Our Own Private Universe

by Robin Talley

  “I sure did.”

  “I figured,” Drew said. “It’s the only part that looks halfway decent.”

  “Hey!” I reached out to swipe Drew with my paintbrush, but he stepped away in time.

  “Come on, Aki’s section looks great,” Christa said. I beamed, even though she was totally lying.

  “Had you painted before you came here?” Drew asked her.

  “Yep. Well, I’ve painted one room, anyway.”

  “Your room at home?” Drew asked.

  “No.” Christa bent down and wiped her paintbrush on the edge of the tray. “I helped my boyfriend paint his room at his dad’s house.”

  “Your ex-boyfriend?” I asked, thinking I’d misheard.

  Christa stood up, biting her lip. “Uh, no. Current.”

  I dropped my brush. Paint splattered onto my pants. Drew jumped out of the way to avoid getting hit.

  “Hey, you three!” one of the pastors from the West Virginia church called over. “No roughhousing!”

  Christa stood up straight. When she called back to the pastor, her voice was totally different than it had been when she was talking to us. She sounded calm. Demure, almost. “We’re very sorry, sir.”

  The pastor came over to us, looking with a frown at our uneven paint job. “I don’t think it’s really going to take all three of you to finish what’s left of that wall. You two are Benny’s kids, right?”

  Drew and I nodded, keeping our sighs to ourselves. Preacher’s kids never got a break.

  “Come out here and we can get you to work on the ditch.” The pastor nodded to Christa. “You can finish up that wall on your own.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, still in that strange voice.

  Stop, I wanted to say to Christa. Wait. Tell me what this means.

  “Come on, Sis,” Drew said. Preacher’s kids did as they were told.

  I tried to catch Christa’s eye before we left, but she didn’t look my way. She’d already turned back to the wall.

  She was out of sight long before I’d stopped shaking.

  CHAPTER 4

  I poked the rice with my fork. It looked like rice, anyway. It was hard to tell. There was all sorts of...stuff in it. Beans, and other things I didn’t recognize.

  Mexican food in actual Mexico, it turned out, wasn’t anything like the Mexican food at Taco Bell. Everyone around me was gobbling down whatever was on their plates, but I preferred to be sure I knew what, exactly, I was putting in my mouth.

  Lunch had been torture. We’d split up into groups and gone to the local families’ houses to eat. A nice Mexican lady kept putting more and more food on the table in front of me, but all I could do was nibble on some corn. Then I’d gotten a lecture from Lori’s aunt Miranda about being respectful of local cultures.

  At least for dinner we didn’t have to eat in people’s houses. Instead we were sitting at a row of picnic tables near the church. A whole team of ladies had set out big bowls full of rice and vegetables and tortillas and stuff. It was really pretty outside at this time of day, right when the sun was going down. Beams of light shone through the scraggly trees that dotted the hillsides to the west. Plus, this time I didn’t have to worry about getting a talking-to from a chaperone about what I was eating. The adults were at their own table, so far away we could barely see them.

  A big pile of toast stood in the middle of the table, still in a plastic bread wrapper. I grabbed three slices. Maybe I could make it through four weeks in Mexico eating nothing but corn and prepackaged toast.

  “Hi, Aki.” Jake, the guy I’d met at the party last night, swung into the seat next to me.

  “Hi.” I tried to smile through my mouthful of toast crumbs, but I could feel my face arranging itself into an embarrassing half smirk instead. “Did your day go okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m beat, though.”

  “I know. Me, too.”

  I tried again to smile, but it still wasn’t easy.

  I hadn’t seen Christa all afternoon. Not since the “boyfriend” thing.

  She’d told Lori she was into girls. Sure, maybe she was bi, but still—why had she been flirting with me last night if she already had a boyfriend?

  All afternoon I’d worked outside, digging that stupid ditch with Drew and the others. When the work day ended I waited for Christa to come out so we could talk, but I never saw her. She must’ve been avoiding me.

