The Wonder of Us

by Kim Culbertson

  Sitting back, he lifts his mug again. “What makes you think that?”

  I study the closed door of our cabin. “It was hard being so far away. The new school, the time difference … I was just trying to figure things out in Berlin. But her parents split up last winter, and I could have been a better friend during it.”

  Rand stares in the direction of the cabin. “Have you told her that?”

  “I’ve tried. But I kept some things from her. And I didn’t reach out enough.” I sip the cider that has gone lukewarm in my mug.

  The fire glints in Rand’s dark blue eyes. “I think with any long-term relationship, it’s a two-way street. She could have reached out to you. None of us are mind readers.”

  “That’s true.” I glance at the closed cabin door. It’s already eleven, even if it doesn’t feel like it with the blue light, so I tell Rand, “I think I’m going to turn in.”

  He holds up his cup in a cheers motion. “Good luck.”

  I cross to the cabin and push open the door. As I walk through it, at first, I think I’m imagining things. But no, I’ve caught Neel and Abby in a deep kiss, standing by the half-open sliding glass door, Abby’s arms around Neel’s back, Neel’s hands in her hair.

  I freeze.

  They hear the door shut behind me. “Oh—” They both stumble apart, avoiding my eyes, Abby fiddling with her glasses, Neel running his hands weirdly through his hair, adjusting his shirt. Anger bubbles up. He promised me.

  “Riya—” he starts, taking a step toward me.

  “Are you kidding me?!” I shout at him. “Did you not just make a promise to me barely a day ago that you wouldn’t complicate things with Abby?”

  “Things changed—” he starts again.

  “I don’t care! This is our trip. Mine and Abby’s. You have no right to—”

  “Just stop it!” Abby’s voice rings out in the cabin, and it takes me a minute to recognize it as hers. “You don’t get to tell him what he can and cannot do. He doesn’t have to promise you anything.”

  I turn to her, feeling my face heat. “How could you let this happen? This trip was supposed to be about us, you and me. Not some messed-up triangle. That’s not how I meant for this to go.”

  “Welcome to my year.” Her voice has gone quiet again, the sound of it like ice.

  I cross my arms snugly across my chest, mostly to control my shaking hands. “This is ridiculous. You wouldn’t kiss Tavin but you’ll kiss Neel? It’s crazy.”

  Abby nods slowly. “Oh, I get it. You’re mad I did something crazy you didn’t plan. Because it’s usually you doing the crazy stuff, right? And me following along. It’s usually you kissing the boy you shouldn’t.” She ticks off her fingers. “Trey Christopher. Mark Sears. Greg Newman. And Alec Limm, who was my friend, too. And I took sides. I said I wouldn’t and I did. Do you remember whose side I took with Alec?”

  I swallow. “Mine.”

  “Right. I took yours. Always.” Abby holds my gaze. “Whose side are you taking right now?”

  Standing here, in the late blue light of the cabin, I don’t know how to answer her. She’s right about those boys. With each of them, she stood by me. Every time. But this is different. It’s Neel. And this trip was supposed to be about our friendship. How could she do this? “It’s completely different, and you know it,” I tell her. “This trip was supposed to help us. How does this”—I motion at the two of them—“help us?”

  She lets out a low laugh, one that holds notes of being hurt, disappointed, but also not completely surprised. It’s the sound of this last bit that cuts me. Shaking her head, she moves by me to the door. “You’re unbelievable.” She turns to Neel. “Fire pit?” He slinks by me and follows her out of the cabin.

  The next morning, Maggie and Carol keep up a constant chatter at breakfast. It helps make it seem like I’m not ignoring Abby and Neel. They stayed out by the fire pit until almost two last night, when I heard them creep quietly into the room. I kept still, pretending to be asleep, while they took turns brushing their teeth and then, after the snap of the bathroom light, Neel closed the door to his bedroom, and Abby crawled into the other twin bed near me. My eyes slits, I watched her settle next to me, the violet form of her slipping under the covers. She turned to face me in the shadows of the room. “Riya?” she whispered, waiting. I didn’t answer. Finally, she rolled over, her back to me, and soon I heard the steady purr of her breathing.

