Our Own Private Universe

by Robin Talley

  “What’s the other petition on?” Gina asked.

  “Marriage,” Jake told her. “There’s a plank to make it so Holy Life ministers can perform same-sex weddings.”

  “They can’t already do that?” Becca handed the pen to another guy so he could sign. Jake looked happier than I’d ever seen him.

  “They can, but it isn’t officially recognized by Holy Life national if they do,” Drew said.

  It was weird to hear my brother talking about this. He’d had a ton of friends in high school, but none of them were gay. Or if they were, he hadn’t mentioned it.

  Maybe that was why I hadn’t told him about Christa. I was used to telling Drew pretty much everything—I’d even told him about the dumb pact Lori had gotten me to make, about both of us having a fling this summer, and I’d stood there and acted like it didn’t bother me when he laughed so hard his face looked about to fall off—but I’d kept this part secret. I didn’t know how he’d react. His whole high school world was all about super hetero dates with pretty girls and parties with his ball-playing friends. When I was a kid I used to be so jealous.

  Maybe I still was. It was frustrating sometimes, going to my tiny school where I’d known everyone since we were little. My plan had always been to transfer to MHSA for high school, but then I got rejected.

  I’d dreamed of spending my high school years becoming a real musician. Instead I wasted ninth grade doing nothing but hanging out with Lori, doing the same things we’d always done.

  I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was running out of time to start doing cool things.

  Well, I was doing something this summer, at least. I smiled at Christa, who was adjusting something on her black-and-white camera. She glanced up and met my eyes. Then we both ducked our heads before anyone could notice.

  “I heard they aren’t sure if the marriage plank is going to pass,” Sofía said. “There’s a lot of controversy.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” Lori huffed. “Why does anyone even care if gay people get married? What business is it of theirs?”

  “Well, it’s caused big problems for some denominations,” Jake said. “Whole national church groups have split in half because they couldn’t agree on whether to recognize same-sex marriages.”

  “For real?” I’d never heard that before.

  “Yeah.” Drew looked at me like I was dumb. “It was all over the news a few years ago.”

  “Jeez,” Gina said. “How do you guys think your dad’s going to vote on it?”

  “Uh.” I had no idea. I knew Dad would vote to end the war—he and Mom hated everything to do with the military; they’d even tried to get a religious exemption to keep Drew from having to register for the draft when he turned eighteen—but I’d never heard him talk about the marriage thing.

  Drew shrugged at Gina. “I don’t know.”

  “A lot of black people don’t support gay marriage,” Becca said. “Church people especially.”

  Everyone got quiet then. I had no idea what Becca was talking about.

  “My dads told me that,” she said, when she realized we were all staring at her. “They’re gay, so they should know.”

  “That’s completely not true,” I said. “And if your gay dads told you that, they—”

  “Hey, I think this store sells that toast you’re so obsessed with.” Christa tapped her finger on my arm kind of hard. That was the most she’d ever touched me in front of other people, so it was enough to shut me up. “Want to go see?”

  She was right. We were in front of a tiny grocery store with a sign in the window for the brand of toast I’d been eating to the exclusion of almost everything else since we’d come to Mexico.

  “Okay,” I said. Becca was eyeing me. I really wanted to keep talking about her dads (and to ask what it was like to have gay dads in the first place), but Christa was probably right. That conversation wasn’t going to end well.

  The store was tiny. When Christa and I ducked inside, we took up nearly all the available space. A woman was sitting behind the counter, reading a newspaper. I smiled and said, “Hola,” but I was too anxious to try to say anything else.

  The store definitely sold toast, but I didn’t see the point in buying any since our hosts put it out at every meal we ate. It felt like we should buy something, though, so Christa found a pack of ponytail holders and went up to pay, fumbling in her purse for the pesos we’d all gotten at the airport. I walked around, gazing at the shelves of canned vegetables, then caught a reflection in the store window that said Salud. Salud meant health. I turned around.

  Across the street was yet another one-story cement building. A stone fence stood around it, and the front of the building was plain except for the painted words Casa de Salud above the door. In my head, that translated to house of health, but it probably sounded cooler in Spanish.

  The name made it sound like the building was some kind of doctor’s office, but it didn’t look anything like the clinic where I’d volunteered back home. This place looked old and deserted.

  I’d seen doctors’ offices in Tijuana when we drove in from the airport. They’d looked pretty similar to doctors’ offices back home—neat and shiny, with giant signs announcing the doctors who worked there and what their specialties were, in Spanish and English.

  Maybe there was a big, shiny doctor’s office in some other part of Mudanza. I was still curious about the Casa de Salud, though.

  “I’m all set.” Christa pocketed her ponytail holders. “Sure you don’t want to grab some toast, seeing as how nothing else in the whole country is edible for you?”

  “Oh, whatever. Listen, do you want to go check out that building across the street?”

  “What? Oh, uh.” Christa craned her neck to read the sign, then looked at me quizzically. “Sure.”