  I’d thought this summer was going to be when my life actually started to happen. Now I was right back where I’d started.

  “I didn’t know Benny was your dad,” Jake said.

  “Yep.” I leaned over the table for more toast. “Want any?”

  “Yeah, thanks. That stuff is great.” Jake held out his empty plate. A fellow picky eater. “Hey, cool bracelet.”

  “Thanks.” It was one I’d made last year, when Lori and I were into embroidery. It was emerald with white stitching that said, Music should be your escape. “It’s a Missy Elliott quote.”

  “Super cool,” Jake said. I could tell he had no idea who Missy Elliott was. “So, he’s going to be a delegate at the national conference, right? Your dad, I mean?”

  I shrugged. “All I know is that he’s going. He wanted to take some pictures to show there.”

  Dad, true to his word, had rounded up half a dozen girls from the local church for our first jewelry-making workshop. They’d been gathered on a blanket near the work site waiting for Lori and me when we got back from lunch with our supplies. Dad was already taking pictures. The girls were mostly around seven or eight years old, and I couldn’t understand a single word they said. Lori managed to talk to them, though. She and I had taken the same Spanish class with the same teacher and gotten the same grades, but Lori was the only one who could say more than “¿Hola?” and actually have people understand her. We’d planned to make beaded safety-pin bracelets, but the girls had trouble getting the tiny beads we’d brought onto the pins, so Lori told them to stick with fastening the safety pins together to make loops. The girls loved it. They’d kept giggling and stringing safety-pin chains around my arms. One of them thought my baseball cap was so cool I wound up trading it to her for a safety-pin necklace.

  The problem was, now we were out of safety pins and I had no idea what to make with them tomorrow. Plus, Lori was irritated with me. She’d had fun with the girls, but she kept complaining that she was having to do all the work since she was the only one who could talk to them. I thought I’d helped plenty, so whatever.

  “No, he’s definitely a delegate,” Jake said. “He’s on the list on the conference website.”

  “You got onto their website?” I put my toast down and turned to Jake. “Do you get internet on your phone here? Can I borrow it?”

  “No, I, uh.” Jake scratched the back of his neck. “I printed out the list of delegates before I left home.”

  I smiled again. “You’re really into this conference thing, huh?”

  “Yeah, our little Jakey’s a big old nerrrrrrrrd,” the guy sitting across from us said, dragging out the word in a way that I was sure he found hilarious. This guy looked older, maybe Drew’s age, and he was wearing a T-shirt with an American flag on it, even though we weren’t in America. “He’ll talk to anybody who’ll listen about that stuff.”

  I didn’t like the way the guy was grinning at Jake. I didn’t like the way Jake was staring down at his toast, either.

  “Do you go to the church in Harpers Ferry?” I asked the guy across the table.

  “Yep.” He waved his fork at me. “I’m Brian.”

  “I’m Aki. I go to Silver Spring.”

  Brian frowned at me. “How do you spell your name?”

  I sighed. “A-K-I.”

  “Oh,” Brian said. “So it’s Ahh-kee?”

  I sig
hed again. This had been happening my entire life. I told someone my name, and they told me I was pronouncing it wrong.

  It was my brother’s fault. When I was born, he was four and still learning how to talk. (When I told people this story, I always said he was actually still learning how to talk now, but if Drew was nearby that was a good way to get a sharp elbow in my rib cage.)

  My parents had just brought me home from the hospital. They put my baby carrier on the floor next to Drew and told him I was his new sister, Akina. Drew didn’t even try to say my real name. He pointed at little me, turned to Dad, and said “Ack-ee?” Apparently the way he said it was so cute, Mom and Dad decided to call me that from then on. Thus sentencing me to a lifetime of explaining myself to dudes like Brian.

  “Ack-ee,” I corrected him.

  “Oh.” Brian looked confused. I might as well accept that no one around this place was ever going to learn my actual name.