  The morning passes as Gunnar drives us to visit volcanic, bubbling mud pools and an old lighthouse. Back in the van, he tells us about the terrible eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, how the ash caused trouble with air traffic for nearly a month. I only half listen, zoning out by the window, as we pass farmhouses and pastures, wide green fields dotted with sheep and, occasionally, those beautiful Icelandic horses. Abby’s right. It’s harder to care about the big problems when the personal ones are taking up all the space.

  My phone buzzes with a text from Will: how’s iceland?

  I text back: volcanic.

  His series of happy faces and flames brings the first smile of the day to my face.

  I glance sideways at my cousin. He sits between Abby and me, but his body is angled away, leaning a little forward to listen to Gunnar. He motions at something out the window and Abby nods, grinning back at him. As she does, she catches my eye for a moment, but quickly looks away, her expression darkening.

  Before heading back into Reykjavík, Gunnar takes us to the famous Blue Lagoon geothermic spa built into a lava field in Grindavik. Leaning against the edge of the pool, the alien, pearlescent blue water so opaque I can’t see my own body in its depths, I study the white clouds swirling overhead and try to convince myself the trip hasn’t been a complete bust.

  Abby wades over to me. She holds two neon-orange juices from the swim-up bar. “Healthy beverage?” I take one, and she leans against the side of the pool with me. “This place is a trip.” I nod, sipping the gingery carrot juice as she takes a long drink through her straw. “I like the name Grindavik,” she says. “It sounds like a friendly, wise elf from The Lord of the Rings. The one who tells the travelers the right way to proceed.”

  I eye her. “We could use one of those now.”

  Abby points to the pool deck with her plastic cup. “Maybe we should just enjoy the view.” The Spanish twins lounge in their swim trunks, their bodies gleaming from just coming out of the sauna.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “What?”

  “Pretend you’re interested in them because I thought they were cute.”

  “I’m not interested,” Abby says, watching them. “But I’m not blind, either.”

  My gaze catches on something at the far end of the pool, and a giggle bubbles up. “Oh, wow. Carol and Maggie have found the silica mud.” Across the blue expanse, the two women are slathering on the signature mud found in various containers around the pool, only their eyes visible through their white masks, like pale, muddy raccoons. “Supposedly, silica mud brings out the skin’s inner glow. Try it. You’ll look ten years younger when you take it off.”

  “Fabulous; I’ve always wanted to look seven again.”

  “I want to be seven again.” I sigh. “Second grade seems like a million years ago. The worst thing that year was your fish that kept pretending to die. He traumatized us for, like, a month.”

  Abby almost spits juice into the water. “Patch McSpotty! That fish had one seriously dark sense of humor. What fish floats upside down like that? Weirdo. We made that thing at least five RIP rock headstones before we had to actually use one.”

  “RIP Patch McSpotty.” We take a moment of silence for Patch, the dark-humored fish.

  We quietly take in the activity around us for a few moments. People lounge in the ghostly water, chat at the swim-up bar, walk in white robes across the small bridges over narrow parts of the pool. “What are we going to do about all this?” Abby finally asks, setting her empty juice cup on the edge of the pool.
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  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  She brushes a stray lock of hair from her eyes, squinting in the slash of sun that has come out from behind a cloud. “I went for a hike with my dad before I met you in Florence, and he told me a little about what happened with him and my mom.” She lowers her voice, so I edge closer to her in the water. “He said of all the things that did them in as a couple—that’s the way he put it, did them in—anyway, of all the things, it was the scorekeeping.”

  The tingling in my legs isn’t from geothermic activity. “Scorekeeping?”

  She nods, holding her hand to her forehead as a visor from the sun. “How they started keeping these mental scorecards against each other. Like, I cleaned the bathroom three times in a row. Or I did all the grocery shopping last month. Or you haven’t taken Henry to the vet once in the last five years. He said it didn’t start out that way. But instead of talking to each other about it in a real way, they started shooting these darts into each other. For years. And then it was like a habit they couldn’t break.” She blinks at me from under her hand. “I don’t want it to be like that with us. Keeping score.” And she doesn’t even add the normal Abby joke at the end, like because I’d win—ha! She’s serious about this.

