by Jen Klein
“I…think I might want to.” The honesty feels good. It feels refreshing.
“You don’t know,” Ardy says. “There’s a whole day ahead of us. I could still scare you away.”
“True,” I return, and he laughs. Once again Ardy’s laugh is so nice. Contagious. He lifts his right hand from the wheel and, without taking his eyes off the road, reaches over to where my hands are resting on my lap. His hand hovers above them and, after the tiniest hesitation, descends. He slides his fingers over mine.
“Maybe let’s start here,” he says. “Like this.”
His fingers are warm and dry. They feel amazing. Maybe even perfect.
“Okay,” I tell him.
“Cool,” he says.
“Cool.”
* * *
We stop for food on the way—and then for gas, and then for me to pee—which means we don’t get to La Jolla until close to noon. I, of course, am just excited to know the name of the place where we’re going.
La Jolla is on the Pacific coast, close to San Diego. For a while on the drive, I thought maybe we were going to the zoo after all, but then Ardy pulled off the highway and into a high-end suburban neighborhood, so I knew that wasn’t right.
My phone buzzes and I check it. A text from Cooper:
WHAT IS THE ADVENTURE?
I decide to ignore him. Not only because I don’t know the answer yet, but also because he blew me off earlier when I was trying to tell him about the morning shenanigans. You can wait for it, Cooper!
But still I tell Ardy: “Coop wants to know what the adventure is.”
“You’re about to find out.” He turns onto a smaller road. We wind past a sprawling resort, two gated communities, and a public park until we find ourselves bumping over dirt. I know we must be near the ocean, because sea air is coming through the windows, but I don’t know how close until we round a bend. There it is, past a parking lot and beyond a grassy hill: the Pacific Ocean.
We grind over the parking lot gravel and into a spot among the scattered pickup trucks and sedans and luxury vehicles. There doesn’t seem to be any one specific type of person who does…whatever this adventure is.
Ardy gets out and swings around to my side of the minivan. At first I think he’s going to open my door, which seems very adult and gentleman-like of him, but instead he slides open the side door behind me. I hop out, tying Leo’s sweatshirt around my waist, and watch Ardy tug a cardboard box across the bench seat. “What’s that?” I ask.
“Here.” He rips a strip of packing tape off the box’s seam and steps to the side. “Take a look.”
I fold back the box flaps, revealing a dozen pairs of gloves. They’re not like any gloves I’ve seen before. These are made from thick, stiff leather. The cuffs are long—they would reach halfway up my arms—and there’s a metal ring on the inside wrist of each one. “Um, are we gardening? Trimming rosebushes?”
“Keep looking—there should be something else in there.”
I dig beneath the gloves and find…well, I’m not sure what they are. There are six of them, each a narrow length of leather, maybe as long as one of my legs. They’re like straps, except I don’t know what they’re for. At the end of each is a stainless steel shackle that is clearly meant to attach to something.
It’s not a sex thing, is it?
The confusion must be evident on my face, because when I look back at Ardy, he’s grinning. “It’s not a sex thing,” he says, and then laughs when I make a sighing noise of relief. “Come on.”
He hefts the box into his arms, and I slam the scratched and dented minivan door. We trot across the gravel and to the top of a slope. Over the grass to our left are several small buildings, and way off to the right is the edge of a forest. Before us is the ocean—blue and choppy and going on forever. Above it is a throng of paragliders, their sails bright patches of color in the sunlight. I stare at them: humans floating high above dark water in a way their bodies were not born to move. It’s beautiful and unnerving at the same time.
“Amazing.” I say it under my breath, but not so quietly that Ardy can’t hear me.
“Indeed.” The timbre of his voice—serious, not laughing at all—makes me turn to him. He’s facing me, with the box in his arms, not looking at the ocean at all.
Heat rises again. My heart swells, and I shine a smile right at Ardy. He blinks, and then he smiles back—sort of confused-looking. In that moment, I absolutely, 100 percent want to kiss him, no question about it. I can’t wait for my porch.
