Our Own Private Universe

by Robin Talley

  “For real, right?” Christa said. “I try to tell her, but some people, you know?”

  She smiled at me. I smiled back. There was a pink streak in her shoulder-length hair that I hadn’t noticed before. She was wearing jeans and a yellow tank top, and her sneakers had red hearts drawn on the sides with a marker. I’d never known it was possible for a person to look as cute as Christa did.

  “I’m gonna go get more salsa,” Lori said.

  I shook my head at her frantically. I couldn’t do this by myself.

  Lori only grinned and left. Christa stayed where she was. Damn it.

  “So, what’s your name?” Christa asked me.

  “Aki.”

  “That’s pretty.”

  It was so hard not to giggle. But I managed to keep my face relatively composed as my insides jumped for joy.

  “It’s short for Akina,” I explained.

  “Akina.” I liked how she said my name. She pronounced it slowly, as though it was some spicy, forbidden word. “That’s even prettier.”

  Was this flirting? I’d never really flirted before. Sure, I’d hung out with guys, but they never told me my name was pretty. Instead they made stupid jokes and then looked really happy when I laughed.

  Was it even okay to flirt with a girl here? If someone saw us, would they be able to tell we were flirting from across the courtyard? Or did flirting just look like talking?

  And if Christa was flirting, what made her think I wanted to flirt back? Was it something about how I looked? What I was wearing? Did she know I wanted her to flirt with me?

  Did I want her to?

  If she was really gay, she probably had a girlfriend back home. I didn’t know if I was ready to have a girlfriend. I’d never even had a boyfriend for longer than a couple of weeks.

  “Wait... Aki?” Christa cocked her head, as if she was studying me. “Aki from Silver Spring. I’ve heard about you.”

  “Yeah?”

  Oh.

  My stomach tensed. This cute girl, the first girl ever to flirt with me, knew exactly who I was.

  Of course she did.

  I was the black girl with braids. I was Pastor Benny’s daughter. Everyone in all of the Holy Life community knew who I was. I was one of a kind.

  But then she said, “You’re like a really talented musician, aren’t you?”

  And my stomach didn’t know whether to twist tighter or do flips in the air.

  “I. Um.” I didn’t know what to say.

  “I’ve definitely heard about you.” The smile spread wider across Christa’s face. “You play a bunch of instruments, right? And you write music and you sing? My friend went to a service at your church where the whole choir sang something you wrote. He said it was gorgeous and that everyone cheered and talked about how amazing you were.”

  That had been during Advent in eighth grade. The piece we performed was the same one I’d used for my audition for MHSA. Even thinking about it made me want to throw up.

  But this girl. God, this girl was so amazing.

  And she was staring at me as though she thought I was amazing, too.

  So I nodded. “Yeah, that’s me. It’s not that many instruments, though. Mainly I play guitar. And a little piano.”

  Okay. So that wasn’t totally true.

  But it wasn’t really a lie, either. It was just an inaccurate verb tense. I used to do that stuff, after all. If I’d said played instead of play it would’ve been a 100 percent accurate statement.

  Either way, it totally didn’t count as lying.

  Either way, I was glad I said it the way I did when Christa beamed at me in response.

  “Oh, wow! That’s so cool.” Christa nodded over and over again. “It’s so neat to meet someone else who’s seriously into artistic stuff. I’m not anywhere near your level, but I’m an artist, too. I do photography sometimes.”

  “You do?” I seized on the chance to talk about something that wasn’t me and music. “What kind of photography?”

  She took out her phone. “Most of it’s on my Instagram, but...” She sighed. I understood. We’d all gradually realized on our bus ride into town that our phones didn’t work here. No service. We could play games and take photos, but no internet, no texting. It was like missing an arm.

  Christa swiped through the photos on her phone. I tried to crane my neck to see them, but she held it out of my reach. “No, no don’t look at that one, that one’s awful. That one I need to crop. That one’s not—hey, actually, you can look at this one. This one’s good.”

  I leaned in until my face was only inches from hers. I had to force myself to focus on her phone screen instead of the soft, warm scent of her skin.

  I didn’t know anything about photography, but even so, I could tell it was a good photo. It was better than any pictures I’d ever taken with my phone, anyway. It showed a kid’s bare feet hovering in midair over a pool of water on a bright green lawn, as though the kid had been in the middle of jumping into the puddle when the phone was taken. You could see individual ripples and the reflection of the kid’s toes in the water.

  “I really like that,” I said. “Are those your little brother’s feet?”

  “Yeah. At least the little demon is good for something.”

  I laughed and reluctantly stepped back from her phone.

  “Do you go to King?” I asked her.

  King was the big public high school in our area. My brother had gone there, but Lori and I went to Rowell, a tiny private school. There were only twelve people in our grade.

  Christa nodded. “I do.”

  “Do you know Eric?” I asked. “He’s the president of our youth group. He goes to King, too.”

  Crap. I should’ve just stayed quiet. Things had been going great when we were looking at her phone, but now I was asking her the most boring questions ever. Why couldn’t I think of something cool to say? Christa was going to think I was boring with a capital B.