  “Me either.”

  She points to Carol and Maggie, who are now sitting on the edge of the far pool, slathering their arms and legs with white mud. “Okay, seriously, I’m thinking maybe a silica intervention might be necessary.” There it is. The lightening of the atmosphere. It’s something I realize I’ve grown to need from her, even when maybe it’s not fair to always expect it.

  Later, Gunnar pulls into the Radisson parking lot, depositing our bags where he collected us thirty-three hours ago. Neel hangs back, talking to Gunnar; he’s been giving us a wide berth today. We say good-bye to Carol and Maggie, and the Spanish family. When Manuel and Josefa disappear into the hotel, I give Matías and Diego each a big hug. Diego holds on to me a bit longer than usual. “Come to Barcelona someday,” he says in my ear. “I can show you the city.”

  I pull away, smiling at his messy, coppery hair, his wide-set dark eyes. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  What I’m really keeping is his sweatshirt.

  We wave to Rand and Suzie, but Suzie, who spent most of today hiding behind large black sunglasses, doesn’t wave back. Abby walks over to where Rand unloads his luggage from the van. She returns with his card. “He said I should check out his college,” she tells me, her voice sounding hopeful.

  “You mythology nerds need to stick together.”

  We spend the early evening wandering around Reykjavík, checking out the jagged church, marveling at the massive boats in the harbor, eating yummy vegan bowls at stand-up tables in a brightly painted restaurant. We wander back to our hotel by eleven, since we have to be up at three to catch our shuttle to the airport tomorrow morning. While Neel is downstairs settling the bill and organizing a bag breakfast for our early departure, I hand Abby a white envelope.

  “What’s this?”

  I sit next to where she’s sorting her bag on the bed. “I’ve been going back and forth on whether to give it to you. I made it before we started our trip. It’s a scavenger hunt I planned for London.”

  She inspects the bulky envelope. “I love scavenger hunts.”

  “I know—and I want you to go on it with Neel when we get there.” When she looks like she might argue, I hurry to explain. “I have a student orientation I should probably attend tomorrow. For my new school. I wasn’t going to go because, well, honestly, I hadn’t planned on telling you about it until our last day, but in light of everything …” I trail off.

  Abby pushes her bag out of the way and sits down next to me. “You want to go to the orientation?”

  “I do, yeah.”

  She bites her lip, looking down at the envelope in her hand. “And you want me to do this with Neel? Really?”

  I nod. “I think you would have fun, and he knows the city. He helped me with some of the details in the first place, and, well, maybe you two need some time to sort out that kiss?” I study her face. “It looked like it might have been a good one?”

  She flushes, dropping her eyes. “There have been several good ones.”

  “What?!” I try not to visibly shudder. “Okay, officially—ew. He’s—”

  “Smart and adorkable and gets my nerdy self,” she cuts in hopefully.

  This time the shudder is visible. “If you say so.”

  Neel holds open the glossy red door of his family’s flat in Bloomsbury while Riya and I step inside, tired from the early-morning rise in Iceland, the flight to Heathrow, and the ride into London to the quiet, tree-lined street where Neel grew up.

  “Just feel lucky Nani booked us a car,” Riya says, walking into the living room. I follow her. The flat is quiet, the drapes drawn, and smells like cinnamon and clove.

  “Are your parents here?” I ask Neel, depositing my bags in the cozy book-lined den Neel points out to us.

  “They’re in Berlin, actually,” Riya answers for him. “Getting a few details squared away before we head back to California.” She grabs her bag. “I’m going to go change for my orientation,” she says, and disappears into the den, closing a sliding door behind her for privacy.

  I scan the elegant flat, its rich carpets and deep-taupe walls. Neel opens the drapes, letting in a spill of late-morning light. He takes his bag into the room next to the den, and I catch a glimpse of soccer posters and a navy bedspread. “You’ve lived here your whole life?” I ask when he emerges.

  “Most of it. We moved here when I was two.”

  Riya comes out of the den in the pink maxi dress she wore in Berlin, and her leather jacket. She’s dabbed on some lip gloss and brushed her hair. She gives me a twirl. “Not bad, huh? After all that travel.”

