Your Destination Is on the Left

by Lauren Spieller

  “Damn you, Cyrus,” I sigh, and hold out my hand.

  “Yes!” He tosses me the helmet. “Make sure you buckle it under your chin. It should fit snug, but not too tight. You know what, let me do it for you.”

  He steps close and puts the helmet on my head, then pulls the straps down around my chin and clips them in place. I watch his face as he works, mesmerized by the way he bites his lip as he checks to make sure the helmet is in place, and how he grins when it’s done.

  “You look adorable,” he says.

  I roll my eyes. “Thanks a lot.”

  He throws one leg over the bike, and I notice for the first time that there’s a backpack strapped to the bike. “What’s that for?”

  He glances over his shoulder. “Oh, nothing. Climb on.”

  I gingerly lift my leg and lower it to the other side. The seat is sculpted almost perfectly to fit my butt, and as soon as I sit down, I slide forward so that I’m holding Cyrus around the waist. If we weren’t about to go hurtling through space with nothing between the concrete and me except my dinky helmet, I’d be super into this.

  “Ready to go?” Cyrus says.

  “Not really.”

  He’s quiet, waiting for me. I take a deep breath, and press my face into the back of his T-shirt. “Ready.”

  He starts the bike, and it roars to life beneath me. I hold him tighter.

  “Don’t worry,” I hear him say over the engine. “I’ve got you.”

  The bike rolls forward, slow at first. The seat vibrates a little, like I’m sitting on a really violent massage chair. We pick up speed, the engine purring now, and I chance a look over his shoulder. Houses and trees fly by us, a blur of color that I’m used to seeing through the protection of a windshield.

  Cy steers us around a corner and the bike leans to the side. A shriek escapes my lips before I can swallow it down. Cy takes one hand off the handlebars and squeezes my forearm, which is pressed into his stomach—it’s the only thing saving me from tumbling off the bike.

  We turn again, and the freeway entrance appears.

  I bury my head in his shirt as we head up the ramp, gathering speed. “Please don’t let me die like this,” I whisper. “I’ve got way too many things to do.”

  • • •

  Cy steers the Suzuki onto a dirt road, drives for about a minute, then parks in a seemingly random spot. I turn around in my seat. The road has a slight bend to it, rendering the bike invisible from the main highway. When he kills the engine, I climb off slowly, my knees weak with relief to be back on solid ground. Cy’s already got his helmet off, and he’s bent over the handlebars, his eyes fixated on whatever he’s fiddling with on the front of the bike. As much as I hate riding the Suzuki, I have to admit that he looks sexy as hell on it.

  Cy gets off the bike and stretches his arms overhead, and the bottom of his T-shirt rises an inch, exposing a strip of smooth skin and the corner of his hipbone. He pulls the backpack off his bike and hitches it over his shoulder, then takes my hand, sending a surge of electricity through my palm, past my wrist, up my arm, and directly into my heart. “Ready?”

  I nod, and he leads me down the trail into a forest of pine trees. We walk the path slowly, taking our time. There’s so much beauty out in these mountains, so much to see and touch and smell, but my attention is torn between how anxious I am about wasting time that I should be spending at my easel, and what it means that Cy’s fingers are curled around my own, his skin warm against mine. We’ve held hands dozens of times over the years, but things have never been as complicated as they are now. And he’s never had a girlfriend before. Part of me still wonders if I’m doing the wrong thing by following him into the woods like this. If this were a scary movie, there would be a werewolf right around the corner, waiting to take a bite out of me—the “other woman.”

  We come to an old pine tree that stretches hundreds of feet into the air. I stop at the base and stare up into the green, needled canopy. “YiaYia told me these forests are in danger,” I say, reluctantly letting go of Cy’s hand to rest my palm against the rough, reddish bark. “Hundreds of years old, and they could be gone in the blink of an eye from a wildfire.”

  “It’s hard to imagine what life would be like without them.”

  “That’s a tad dramatic—”

  He looks at me, and I realize he’s not really talking about the tree. “Cy, I’m not going anywhere.”