  “I only want to stick my head inside. See how it looks.”

  Christa reached for her digital camera and followed me across the street, through the opening in the stone fence and up to the front door of the Casa de Salud.

  The door swung open. Christa lowered her camera. Inside, the building looked just as old as it had outside, but it was far from deserted. In fact, all I could see no matter which way I looked were people, waiting. There must’ve been at least thirty of them, mostly women and kids, swatting at the mosquitoes that buzzed around them.

  There were only a few chairs, so most people were sitting on the floor or standing. At first I couldn’t see what they were waiting for, but then I spotted a desk strewn with papers in the far corner of the room. Behind it was a door that must’ve opened into another room. A young woman in a button-down shirt sat behind the desk, talking to a woman with a baby on her lap. The baby was crying. The woman behind the desk was trying to explain something, but the woman with the baby was arguing with her. I wished I could understand them.

  An older woman came up to Christa and me, speaking rapid Spanish. She was wearing a stained gray sweatshirt and holding a jar of bandages, and she didn’t look particularly happy to see us. I dipped my head in an apology and murmured “Lo siento” before backing out the door with Christa.

  “Did you see any medical equipment in there?” I asked when we got outside.

  “Some bandages, I think?” Christa glanced back over her shoulder. “Most of the equipment was probably in the other room. That must be where all the doctors and nurses are.”

  I had a feeling that wasn’t the case.

  The clinic where I’d volunteered back home wasn’t anything fancy, but it was neat and mosquito-free. And it had rooms full of equipment. Machines that the orderlies wheeled around. Drawers and drawers full of medicine and syringes.

  I didn’t know what to think of any of it. Maybe I should ask Dad. He probably understood it all better than I did.

  “I think we lost them.” Christa pointed
up the street. We could still see the rest of our group, but they were so far ahead of us now, we couldn’t tell who was who.

  I didn’t actually mind, though. There was only one person I’d been looking forward to spending time with today, and she was standing right in front of me.

  “Well.” I turned to meet Christa’s eyes. “If they’re that far off, I guess there’s no point trying to catch up.”

  Christa smiled.

  “I’m quite confident,” she said, “that we can have a lot more fun on our own.”

  CHAPTER 7

  We spent the rest of the morning exploring the town by ourselves, stopping so Christa could take photos whenever we saw something interesting. And now that I was actually paying attention, there was a lot of interesting stuff. Mudanza was beautiful, with the hills in the distance and wide, open streets. Everyone we saw smiled and waved at us. One man even tipped his hat. When Christa asked a few women standing in front of a shop if she could take their photo, they beamed and twisted into so many different poses Christa finally had to tell them she was running out of storage space on her camera.

  I asked her questions about the photos she was taking, and it turned out that was really interesting, too. She had a whole method she’d learned from classes and from reading tons of articles online.

  “This camera shoots on film,” she told me, holding up the old black-and-white camera. “I only have so much film, so I have to be really choosy about what I shoot. I’m using it for artsier shots, where there are cool shadows and stuff. Those are the ones I want to print out and play around with in the darkroom once we get back home.”

  “Darkrooms are still a thing?”

  “Yeah! I mean, not many are still around, but my school has a tiny one in the art department. They have a way fancier one at the school I wanted to go to, but my parents wouldn’t let me apply. Hey, did you ever think about going there? Your parents would probably be cool with it. It’s called MHSA, the Maryland High School for the Arts. It’s a public school, so it’s free, but you have to apply, and they only take the very best. They have lots of different programs. Visual art, theater, music.”

  Sweat broke out along the back of my neck. I should’ve known this might come up. “I, uh...”

  I could tell her the truth. This would be the perfect time to tell her the truth.

  But I didn’t want her to know I was so bad at writing music that I hadn’t even gotten in. Besides, I’d have to admit I’d lied to her, and right when things were going so well between us.

  Plus, why did it even matter? We were only having fun. She didn’t need to know my whole life story.

  “I’ve heard about it, but I decided not to apply.” I rubbed at the sweat on the back of my neck, but that didn’t help because now my palms were sweating, too. “I read that their music program was all about rote learning and that it totally stifled creativity.”

  I actually had read that, after I got my rejection letter. On a message board for other people who’d gotten rejection letters, too.

  “Oh, that’s too bad.” Christa seemed to believe me. Whew. “Hey, do you want to go into any of these shops here? I think we’re right in the middle of town.”

  We were walking down a little strip lined with stores on both sides. I nodded and we went into a couple of them. One was another grocery-type store. One looked like a bookstore but it turned out to have nothing but religious pamphlets, in Spanish, of course. There was a tiny shop that had a sign about computers and internet, and Christa nearly hyperventilated at the idea of getting on Instagram, but it was only open in the afternoons. I asked Christa if she wanted to chat with Steven the next time we could get online, but she shook her head.

  I wondered if she’d tell him about me someday. I wondered how I’d feel if she did.