  One of the nice Mexican ladies who’d served our meal came over to clear our plates away. I jumped up, ready to help her, but she laughed and put her hand on my shoulder, pushing me gently back onto the bench. The same thing had happened at lunch. I’d always been taught to help clean up when I was someone’s guest. One more adjustment to get used to.

  The sun was almost down. Seeing the church ladies in their dresses carrying our plates inside reminded me that I hadn’t cleaned up after work today. None of us had, but still, I felt scuzzy and sweaty in my paint-spattered, too-small clothes.

  (That was another thing Lori was annoyed at me for. I’d gotten paint and dirt on her clothes. But what was I supposed to do? I didn’t have any of my own clothes, and everyone got paint and dirt all over everything today.)

  I stretched my arms over my head. Once dinner was over we had to go to vespers. Every single night we were here, the chaperones would take turns leading us in prayers and songs so we could reflect on the work we were doing. I’d never been much for reflection, but I was a preacher’s kid, and I could play along with the best of them.

  “Hey!” I yelped suddenly. Someone was tickling my armpit.

  At first I thought it was Brian, and I was ready to yell louder if I had to, but when I turned, Christa was there. “Oh. Sorry! Hi.”

  “Hi.” Christa pulled her hand back. She was giggling again. “I couldn’t resist. You do that a lot, you know?”

  “What, stretch?”

  “Yeah. Is it because you’re tall? Do you need to flex your limbs and stuff?”

  Christa was smiling, but I didn’t smile back. I wasn’t going to act as if everything was normal.

  “No,” I said. I decided to head her off before she could ask any of the other questions everyone always asked me, too. “And no, I don’t play basketball.”

  “Sorry.” Her smile faded. “I didn’t mean to...”

  “Hi.” Next to me, Jake stuck out his hand. “I’m Jake. You’re Christa, right?”

  Christa’s head swiveled toward him. “Uh, yep, that’s me. Hi, Jake.”

  “Want to sit with us?” Jake scooted over on the bench to make room.

  “No, thanks.” Christa fumbled with her hands. “Listen, Aki, do you want to go somewhere for a second?”

  I glanced around the table. Jake suddenly seemed very absorbed in his food. No one else was paying attention to us.

  I followed Christa around the corner of the house. We couldn’t go far, not with vespers in a couple of minutes.

  The view back here was incredible. On the bus ride in from Tijuana the day before we’d mostly seen hills and sparse trees and a pretty, golden landscape. Since we’d arrived in this tiny town, Mudanza, we hadn’t seen that much besides houses and churches. But now Christa and I were standing on the town’s northern edge, with Mudanza on one side of us and empty country on the other. Ahead of us were hills, valleys and trees as far as the eye could see, with a painted pink sky to frame it all.

  Christa was walking toward the hills now, into the last sliver of sunlight. It shone on her dark hair and reflected off her long bead necklace. She was wearing a fresh, clean T-shirt that clung to her body and jeans that looked brand-new and paint-free. She must’ve changed for dinner.

  She turned around and smiled at me over her shoulder. “I missed you this afternoon. I mean, I wound up less covered in polka dots compared to this morning, so there’s that. But it turns out painting by myself is way more boring than getting polka-dotted by cute girls.”

  I stood motionless. “You didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend.”

  The smile fell from her face. We’d passed the peak of the hill. When I looked back, I couldn’t see the rest of our group. We were alone out here.

  “I—” She paused and took a breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you that way. It sort of slipped out.”

  “Slipped out?” How could she be so casual about this? And right after she’d said that thing about getting polka-dotted by cute girls that made my insides want to melt? “Who is he?”

  “His name’s Steven. He goes to a private school in DC. I met him at drama camp a few years ago. He’s a really talented actor.”

  “Oh.” I tried to stick my hands in my pockets, but Lori’s track pants didn’t have pockets. I stuck my thumbs in my waistband as though that was what I’d meant to do all along.