  He looks up at the branches overhead. “So what happens now?”

  I walk around to the other side and lean against the tree. It’s quiet out here, so quiet I can hear a stream bubbling somewhere close by, and a bird singing above me. If I lived in Santa Fe, I could come out here all the time. Just like if I had gotten into UCLA, I could have gone to the beach every weekend. But only a traveler can do both in just a matter of days.

  Cy steps around the tree and stands in front of me. He’s close—too close—and yet not close enough. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he says. “It’s about Rachel. And us.”

  I pick at the bark on the tree. “I know. We’re just friends. You don’t have to explain.”

  “Actually,” he says, taking my hand again, “that’s not what I was going to say.”

  I stand up straighter. “Okay,” I say, struggling to keep my voice calm. “What’s up?”

  “The trip to Dallas was a mistake,” Cy says. “A big mistake. Rachel and I . . . we’re not . . .” He scrunches up his face, considering his words. “She’s not you, is what I’m saying.”

  My heart goes into overdrive. “You’re not together?”

  “No. Definitely not. We didn’t even kiss. I got there and realized I don’t feel that way about her, and she felt the same.”

  I want to throw my arms around him, or shout with joy. But then he laughs. “It was sort of funny, actually.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I walked up to her house and I was super nervous that I was going to have to kiss her right away or something. But instead I just kept thinking about you and the fight we had before I left. And then she answered the door and we hugged, and there was this moment where it was like . . . okay, are we going to kiss? Then we both started laughing. We spent the rest of the night playing video games and hanging out with her older brother, and I came home the next day.”

  “You were only there for one night?”

  “Yep.” He’s smiling now, like he’s had the weight of the world lifted off his shoulders. “One night, and then I came right back. It was a lot of driving.”

  I run my hands through my hair. “Let me get this straight. You came back and you didn’t come see me? You were in Santa Fe that whole weekend, and you didn’t . . . what the hell were you doing that whole time?”

  His face falls. “I was working. Saving up to buy the Suzuki.”

  “To hell with the Suzuki! Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t with her?”

  He takes a step back, pushed away by my anger. “What difference would two days have made? When I came over to your grandma’s, you turned me away!”

  “I was pissed. I spent that whole weekend doubting myself, wondering if I was selfish and stupid. I couldn’t stop picturing what you were doing together. What you were saying to each other. I thought . . . I thought you were moving on.”

  A muscle in Cy’s jaw twitches. “Yeah, well, I tried to. But it wasn’t that easy. I’m in love with you. I have been since we were fifteen.”

  A sob hitches in my throat. “Then why didn’t you come back?”

  “Because I can’t just wait around, hoping you’ll change your mind and say we can be together. So yeah, I came back and I spent that time doing something for me. Because one of these days you’re going to leave, and then what?”

  Tears fill my eyes, but before they can roll down my cheek, Cyrus has his arms around me. “Don’t cry,” he whispers. “Please.”

  I bury my face in his shoulder. “This sucks.”

  “I know,” he whispers into my ha
ir. “I know.”

  I press my face into his neck. He smells like he always does—like laundry and the open road. Like home.

  When I finally pull away, Cy laces his fingers in mine and pulls me back onto the trail. “Come on. There’s something I want to show you. It’s a short hike to get there, but I promise it’s going to be worth it.”

  We walk side by side, and when I glance over at Cy, he’s looking at me, too. It fills me with a bubble of nervous excitement that I don’t know what to do with, so I put my head down and walk faster. He’s not with Rachel. He still wants to be with me. Nothing has changed—we’re still travelers, it’s still a risk—but we’re different now. Both of us.

  “This way,” he says when the path splits. We follow a narrow, winding trail, and come to a stop in front of a towering pine tree. “Are you ready?” he asks.

  “For what?”

  He grins mischievously. “You’ll see.”

  I follow him around the tree, and find myself at the edge of a clearing. It’s only about as large as YiaYia’s living room, but there’s a ring of stones in the middle that someone used to create a fire pit, and off to the side is a wide, flat rock, covered with a red-and-white checkered picnic blanket.