But I’m going to have to.
I follow him to a patio near the buildings. Ardy thunks the box onto one of the picnic tables. “I volunteer here.” He looks mischievous, knowing he still hasn’t given me an explanation. “The people who own it ordered these supplies from a store in the city, and I picked them up to save shipping charges.” Ardy shoots me a grin. “Back in a minute.”
What have I gotten myself into?
He disappears into a building, and a minute later he’s back. A leather bag is slung diagonally across his body, and he’s holding…something. The something is square, and it looks heavy, because he’s holding it with both hands, low and away from his body, like he doesn’t want to bang it against his legs. His fingers are wrapped around the handle on top, and there’s a leather covering over the entire item.
Is it a cage?
It might be a cage.
“Let’s put an end to the suspense,” Ardy says. I follow him back up the slope we came down, toward the place where it overlooks the ocean. “I guess I could wait for the great unveiling,” he says. “But I’m going to cut to the chase. It’s a bird of prey.”
I don’t know what I expected, but it definitely wasn’t that. “Like an eagle?”
“It’s called a Harris’s hawk,” Ardy says. “I’m in a falconry apprenticeship program.”
He pauses, watching me. Waiting for my reaction. I’m confused, since as far as I’m concerned, he could have said he’s learning to be a taxidermist or a lunar scientist or a trapeze artist, for all the understanding I have about what he’s just said. “A what?”
“Falconry.” His voice sounds very patient, like it isn’t the first time he’s had to explain this to someone. “This place teaches people about birds and the environment. I started off by taking lessons about how to fly the hawks.”
Which begs the question…
“Am I about to get a lesson in falconry?”
Ardy lets one hand loose from the handle long enough to push his glasses up on his nose. “Unless you don’t want one.”
“I think I want one,” I tell him. “At least, I don’t not want one.”
“As a warning, you’ll have to touch something you’ve never touched before.”
I mentally run through a list of things I’ve never touched—a Bentley, caviar, the moon—and end on something that I more and more want to touch: Ardy Tate’s mouth.
“A dismembered quail foot,” Ardy says.
WHAT.
But before I can respond, we’ve reached the crest of the slope and we’re overlooking the rainbow cloud of paragliders. And three minutes after that, I’m wearing a pair of the new leather gloves, and Ardy is standing several yards away with a bird tied to his wrist.
The bird has red and brown feathers, a sharp yellow beak, and black beady eyes that, Ardy informs me, can see for miles. “See those paragliders? If this bird was where they are, and if you held up a book, he could read it.”
“Are you telling me that bird can read?” I ask.
“I don’t actually know,” he says, and I laugh.
The bird’s name is Torch. It’s an incredibly cool name for an incredibly cool creature. In fact, everything here is so much cooler than I would ever aspire to be. Than I ever could be.
Over the next hour, Ardy teaches me how t
o convince Torch to fly to me. Ardy starts by holding his arm outstretched so that the bird can perch on it. From where I’m standing, Torch doesn’t seem very happy about the situation. He keeps making a loud squawking sound. And his face—I mean, I don’t know much about bird faces or what one looks like when they are happy, but I can safely say that Torch doesn’t look happy at all. Torch looks pissed.
Ardy tells me to hold my leather-clad hand high in the air while I call for Torch. It takes me several tries to be loud enough and convincing enough, but eventually Torch leaps off Ardy’s glove and sails across the distance between us. He glides low and slow over the grass, arcing up to land on my glove. Even though he’s not very heavy—less than three pounds, Ardy says—I’m shaky with the responsibility of it.
Ardy and I fly Torch back and forth between us a bunch of times, and by the end of it, I feel like I’m sailing with him. When he dives off my hand, I can almost feel the air under my own wings. I hold my breath when he leaps, and suck in oxygen again when he lands.
It’s exhilarating.