  I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. Christa had flirted with me, but it wasn’t as if she owed me anything. If she’d flirted with me even though she had a boyfriend, he was the one who had a right to be annoyed about that, not me.

  Plus, I wasn’t exactly in a position to be self-righteous about telling the absolute truth. Not when I was still straight-up lying to her by acting like I still did music.

  The boyfriend thing hurt, though. A lot.

  We’d made it to a little valley between two rows of hills. They were sort of hills-slash-sand dunes, now that I looked closer, with trees scattered along the peaks. We couldn’t even see the town behind us anymore. We’d barely come any distance at all, but it was as if we’d gone straight into the wilderness. It was cool enough that for a moment I stopped thinking about how upset I was.

  “Wow,” I said. “It’s gorgeous out here.”

  The sun was almost down. Everything was gray and hazy. All I could see were sand and hills, trees and sky.

  And Christa. She was gorgeous, too. She was biting her lip and brushing her hair out of her face and looking at me with her steady brown eyes and I wanted... I didn’t even know what, exactly. I just wanted.

  “You’d like Steven,” Christa went on. “He’s really smart and funny. Open-minded, too.”

  “Great.”

  “Yeah. We’re actually a really modern couple. Steven hates all those old-school rules about how relationships are supposed to work, and I do, too.”

  “That’s great.” I wished she’d shut up about Steven.

  “Everyone’s stuck in this 1950s mentality,” Christa went on. “As if people still ‘go steady.’ I mean, what a boring idea, that you’re supposed to be with one person all the time and never so much as look at anyone else. Haven’t we evolved past that as a culture?”

  I was about to reach my breaking point with this conversation. “What are you talking about?”

  Christa looked down at her hands. “The thing about Steven and me is that we’re taking a break for the summer.”

  “A break?” I watched her closely. “What does that mean?”

  “You know.” She met my eyes for a second and then looked away, her shoulders shifting. “We don’t believe in that old-fashioned rule about how you always have to be totally monogamous. It isn’t human nature, you know? So, since I was coming down here, we decided we’d take the summer off from our relationship. So we could see other people for a little while. If we wanted to, I mean.”

  “Oh.” Ohhhh
h. “So you mean—he was your boyfriend up until this week, and he’ll be your boyfriend once you get back home, but right at this moment, you’re boyfriend-free?”

  She nodded. “That’s the general idea.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about him last night?” My annoyance was fading fast, but I tried not to let it show. This kind of changed everything.

  She bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I should have. Steven and I agreed before I left town that we’d both be totally up front about the whole thing so no one gets the wrong idea.”

  “And what would the right idea be, exactly?”

  She looked back up at me, her mouth set in a straight line. “The right idea would be...that even though I technically have a boyfriend, I could still like a girl. A particular girl, I mean.”

  My chest felt fluttery. Damn it. I was supposed to be mad at her.

  Also, this meant Christa was definitely bi. The same as me. I’d hardly known any other bi people.

  “I mean.” She stepped closer. “You know my thing for artist types. Because as it happens, there’s this one artist girl, a musician in fact, who I happen to like a lot. But only if she’s okay with the temporary thing, since that’s all I can do. And only if she likes me back.”

  This time, I was the one who looked down at my hands. She was being honest with me, but I wasn’t being honest with her. She still thought I was an artist type, like her. And like the super talented actor that was Steven.

  “Because the thing is,” she went on. I glanced back up. She was still biting her lip. Was she nervous? Did Christa get nervous? “I mean, if that particular musician girl did like me back, then, well, we’re here in this totally new place, where we hardly know anyone. Where we can basically start a whole new life, just for ourselves, just for these next four weeks. No one even needs to know about it. It could be our own private universe. And then once we get on the plane at the end of this trip, we go back to the real world.”

  Christa tugged at her shirt again. She looked so awesome, especially next to me in my paint-splattered pants. Had she changed her clothes because she knew she was going to see me?