  “Someone is using this space,” I say as Cyrus drops his backpack on the ground.

  “Yeah. Us.” He walks over to the rock and picks up a duffel bag that was hidden on the other side.

  “How did you know that was there?”

  “Because I put it here early this morning. Along with two sleeping bags and a cooler full of food and drinks.” He nods at the other side of the clearing, where the corner of a red cooler is peeking out from behind a tree. “I also brought that.”

  He points at the tree we just passed, and I turn around. A cardboard box, full of paints and charcoal and drafting paper, waits patiently for me against the tree, in the middle of the forest. A grin spreads across my face.

  “I can’t believe you did this!” I say, turning back to Cy. “This is amazing.”

  He comes to stand next to me, and takes my hand. “Dessa, I would do just about anything to make you smile like you are right now.”

  My cheeks burn, but Cy keeps talking.

  “I knew you were struggling to come up with an idea for the show, so I went back to your RV late last night and grabbed your supplies, then drove up here and unloaded everything.” He tilts his head back to look into the canopy of pine needles. “It’s not an ocean view, but—”

  “Never stop moving?”

  He grins. “Exactly.”

  I kneel in front of the box and pull out my pad of drafting paper. “What are you going to do while I’m working? Are you going back to Santa Fe?”

  “Nope, I’m gonna sit right over there”—he nods to a log that someone rolled over to the makeshift fire pit—“and read. But don’t worry about me. You do what you gotta do.”

  I hug him one more time, then grab my sketch pad and sit on the rock on the other side of the clearing. I don’t want to psyche myself out again, so I tuck away all my worries—about the show, about Dad, about Cyrus—and start doodling. A broad leaf comes to life beneath my graphite, the brittle veins that stretch away from the stem branching out like the limbs of a tree from which the leaf fell. Next I sketch my shoes, the dopey way the tongue of my Converse hangs crooked to the side, how the laces are dirty near the ends from dragging in the dirt. When that’s done, I draw Taryn’s face in profile using a picture I snapped while she was sleeping a few days ago. I take extra care with this one, in case I decide to send it to her when I’m done. I think she’ll appreciate the way I’ve captured the drool dripping out of the side of her mouth.

  When I’m finished, I set my drawing pad aside and lie back on the rock. I close my eyes and smile up into the sunlight, letting it warm my entire body and the stone beneath me. I still need to come up with an idea for the gallery piece, but it feels so good to just be. This place is so peaceful. So still. Like the whole world has disappeared, leaving behind only the best parts of itself. I want to be like that. I want to be my best self, all the ugly parts stripped away. Or better yet, I want to be everything, all at once. No choice necessary. I want to be a traveler. An artist. Daughter. Friend. Failure. Fighter. I want to be the sum of all of these parts, no matter how hard it is to fit the pieces together.

  The light on the other side of my eyelids dims. I open my eyes to find a cloud passing overhead. A ray of sunlight breaks free, and shines through the trees above my head. I blink into the glare, but it’s too bright, so I sit up and look down at the rock beneath me. A patchwork of sunlight and shade surrounds me, broken into pieces by the trees overhead. I trace the edges with my finger, all sharp lines and geographic shapes. It feels familiar somehow—and then I remember the box of tiles in YiaYia’s garage. I draw in a sharp breath.

  The tiles. The mirror. The sunburst.

  I know what I’m going to make for Fiona’s show.

  CHAPTER 19

  “Earth to Dessa.”

  Cy stands over me, eyebrows raised. “How’s it coming?”

  I look up from my sketch pad for the first time in hours. The sun has started to go down, and a breeze blows through the forest. “Fantastic. But I need to borrow some supplies from Fiona. And YiaYia. And the RV.”

  “We can go back,” Cy says with a shrug, but I can hear the disappointment in his voice. We’ve been together all day, but we’ve barely spoken since we arrived in the clearing.

  “Actually . . . I could use a break,” I say. “How about we camp, and leave early tomorrow morning?”

  “Great!” he says with so much enthusiasm that I laugh. “I mean, yeah. Sounds good.”