  But she didn’t look bored.

  “Sure, I know Eric. He’s okay.” She tilted her head to one side. “For a straight, privileged white guy, you know?”

  She laughed. I did, too.

  Her saying that had to mean she was gay. Or bi, at least. She must be into girls one way or another. Right?

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, trying to be clever and praying it was working. “I have lots of friends who are straight, privileged white guys, and I’m totally okay with them. I think they should have equal rights, just like the rest of us.”

  Christa laughed again. Her eyes crinkled up, as though she actually thought I was funny. “As long as they don’t flaunt it, right?”

  I laughed again. Christa slid her shoulder up against the wall right next to me and leaned forward until her face was only inches from mine.

  My heart thudded in my chest. I was too nervous to look back at her.

  I did it anyway.

  Maybe this qualified as doing something.

  I could barely remember what we’d been talking about, so I was halfway relieved when a smiling black guy I didn’t know came up to us. “Christa, are you bothering this nice young girl?”

  I wished he hadn’t called me young. Or nice. Those two words added up to the opposite of sexy.

  “I don’t know.” Christa turned toward the guy, then looked back at me. Her light brown eyes glimmered in the dim light. “Am I bothering you, Aki?”

  “No,” I breathed.

  The guy and Christa both laughed, and she introduced us. His name was Rodney. He went to the same church as Christa, and they were both going into their junior year at King. I was surprised Christa was only one year older than me.

  The three of us sat down on the tile patio and Rodney grabbed a pile of chips for us to share. I to
ok an inventory of the courtyard while Rodney and Christa talked about their friends from school. I counted only five black people, including Rodney, my brother, Drew, and me.

  I wondered if that was why Rodney had come over to talk to us. There were plenty of black people in our part of Maryland, but most of them went to all-black churches. Only a handful of black and Hispanic families went to our church, and I figured the same was probably true at Christa and Rodney’s, too. The other church who’d sent their youth group on this trip was in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. I didn’t know much about West Virginia, but from what I did know, I had a feeling that church was all white, all the time.

  Rodney wasn’t bad-looking. I probably should’ve been excited that he wanted to talk to me. But all I wanted was to be alone with Christa again.

  Other people came over to sit with us. Christa kept saying stuff that made everyone laugh, me especially. Then the group got so big that a bunch of different conversations were going on at once.

  A short white guy came over and sat down next to me.

  “Hi.” He waved awkwardly. “I’m Jake. I go to Holy Life of Harpers Ferry.”

  “Hey, Jake.”

  Jake, it turned out, was really, really chatty. He kept trying to ask me questions about the people who went to my church and about the national conference that was coming up at the end of the summer for all the Holy Life churches. I knew absolutely nothing about the conference, so I mostly nodded while Jake talked.

  It actually turned out to be kind of cool hanging out with new people—people who didn’t automatically see me as a music-dork preacher’s kid—but even so, I couldn’t focus. I wanted to talk to Christa again. She was funny. And I liked how her eyes caught the light.

  Lori came over and motioned to me, so I apologized to Jake and got up. It was good to have an excuse to get away. It was hard to think clearly with so much happening around me.

  I followed Lori through the courtyard’s tall, swinging wooden door. A patch of gravel ran behind the row of houses and faded into dirt as the hills rose up behind the edge of town. Lori and I walked out a few yards past the gravel into the pitch-black night so we could talk without anyone hearing us. It took all my energy to focus on Lori instead of those stars again.

  She wanted to tell me about the blond guy she’d spotted earlier. She’d found an excuse to talk to him. It turned out his name was Paul, and he went to Christa’s church in Rockville.

  “He’s going to be a senior at King,” Lori said. “He has a car and everything. A Toyota.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Uh-huh. He’s really cute and funny. Plus, older guys are more mature, you know?”

  “Do you mean mature, like, emotionally, or mature, like, he’s done it?”

  “Oh, shut it.” Lori giggled. I did, too. “I took a picture of us goofing around. Want to see?”

  Lori took out her phone and showed me a poorly framed photo of her and Paul sticking their tongues out at the camera. It made me think of Christa and her gorgeous photography. I flushed, glad it was dark so Lori couldn’t see.

  “Do you think you’ll ask him out or something?” I said.

  “I don’t know. What is there to even do around here? Maybe we’ll just hang out at the volunteer site. And find someplace to sneak off to when the time is right.”

  We both laughed again.

  We were supposed to start work tomorrow. None of us were sure exactly what that meant. We’d come here to do construction on a church that the local congregation had already started building. None of us knew the first thing about construction, but my dad and the other chaperones said they’d teach us. I only hoped they didn’t make me climb ladders. I was afraid of heights.

  My back felt stiff from sitting on the ground, so I stood on my tiptoes and stretched my arms over my head, arching my spine so my braids hung straight down. This time, I couldn’t resist gazing up at the stars. They were closer out here than they were within the stone courtyard walls.

  In that moment, it felt like we were the entire world. Just me and those gorgeous stars.

  It was colder out here, too, away from the lights of the houses. We weren’t really in the desert, even though that was what I’d expected when I signed up to come to Mexico. Here there were trees and stuff, and it had been hot during the day but not that hot. Now that it was dark, it was only sixty-something degrees.

