JUST AS WE WERE ABOUT to walk away, a man came to the door and unlocked it. He appeared to be around my dad’s age, a little less gray maybe. He was wearing a polo shirt that said “PED-X CYCLE.”
Pushing the door open, he looked at me and said, “Come on in.”
“You’re not closed?” Maia asked.
“Not if y’all can find what you need in the next five minutes.” He looked at me again and smiled, even though Maia was the one who’d asked the question. “So, what can I help you find today?”
I gestured to Maia, who glanced at the words on her hand and told him, “Both of my tires are flat, so I need to get two new inner tubes. And I need an air pump, too. And bike levers,” she added, sounding so sure of herself, like we hadn’t just sat in the car watching the same videos for the first time.
I watched the man’s face as he listened to her—or rather, didn’t listen to her—and I understood why she suddenly sounded like someone else. He was fidgeting as she spoke, kept opening his mouth like he was about to interrupt her, squinting his eyes hard and scrunching up his face, like she wasn’t making sense, even though she was.
“First thing’s first.” He looked to me. Again. “Do you know what size her tires are?”
I knew this routine well. This guy was a jackass. I’d been treated like this plenty of times.
“Who, me?” I responded. “No.”
“I know my tire size, though,” she replied firmly.
“You know all the numbers that are printed on the sidewall of the tire?” He looked at me again, then back to her, like he’d just challenged her with some sort of a dare rather than an answerable question.
Maia pulled her phone out of her pocket and said, “Yes. I even took a picture.”
She was putting misogynistic bike guy in his place.
I said to her, “Hey, I’ll let you do your thing—I’m gonna look over there.”
She nodded, and when she met my eyes, I felt like we had a silent moment of understanding.
“All right,” he said as I drifted away from them. “Let’s see what you got there.”
I was checking out the cycling apparel, all the Lycra and technological fabrics, and I wondered if I could use something like this for running. As I walked by a floor-length mirror, I couldn’t help myself. I pulled the bottom of my T-shirt down, making sure my chest was smooth and flat. Just then, Maia appeared next to me in my reflection.
“Hey,” she said. “Ready?”
The man locked the door behind us, and we stood there, Maia with her bag of supplies, me hoping she hadn’t caught me checking myself out in the mirror.
“Well,” I said, looking around, “what should we do now?”
Almost like it was an answer to my question, a firework sounded in the distance. We both looked up, searching for the explosion in the sky, but it was still too light to see where it had come from.
She shrugged, and looked around, as I had. “It’ll be getting dark soon,” she began. “I don’t know. Maybe we should just go back?”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Her voice wavered, though. I suddenly got the feeling I had missed something. “I mean, nothing’s going to be open now anyway, with the holiday and all.”
“We could walk a little farther?” I looked down the road, at the line of shops that seemed to hold so much potential, so much possibility—we were out here living, not asking anyone for permission. I wanted so badly to stay.
There was a definite tension pulling at the space between us, and when I turned back toward her, I recognized something in her expression, in the tone of her voice when she said, “No, I just want to go. I mean, I didn’t even really tell my friends I was leaving.”
I felt like an idiot, the realization hitting me at once. I was a guy. I was just some guy she didn’t really know, in a place that was far away from home, where there weren’t a lot of people around, and it was about to be getting dark, and no one knew where she was or who she was with. Of course I got it.
“Okay, that’s fine. Yeah, let’s go.”
As we walked back to the car, I didn’t know the right thing to say. I had so many different thoughts swirling around in my head. It was a strange feeling—a good but strange feeling—to really be passing. Not as a girl who was really a boy, or a boy who was really a girl, but to be seen as just a boy.
But then I had to remind myself of how boys could be—how men are taught to be. Not just rude and condescending like the shop guy, but how they could turn scary and mean and dangerous. It wasn’t something I could ever really forget about; it was always there in the back of my mind. I had a whole list of scenarios tucked away in my memory of things that had happened, and it was not made up of the really terrible stuff, like what happened that day in the woods. It was filled with smaller things—a particular look a boy gave me while passing in the hallway at school, or some guy walking too close behind me on the street, or a man sitting down next to me on the bus and taking up too much space, letting his thigh knock against mine. All of those seemingly innocuous things men do every day that can be threatening as hell. Meanwhile, they’re completely oblivious.
I would never be that type of man.
Which meant that if Maia said she wanted to leave, the only thing I was supposed to do was take her home. Not try to persuade her to change her mind or make a point or suggestion, however well meaning. The only thing I was supposed to say, immediately, was, Okay, let’s go.
I was starting to understand that there’s also a price that comes with being a boy, one that’s different from being a girl. Maybe the price is more one of a responsibility—to not only be a decent person, like everyone else, and not only to not turn scary or mean or dangerous, but to never forget.
I found myself wondering, as I had once wondered if other girls felt the consequences of their bodies the way I did, if other boys felt consequences too, like the one I was suddenly coming face-to-face with, as I walked down an unfamiliar street with an unfamiliar girl.
When we made it back to the car and started driving, I wished that I could tell her I wasn’t thinking anything about her. Not really, anyway. At least, nothing mean or perverted or dangerous. That I really did just want to hang out. I wanted to know her. I wasn’t looking for anything else, not expecting anything.