Then Ardy clips one of the leather straps to the tiny band around Torch’s ankle. He reaches into the bag, taking out a quail foot. Yes, it’s a dismembered body part from another bird. Ardy throws the foot to Torch. Torch sails after it, doing a midair flip along the way, and catches the foot before it hits the ground. He doesn’t take time to savor the snack. He basically inhales it.
Ardy looks at me. “Do you want to try?”
I hesitate for a moment—because quail foot!—but then I nod. After all, when am I going to have this chance again?
I shove down the part of me thinking that if I play my cards right, if Ardy and I end up as a thing—a real thing—maybe I will have the chance again. Maybe I’ll have many chances.
“Okay, hold it far away from your body,” Ardy tells me. “Torch isn’t big, but his claws can grip with two hundred pounds of pressure per square inch.”
“So this bird could basically rip me to shreds?”
“That’s a little overdramatic,” Ardy says. “But definitely don’t drop the quail foot on your own foot—”
“Because Torch would swoop down with his talons and beak and eff me up,” I finish for him.
“Again—not to be overdramatic…” Yet he grins at me.
Ardy and I fly Torch back and forth for almost an hour, until Ardy says Torch is probably tired. Ardy carries Torch over so I can look him in the eye. “It was nice to meet you.” Torch averts his eyes and makes a disgusted sound. “I don’t think he likes me,” I tell Ardy as he tucks the bird back into his covered cage.
“It’s not that,” he assures me. “Training the hawks takes a lot of time. You have to establish the relationship.”
Which, obviously, is not something I’m awesome at.
“They don’t trust easily.” Ardy straightens up from the cage. “It’s not in their nature.”
The way he’s looking at me, it’s like he’s giving me a message. Is Ardy like that, too? Or does he think I am?
Ardy takes Torch back into the building, and then we return to the crest of the hill to watch the paragliders. The air smells salty and clean, but it’s cold as it ruffles through our hair and presses our clothing against us. I wrap my arms around myself, trying to ward off the chill, when suddenly I’m enveloped by warmth. Ardy has stepped behind me and opened his jacket, wrapping it around me as far as it will go. Pulling me into his body, protecting me from the wind. “Is this okay?”
“Yes.” It comes out in a whisper.
He rests his chin on the top of my head, and I lean back the tiniest bit. Pushing my shoulders into his chest and settling in, breathing the clean-laundry scent of him. His arms tighten around me, and we stand there, looking out over the water. At all those rainbow sails.
“You’re shivering,” he says, and I don’t correct him, although it’s not the cold anymore but him that’s the cause. It’s less a shiver than an ongoing tremble, an electric current just below the surface of my skin. Vibrating everywhere, everything. Like I’m more alive than I ever have been, like I’m powered by his nearness.
I move, turning within the circle of his embrace, feeling him lift his chin from my head so he can tilt his face to look down at mine. He is half smiling, which I think I’m doing, too.
I almost always kiss the boy first. It’s how I stay out of awkward territory. Otherwise—well, I can’t stand the thing where you’re in some hidden location with a guy and you’re making small talk, waiting for him to make the move: to kiss you or not to kiss you. That’s why—even if I’m not sure I like him yet—I do it. It’s easier. I grab, I pull him toward me, I kiss him—good and long and hard—and I move away. It’s better than waiting. It’s better than talking.
But in this moment, as I’m standing on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean and encircled by Ardy’s long, thin arms, it’s not about getting something over with. It’s not about breezing through to escape the awkwardness. Right now, kissing Ardy Tate would only be about…kissing Ardy Tate.
I tilt my head a little to the right, beginning to rise up on my toes, locking my eyes on his. I feel his hands flatten on my lower back, moving higher, sliding up to my shoulders…
Where they press down, ever so slightly, rooting me to the ground. He pulls me in close. All the way to his chest, the wrong position for our mouths to meet.
It’s a hug.