  I climb off the rock and stretch. My back hurts from hunching over my work. “You make a fire, and I’ll get the sleeping bags set up.”

  Cy starts a fire in the pit using some dry brush and branches, plus a lighter he brought along. While he works, I text my mom to let her know we’re camping for the night, then pull a thick blanket out of his duffel bag, plus an extra sweater and two camping pillows. I hold up my hand to test the wind. Once I’m sure the smoke isn’t going to blow in our faces, I lay out the sleeping bags. It isn’t until they’re both resting side by side that I realize that Cy and I are going to be alone, at night, in the middle of the woods. No Rachel, no parents, no siblings, nothing. Just us.

  Cyrus stands next to me. The flames lick at the branches and brush, shooting sparks into the increasingly dark sky. “Do you think I put our sleeping bags too far away from it?” I ask.

  “No, this should be good. Besides, we’ll keep each other warm.”

  I nudge him with my arm. “If that was your plan, why’d you bring two bags?” Cyrus’ eyes widen at my question, and I feel my cheeks heat up. “We don’t have to . . . I was just kidding. . . .”

  Instead of answering, he squats down and unzips both bags, then connects them to each other, making one extra-large sleeping bag. There’s just enough room for us to comfortably lie next to each other, using YiaYia’s blanket as a pillow. He looks up at me, his eyebrows raised.

  I bite my lip. Cy and I have slept next to each other a million times, but never like this.

  Cy takes my hand. “There’s nothing to be nervous about.” He leans in slowly, stopping just as our lips are about to touch. “We won’t do anything unless you want to.”

  Part of me wants to suggest we crawl into the sleeping bag and cuddle right now, but we’ll end up there eventually, and I’d like some more time hanging out, just the two of us, before it’s just the two of us.

  Cy sits on the sleeping bag and pulls me down so I’m sitting with my back against his chest. He holds me tight, the fire flickering in front of us.

  We eat dinner, then roast marshmallows that we eat right off the stick. When we’re done, Cy pokes at the flames, sending sparks into the air.

  A thumping sound rolls through the trees, deep and full of bass.

  “What’s that sound?” he a
sks, looking out into the trees.

  “Music. That, or war drums.”

  “Wanna check it out?”

  “Now? It’s pitch-black out there.”

  “I brought a flashlight.” He reaches into his backpack and takes one out. “See?”

  “Hmm.” I’m definitely not comfortable joining some random group of people in the middle of the night. But I can hear Taryn’s voice in my head, whispering it’ll be fun. “All right. Let’s go.”

  He hauls me to my feet and leads me into the trees. Without the warmth of the fire, the chill of the mountain air creeps through my clothes. I pull on the sweater Cy brought for me and hurry to match his steps with my own.

  It doesn’t take long to find the other campers. Their music is actually pretty loud, and their campfire is twice as big as ours. As we draw closer, I realize they’re listening to a song I’ve heard a million times. Something with a strong bass line and a simple melody, the kind of thing you hear over and over again at malls across the country. I start to relax, like this one familiar element somehow makes these strangers less threatening.

  We reach the edge of the clearing. A group of ten people are gathered near a keg. A few are dancing off to the side, bouncing along to the music, while the others sit around talking and drinking. A girl my age is lying on the ground near the fire, eyes closed, her hands tracing patterns in the air above her. A boy who looks just like her is standing guard, his lips pressed together as he tries not to laugh.

  The girl sits up and looks in our direction. I shrink back toward the forest, but Cy says, “Hi.”

  “Hey,” she says.

  Cyrus strides forward. A few faces turn in our direction, but most of the people don’t notice our arrival. The girl on the ground reaches for the guy’s hands, and he pulls her to her feet. “Where did you come from?” he asks us.

  “We’re camping nearby and we heard your music,” Cy says. “Thought we’d check it out.”

  He holds out his hand to the boy, who looks at him for a moment, then takes it and smiles. “I’m Heath. This is my sister, Alyssa.”

  “You can call me Liss,” the girl says. Her tan skin looks smooth and flawless in the flickering firelight. “Want to dance?”