing to keep the conversation going. “I’m jealous. It kinda sucks to be cursed with perfect vision.”
I didn’t want this to be awkward, but I suddenly had no idea what to say to him, so I forced out a tiny laugh. It sounded fake and sat there between the two of us.
“Well, I was just here and saw you. So hi.”
“Hi,” I said yet again, and as I glanced at the items he was holding—a box of extra large bandages and a tube of Bargain Mart brand triple antibiotic cream—I blurted out the only thing I could think of: “Not another oven mitt emergency, I hope?”
He laughed.
There. Maybe it didn’t have to be weird. Maybe it was possible to fall back into that rhythm we had been cultivating. Maybe things didn’t have to change after all.
“No, I’m just clumsy,” he said, raising his arm to reveal a line of small Band-Aids leading up to his elbow, too small to cover up the extent of the scrapes.
I winced.
“It’s nothing.” He shrugged. Of course, he didn’t know that I also knew about the equally severe scrapes on his knees too. “But you would think, living with a nurse, she’d have something more in the way of first aid other than the teeniest, tiniest Band-Aids ever created.”
“Yeah, really,” was the best I could come up with. Stupid.
The silence between us hung there, waiting to be filled, but then he glanced down the aisle—at my fellow clearance aisle casualty, who was blatantly staring at us, and said, “Well, I’ll see you around, I guess.”
As he started to turn away I could almost feel Mallory nudging me again, whispering in my ear, Chickenshit, say something!
“Hey, wait.” He turned back toward me, and it took me a second to realize I was the one who had spoken. “I get off in like twenty minutes,” I continued. “I mean, if you feel like hanging out or something. And you don’t mind waiting around for a little.”
“I can wait around.”
“Okay,” I said, and accidentally pressed the pricing gun trigger
again.
“Okay,” he repeated, “I’ll be outside.”
As soon as he started walking toward the front of the store, I looked over and my coworker just nodded and said, “It’s all good. Go.”
So, I abandoned my post in the clearance aisle. I zigzagged a path to the back room, grabbed my bag, and locked myself in the family restroom, where I could be alone and get myself together.
“What are you doing?” I whispered to my reflection, gripping tightly to the sides of the enamel sink.
The girl staring back at me offered no response.
I twisted my hair back into a bun and splashed my face with water. I gargled and spit, patting my face dry with scratchy brown paper towels I pulled from the dispenser. I took the camera out and set it carefully on the sink. Rummaging through my bag, I found one individually wrapped mint floating at the bottom—I must’ve picked it up from one of the two restaurants in town at some point. I tried to remember how long it might’ve been there, whether it was still good or not. But my mouth tasted gross, so I didn’t care. I tore open the wrapper and set it on my tongue anyway. I dumped everything onto the dirty floor of the bathroom, and out poured crumpled receipts and a broken pencil, a marker, nickels and pennies, a safety pin, and finally what I was searching for: my strawberry lip balm.
I picked it up with two fingers and centered myself in front of the mirror. I removed the cap and pressed the waxy tip against my upper lip, gliding it along the right side, then the left. I kneaded my lips together and stood back.
“Yes,” I whispered this time.
CHRIS
THERE WERE PARTS OF THE scrapes that were still pretty raw from being ground up by the pavement. I applied the ointment and used two new, big bandages to cover it again. It already felt better, shielded from the sting of the air.
Then I pulled up one leg of my jeans and removed the haphazard arrangement of little bandages, and did the same thing. Again, for my other knee. And then one last bandage for the palm of my hand. I crumpled up all the paper backings and wrappers and stuck them in the plastic bag.
There was a garbage can by the entrance, so I walked back over and threw the bag away, then went back to the car. I sat inside at first, but I thought maybe that looked too weird, like I was expecting her to get in, which I wasn’t. So then I got out and stood next to the car, but that looked stupid, so I tried to lean against the hood instead. But I thought that looked like I was trying to be a James Dean impersonator or something—as James Dean as one can look next to a station wagon, that is.
So I decided to walk back toward the building. I leaned against the cart rack, in the shade, and waited. As I stood there, I tried to smile at the customers coming and going—I thought people were supposed to be friendly in small towns—but hardly anyone smiled back. Most of them gave me these cool, sideways stares. So I pulled out my phone, to have something to stop myself from getting too nervous.
She asked me to hang out, I tried to remind myself. As friends, I silently added. Just friends.
Cole’s last text to me was two days ago. He had said: Guess what?
It came in after I had that spill in the road, and I didn’t feel like guessing, so I ignored him. I was ignoring him too much lately. It had taken me a couple of days to rally, but I was back. I was feeling better now.
What? I typed, then deleted.
Hey Cole. Delete again.
Hey, how’s it going?
Stupid. Generic. Lame. Delete.
Hey, sorry man.
That one, I sent. I watched the screen for at least a full minute, but there was no indication he was going to respond in the near future.