  I lowered myself back down from my toes and rubbed my bare arms, wishing I’d worn more than my T-shirt and jeans. Then I remembered my missing suitcase. I didn’t have anything else to wear.

  “We’re going into town on Saturdays, right?” I asked Lori. “Maybe you and Paul could do something while we’re there.”

  “Or maybe you and that girl could.” Lori smirked.

  “Oh, whatever.” But I couldn’t help smiling.

  I wasn’t sure if lesbians even went on dates. Did anyone, really? I’d been on one official date in my entire life, to a dance at a school I didn’t go to with a blue-haired guy who threw up because he drank a beer.

  I’d wondered what it would be like to have a real boyfriend. Maybe a girlfriend, too. Someday.

  Just the idea of a girlfriend seemed like it was from a whole different life. I mean, even if Christa had been flirting with me back in the courtyard, that didn’t mean she actually wanted to go out with me. She must’ve been able to tell I didn’t know anything about being gay.

  Heck, she probably thought I was straight. I might as well have been, for all I’d done so far.

  Was Christa bi, too? Maybe she was into Rodney. Or someone else. Maybe she hadn’t really been flirting with me at all.

  “So do you like her?” Lori asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe?”

  “I knew it!” Lori pumped her fist. “I could so tell when you were looking at her before.”

  “It doesn’t matter. She isn’t interested.”

  “How do you know?”

  I shrugged. There was no reason someone like Christa would want someone like me. I’d never even kissed a girl.

  It wasn’t as if I didn’t want to. Lately, kissing was all I thought about. Boys. Girls. My daydreams didn’t discriminate.

  That was where my theory had really gotten started.

  Christa had probably kissed tons of girls. And done more than kiss.

  I’d been daydreaming about that a lot lately, too.

  “You’re smiling again,” Lori said.

  “Oh, shut it. Hey, do you think—”

  Before I could finish, Lori clapped her hand over my mouth and held her finger to her lips, her eyes bulging. Now that we were quiet, I could hear it, too. Gravel crunching behind me, then footsteps on the dirt.

  “Hi, you guys,” a voice said.

  I turned. It was too dark to get a good look from this distance. But I knew it was Christa.

  “Hey there.” Lori was grinning, as usual. “I’m glad you came out here. I wanted to ask you something.”

  Oh, no. I was too far away to elbow Lori, so I glared at her. She ignored me.

  “Shoot.” Christa was close enough now that I could see a design on the inside of her wrist. It looked like a tattoo, but I could’ve sworn it wasn’t there when I’d seen her in the courtyard earlier. It was purple. Some kind of complicated knot.

  Lori lowered her voice. “You’re into girls, right?”

  My eyes jerked up. I couldn’t believe Lori said things like that. I would never say something like that to someone she had a crush on. But Christa didn’t seem to mind.

  “For sure,” she said. “But don’t tell my parents, okay?”

  “Deal.” Lori laughed. “So what kind of girls do you like? You know, generally. Tall, short, long hair, short hair...”

  Christa glanced over at
me. I tried to smile, but my face felt all wobbly. I shifted from one foot to the other. Why did Lori have to be this way? Why?

  “I think,” Christa said slowly, “right now, if I were to describe exactly the kinds of girls I like, I’d say...tall, with long hair, in braids. With big dark eyes and pretty smiles. Oh, and I especially have a thing for preacher’s daughters who wear vintage hip-hop T-shirts.”

  I beamed and tugged on one of my braids. I’d worn my favorite Usher shirt on the plane. It was only three years old, so it didn’t exactly qualify as vintage, and Usher wasn’t so much hip-hop as R&B with some light hip-hop influences. But I did not care even the tiniest bit about those things right then.

  “And I like girls with nose rings who draw stuff on their wrists,” I said. It wasn’t the cleverest thing I could’ve come up with, but the truth was, just saying “I like girls” took so much out of me, I didn’t have energy left for cleverness. It was the first time I’d admitted it to anyone but Lori.

  Now I was definitely doing something.

  Christa took a step toward me. Someone else was coming through the swinging door, but I didn’t look to see who it was. I didn’t want to see anyone but Christa.

  “That’s truly excellent news,” Christa said. “Because I happen to believe that the process of creating is what makes people interesting. Any kind of creating, I mean, but let’s be honest—music is the best art there is. It’s the purest. And, well, I’m actually a little obsessed with musicians. It’s kind of my thing.”

  My stomach tightened again. I could tell from her voice that Christa was joking, at least sort of. But now I really wished I hadn’t messed up my verb tenses earlier. I’d already promised myself to never again create so much as a single note.

  But with the way Christa was looking at me now, I knew there was no way I was ever going to tell her that.

  And that meant I was now most definitely lying to her. About something she seemed to care about a lot.

  I swallowed and dropped my gaze down to my feet.

  “Er, I mean, sorry, Lori, no offense.” Christa turned her still-joking voice to my best friend. “I don’t know if you’re an artist. It’s totally okay if you’re not.”