  “You look great.”

  She checks her phone. “I have to scoot.” Her eyes shift between us. “You two all set for your day?” We nod. As I walk with her to the door, she whirls around, giving me a fierce hug. “Text if you need anything, okay?” She pulls back, her eyes searching my face.

  “Wow, just going out for the day, Rye. Not to the moon.”

  She skips down the steps, her whole body light and eager, and heads off in the direction of her new school. My chest tightens. Maybe this is what my parents felt when they watched me disappear inside my kindergarten classroom for the first time all those years ago. Funny how life has a few of these visible moments, where you can actually see someone turn a corner.

  Iceland’s entire population is roughly 325,000 people, with about two-thirds living in Reykjavík, making it the most sparsely populated country in Europe. London’s population is over 8.6 million and climbing. The contrast between these stats hits me as Neel and I step out of the cab onto the sidewalk in front of Westminster Abbey at noon on this overcast Monday. Neel pays the driver, grumbling at the cost. He only agreed because I wanted to ride in one of London’s famous black taxis. “They’re so cute!” I protested when he said he almost never takes them. “They bloody well better be.” But he’d agreed, telling me to enjoy the ride because from here on out we’d take the Tube.

  The cacophony of busy London whirls around me, and I simmer with excitement. I can’t believe I’m in London. Around me, taxis, cars, and buses zoom by; people in sharp business attire hurry past, shouting into their phones; tourists crowd the street, taking pictures. I take a minute to remind myself to breathe it all in, to let the whir of the city settle on my skin like rain. When it’s clear I’m taking too long on the soaking-it-all-in front, Neel tugs me out of the direct sidewalk traffic and pulls me toward Westminster’s wide walkway. “Clue Number One.” He points up at the famous Abbey. “Your namesake.”

  “Except no e in my version.” I unfold Riya’s instructions, the title in purple ink:

  Seven Wonders of London Scavenger Hunt!

  (so you can start to fall in love like I did)

  In the letter, s
he explains that each of the seven smaller white envelopes inside are titled with one of the Seven Ancient Wonders and include a clue to link them to a London “point of historical awesomeness.” I read the first clue again: “This place provides the resting Corner for the mind that told Tales: the Miller, the Wife of Bath, and the Knight alike.” I glance up at Neel. “Chaucer.”

  He nods. “Right. He’s buried in Poets’ Corner. But what does that have to do with the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus?” He peers at the title Riya has given Clue #1.

  “It held the ashes of Mausolus. And this place holds Chaucer—connections, Neel. Connections. That’s history!” I head toward the entrance.

  He trots to catch up with me. “Okay, but what exactly are we doing with these clues?”

  I turn. “Drinking in the wonders! And taking a picture to prove it.” I hold up Clue #1. “With Riya’s suggested silly face.”

  “But why?” He stops, tucking his hands into his pants pockets. His face is expectant, curious, and he flashes a sheepish smile when I pause at his incessant questioning. In that moment, I realize how much I will miss him when I leave on Thursday. In a way that will feel like a missing tooth. It hits me that the next few days will be like wiggling that tooth until it comes out: exhilarating, and with a constant underscore of ache.

  I take a few steps toward him. “Listen, if we’re going to hang out, you have to understand that we never need a reason to take a suggested silly face picture. It’s a reason in and of itself. It brings history alive.” I show him the envelope. “Riya clearly understands this.”

  “Right.” His grin sends a tingling rush through me. “I don’t know what I was thinking even asking.”

  “You are forgiven.”

  An hour later, we have our picture in front of Poets’ Corner (overly serious poet faces) and Clue #2, Big Ben, which I learned is the name of the actual bell itself and not the tower (wide, bell-worthy faces). Riya linked Big Ben to the Great Pyramid of Giza because it’s a “recognizable landmark even if you’re not a history nerd.” For Clue #3, she included one-way tickets for a river cruise on the Thames and linked it to the Lighthouse of Alexandria. “Tower Bridge,” Neel says, inspecting the tickets while waiting for the light to change so we can cross the street to Westminster Pier.