I was still looking at my phone when a shadow fell in front of me. As I looked up at Maia standing there, I wasn’t sure if it was the light or the shade or what, but I was having trouble remembering the “just friends” part of my agreement with myself.
“Okay,” she said as we stood at the edge of the parking lot looking out at the sparsely arranged cars. “So I can give you the official tour of our sprawling metropolis, featuring our very own Historic Downtown Carson, but that wouldn’t take very long.”
I waited before speaking, just in case she wasn’t finished.
“Or we could do something else,” she added. “It all depends on how much time you have.”
“I’ve got time,” I told her.
“And I’ve got”—she reached around and opened her bag so I could see inside—“the camera today, so I was wondering if you felt like heading back over to New Pines.”
I pulled my keys out of my pocket and jingled them. “Let’s go.”
On the drive, she was extra quiet. I kept feeling her staring at me. Every time I would turn to look, she’d glance away or act like she was watching something outside the window.
“Everything okay?” I finally asked her when I could take it no longer. Were we going to have to get the whole near-kiss thing out in the open? Would that make it better or more awkward?
“Yeah, everything’s fine,” she said, but her voice was all high and she was talking faster than she normally did. “Why?”
“It just seemed like—were you just staring at me?” I asked.
“Staring at you? No.” She was shaking her head. “No. No, not at all.”
“One more ‘no,’ and I’ll believe you,” I tried to joke. “Do I have something on my face or—”
“No,” she said, and even though she smiled, a flush was creeping across her cheeks.
“Okay, okay, I believe you.”
She laughed, and said, “Sorry, I wasn’t staring on purpose.”
“No, it’s okay. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t feel weird or uncomfortable about the other day.”
“The other day?” she echoed. “What do you mean?”
“In my room.”
Now her face went pale, abruptly draining of color. “In your room? What—what do you mean?” she repeated.
“When you came over the other night.”
She exhaled, and it seemed like that tightness in her body relaxed.
“It’s just that you left pretty quickly and I didn’t know if you felt weird about”—I paused, willing the silence to convey the word I was too shy, too embarrassed to say out loud—“anything,” I finished, instead.
“Oh.” A flash of recognition passed over her face, the corner of her mouth curving into the smallest hint of a smile before she bit her lip to make it stop. “No, I didn’t feel weird.”
“Okay.” Shit. Now I really didn’t know what to say. “Good.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Feel weird?”
“Oh,” I said, accidentally mirroring her response. “No.”
“Good,” she said, looking straight ahead.
• • •
We parked not far from where we had only a few days earlier. It was busier today. More cars on the road, more people on the streets. It was almost bustling, for a small town. The sidewalks were shaded under a canopy of lush foliage that arced over the street, with the leaves from the trees on opposite sides meeting in the middle.
Maia got out of the car in less of a hurry than she had on our first visit. She took her camera out of her bag and put the strap around her neck, just like it was that very first time I saw her on the road. Someday I would work up the courage to ask if she would show me the picture she took of me that day.
For now, we stood on the sidewalk next to the station wagon, looking around.
“Where to?” I asked her.
She looked right and left, then stepped out into the street. We crossed to the other side, where the fence of the cemetery lined the sidewalk. “I really wanted to get a picture of those gates,” she said as I followed along next to her.
When we got there, she placed her hands on the bars, like she had the other day. Then she glanced over at me and cleared her throat as she stepped back, pointing the camera at the gates. She kept taking steps backward, past the
sidewalk, onto the grass, and then finally, balanced with only her toes on the curb, she looked through the camera for what seemed like a long time. I stood back to give her space, but even several feet away, I could tell she was holding her breath.
Just when I thought she was about to take the picture, she lowered the camera and looked down at her feet. She repositioned them in the slightest way, more like she was moving her feet inside her sneakers rather than making her sneakers move.
At last her finger pressed down on the button and I heard the clap of the shutter. Even after it released, she didn’t move for a moment. She was so focused; it was kind of mesmerizing to watch her. When she lowered the camera and looked at me, I realized I was the one who was staring at her now.
“What if we went in? Just for a few minutes?” she asked. “No zombies, I promise.”
“Yeah, sure,” I answered. “But I got your back, just in case.”
She looked at me as she pushed through the gates, and smiled in this way that made me wish we really had kissed the other night—if only so that I could kiss her again right now.
It felt like we were walking into another world, another little city inside the town. There was a wide road made of old cobblestones that stretched out in front of us, and smaller pathways that curved around to the left and right, connecting to an even wider network of paths. The abundance of gigantic trees distracted from the smaller monuments that dotted the ground. Old roots had long cracked and lifted the stone walkways. The smell of flowers in the air made it seem like we were entering a park, not a cemetery.
We walked down the main road, both of us taking in the otherworldly scenery. Names and dates on the headstones were engraved in a script that was hard to read, some of the markings worn away altogether.
“A lot of these headstones date back to the 1800s,” I said.
“Yeah,” she replied, but she wasn’t paying attention to the graves we were passing. She had her eyes focused out into the distance.