I got ready to kiss him, and Ardy turned it into a hug.
Confused, I slip my arms around his waist because it seems to be what’s being asked for, and also because I’m embarrassed. Am I misreading the situation?
I turn my head and rest it against his chest. It’s rising and falling, but beneath the regularity of his breath, his heart is beating fast and hard. It makes me feel better about my own uneven fluttering.
We stand like that for a long moment, and then he pulls away and clears his throat. “Ready to head back?”
The loss of him—his warmth, his touch—is palpable. I spin back to the water, closing my eyes, not wanting to forget the rough texture of his sweater against my cheek. Not understanding what moves this boy, what drives him, what he wants.
But all I say is “Sure.”
Things are quiet between us after that. The only time we really talk is shortly after we leave the gravel parking lot. Trying to make conversation, I ask Ardy why he switched schools last year. He shoots me a look across the minivan console. “Why?”
It seems like an obvious question to me.
“I mean, was there something wrong at the public school? Did they not have enough yoga classes or something?”
“No.” There’s an odd look on Ardy’s face as he gazes straight ahead of him at the road. He doesn’t elaborate, so I try again.
“Why didn’t you start at REACH in ninth grade? Especially since Hope’s family and yours are such good friends. It seems like you would have gone to the same school from the start.”
“Mom wanted me to have the most normal life possible.” He seems to relax a little. “Since I don’t have a father and her job is so busy, she wanted me at a school that seemed to be really regular.”
Seems reasonable. But then…
“So why’d you switch?”
“Needed a change.” Ardy shrugs, which does nothing to illuminate the question for me. I wonder if he moved schools to be with Hope. In fact, I’m wondering a lot of things about Ardy Tate.
Our day was strange and fun and interesting, but now I can’t tell how he feels about me. I gave him the clearest sign that I was open for kissing, and he not only didn’t do it but pushed me away.
It’s so confusing.
We finally get back to Burbank. There’s no talk of continuing to hang out—like coffee or a movie or anything—so I’m not surprised when Ardy pulls to the curb in front of my house. He puts the minivan in par
k and turns to face me, but he doesn’t move closer and he doesn’t unbuckle his seat belt. He smiles, but it’s very friendly. Too friendly. Friend-friendly.
Did I do something wrong? Is the kiss on the porch off the table?
“I’m glad you were up for an adventure,” he says. “I’ve only helped my mom teach a class. I’ve never taught the whole lesson by myself. Thank you.”
My mouth almost drops open. Was I his student? His practice student?
“I don’t know what to say.” At least that’s honest.
“Say ‘You’re welcome.’ ” Ardy nods at me. Like I’m a business associate or something.
What. The. Heck.
“You’re welcome.” I mutter it through stiff lips before grabbing the beanie, ski gloves, and scarf that I never even took from the car. I hop out, turning back to say “See you on Monday” before slamming the door.
He waves and takes off down the street.
And that’s it.
I don’t know what to do with any of it.
Mom is in the kitchen when I come in. She points to a pile of produce. “Wanna help chop?”
I wash my hands and pull up a stool at the counter between the kitchen and the living room. She slides a cutting board and a knife to me, and I get to work on a carton of mushrooms. The board is one Mom gave me when I was little. My name is burnt into the wood, and now, as I slice the mushrooms, I try to line them up in the corner of the L before each cut.
I can feel Mom’s curious eyes, but I’m not going to be the first one to talk about today, especially since I don’t know what happened. I make it through the mushrooms, two shallots, and an onion before she can’t stand it anymore.
“How was the falcon?”
“It was a hawk.” I grab the next item in line—a bulb of garlic—and start peeling off its papery skin. “His name was Torch, and I thought it was really cool even though he hated me.”
“How was Ardy?”
“Fine.” I’m not sure how I’d answer the question if it came from Cooper or Katie, much less from my mother. I set a garlic clove on my board, concentrating on slicing it into thin disks.