  We saw more kids playing in the street, too. All the kids seemed to play in the street here, even though I couldn’t see their parents anywhere. There were hardly any cars driving around, though, so it was probably all right.

  I asked Christa what music she was into.

  “You’re going to think it’s horribly uncool,” she said. “You know about all the funky, different music, and all I know is what comes up on my playlists.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I swear I don’t judge musical taste. Any musical taste.”

  “Okay, fine.” She covered her face with her hand. “Don’t laugh, but my all-time favorite is... Taylor Swift.”

  She peeked out between her fingers, like she thought I was going to make fun of her.

  “I think Taylor Swift is awesome,” I said honestly. “I mean, I think pretty much all music is awesome, but she’s got some great stuff. I especially love her early songs, when she was still country.”

  Christa wrinkled her nose. “I never listen to those. Country music is so cheesy.”

  “No, no, there’s a lot of really cool country music out there. Here, listen.”

  I pulled up one of my country playlists and held my phone up between our ears. For a while we walked along quietly, each of us straining to listen through my phone’s tiny speaker. It was too hard to walk and listen at the same time, so we gave up after a few minutes, but that was okay.

  “So is that your favorite kind of music?” she asked. “Country?”

  I laughed. “No, but the truth is, I don’t really have a favorite kind of music. Just favorite artists.”

  “Who’s your all-time favorite? Do you have a playlist for that, too?”

  I hesitated. Talking about Prince felt weirdly personal. No one ever seemed to understand why his music mattered so much to me. Hardly anyone knew what my favorite song was—only Mom and Dad and Drew, since I played it so much there was no way they could avoid it. It was the song I’d listened to the night we arrived, when I’d danced alone out in those hills before Lori dragged me back to the party.

  “I don’t have one all-time fave.” Ugh. The more I lied to Christa, the more I hated myself for it. “But what else are you into besides Taylor Swift?”

  Christa told me more about the music she listened to while she cooked or worked in the darkroom. It was all dance music, the kind I rocked out to when I was alone, too. Soon Christa was pulling up the songs on her phone and singing along while we both howled with laughter.

  Talking about music seemed to make something shift between us. Soon we started talking about our actual lives back home, which we’d never really done before. It was the first time we’d hung out together when all we could do was talk.

  Christa asked me how it was being a preacher’s kid. I told her about how everyone always thought I was totally innocent and boring, and I asked about her family. Both Christa’s parents had gone to Princeton, and now they worked for the federal government.

  “Their work hours are totally bizarre,” she said. “They almost never both make it home for dinner on the same night.”

  I couldn’t imagine that. Both my parents worked from home most of the time. They were always around. “Is it weird?” I asked her.

  “Nah. My brother and I are used to taking care of ourselves. Plus, this way I don’t have to worry about anybody looking over my shoulder.”

  We talked about school. I wasn’t surprised to hear that her huge public high school was really different from my tiny school—pretty much every school was—but I was surprised when she talked about how competitive things were, like grades and sports.

  “We didn’t even have tryouts for lacrosse at my school,” I told her. “The coach knew I could play from gym class so she asked if I wanted to join the team.”

  “I barely made it onto the softball team last year,” Christa said. “Then I wound up quitting because I hurt my shoulder. But it was okay because that way I could get my nose ring without having to worry about getting hit in the face with flying sports equipment. B
esides, I was never that into softball. It’s such a stereotype, you know?”

  “Wait, what’s the stereotype?”

  “You know, how all lesbians are supposed to play softball and listen to the Indigo Girls. As though we can’t be into whatever we want, the same as anybody else. Not that I’m a lesbian, but you know what I mean.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t known that stereotype was a thing. I’d listened to the Indigo Girls when I was in elementary school and going through my nineties phase. Had that meant something? “Yeah, I mean, obviously.”

  “Besides.” She sighed. “Everyone at my school is obsessed with doing every activity so they can put it on college applications.”

  “College. God, I’ve barely even thought about it yet.”

  “It’s all my parents will let me think about. When I was a kid, I told them I wanted to be a chef when I grew up, but they told me cooking is a hobby, not a career. It’s the same with photography. They want me to keep taking photos, especially when there are contests I can win because they think it’ll look good on college applications. But according to them, if I don’t have a perfect grade point average every semester, I might as well give up on everything else.”

  “That sucks. I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks.” Christa shrugged. “It’ll be nice to go away somewhere, though. Start fresh. Mom and Dad want me to go to an Ivy. Well, really they want me to go to Princeton. They keep talking about how two women Supreme Court justices went there, but as far as I can tell, being a judge only means having to wear seriously ugly robes and be mad at everybody all the time. Anyway, I don’t care where I wind up for college as long as it isn’t too close to here. I mean, to home.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. Lori’s mom is always trying to get her to go to UMD, but she wants to go somewhere warm, like Florida.”

  “Florida could be fun. Or California.”

  “Wow. I’ve never been that far from home. Until now, I guess. Have you?”