Ten minutes had passed before she said, “Who is this?” looking at the radio, as if she just realized music had been playing the entire time.
“I don’t know, it came with the car,” I said, laughing. She drew her eyebrows together, like she was trying to understand what the hell I meant or why it was a joke. “It’s like an actual cassette tape my aunt had in the car. There’s a whole bunch of them in there.” I gestured to the glove box.
She paused and looked around, like she was only just now seeing the car for the first time, realizing it was as old as dirt. She opened the glove box and peered inside.
“Full disclosure,” I began, hoping to lighten the mood. “That’s why I almost hit you that day on the road.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was messing around with the tapes. That’s why I wasn’t paying attention.”
She laughed. “Nice to know I’d have gone out for a good reason. I like it, I think—the music.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. I wanted to say something else, though, about the bike shop guy. I wanted to acknowledge that I realized he was being a douche, to ask if that’s why she wanted to leave, if it bothered her. But I probably already knew those answers.
The sky was darkening. The sun had just set. It was a new moon tonight. The sky was so clear. Too bad the fireworks were about to obliterate it all with their smoke and chemicals. Venus was rising in the west. I wanted to hear her talk again, hear her voice, so I went with the one subject that was always easy for me to talk about.
“Hey, check out the moon, Maia.”
She looked up through the windshield. “Where?”
“West.”
“Where?” she repeated, this laugh in her voice. “You gotta give me right or left.”
“There.” I pointed to her right. “Can you see it?”
“No. . . ,” she said.
Careful to keep the car centered in the lane, I leaned slightly toward her and looked up, pointing more precisely in the direction I was looking. “See? It’s a new moon, so it’s dark, but with the light right now, you can see the complete outline of it.”
“Oh wow,” she breathed. “Yeah, I see.”
“I love when it’s like that,” I told her.
“That’s really beautiful.”
“Yeah, plus when the moon is dark, it’s easier to see everything else—the stars and planets, I mean.”
“It looks fake,” she mused. “Like a cutout or something someone just stuck up there.”
I liked the way she saw things; I guess it was because she was an artist.
“See that one bright star near the moon, kind of below it and to the right?” I asked her. “You know what that is?”
She squinted at the point of light. “Is that really a star? It’s so bright.”
“No, it’s Venus.”
She smiled as she looked at the sky. “It’s so crazy to think about,” she said, and I waited for her to finish. I counted silently: one, two, three, four.
“What?” I finally asked. “What’s crazy?”
“Just thinking about being on Earth, the way it’s just sitting there in space, in the middle of nothing.”
I was physically biting my tongue, repressing the urge to correct her or explain all the ways that Earth is not just sitting there in the middle of nothing. Where would I even begin? Kepler’s laws of planetary motion? Galileo? Newton? General relativity? The entire timeline of the history of physics was running through my mind on a loop.
“Okay, don’t look so horrified,” she said with a snort. “I know it’s not really like that.”
“Sorry,” I said. I felt embarrassed; I could be a snob when it comes to this stuff.
“I know you people just love to think southerners are stupid, but I’m not a total moron, believe it or not. I fully understand it all has to do with gravity and orbits, or whatever else. I just mean . . .” She paused, searching for the words, but this time I couldn’t stop myself from interrupting her.
“I don’t think southerners are stupid.”
She said, “Okay,” but I could tell from the way the curve of her mouth was set that she didn’t believe me.
“Hey, my parents grew up here, just like you—I don’t think they’re stupid.”
“But you didn’t.” She squinted at me, like she was trying to see me better. I felt the beat of my heart pumping faster. “Let me guess—you grew up in . . . Connecticut?”
“Connecticut? No.”
She looked at me even harder, this smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “Massachusetts?”
I smiled back. “No,” I replied, wondering what kind of criteria I was fulfilling in her mind about the kinds of people who grew up in places like Connecticut and Massachusetts.
“I know,” she finally said. “New York.”
I hesitated, but then gave in. “Okay, yeah. So?”
“Nothing.” She shrugged. “I could just tell.”
“How?”
“Maybe it’s the way you talk.”
Suddenly I really wanted to know what I sounded like to her. I wished I didn’t care so much, wished I wasn’t so self-conscious about it. I’d been purposely talking lower for years, before the hormones, even before I consciously understood what I was doing, but I cleared my throat before speaking again just to be sure.
“I grew up in New York State, not New York City, which is what everyone thinks when you say ‘New York.’ ” I lived on the complete opposite side of the state in a suburb of Buffalo that was pretty much like any other suburb in America. “Where I grew up and New York City—it’s like two different worlds.”
She nodded like she was really considering this. “It’s sort of the same here, in a way. I mean, Western North Carolina is totally different from Eastern North Carolina. We have the mountains on one side, the ocean on the other—two completely different landscapes, different weather, different ways of doing things. Then you have places like Charlotte and Raleigh and Winston-Salem dotted throughout, all this nice metropolitan culture. But between, it’s all hog farms and tobacco fields and soy crops and a bunch of land waiting to become the next big thing. But really, we’re just another part of that big line of fields between where you want to be and the emptiness in between. Carson is just another spot of nothing.”
“Whoa. That’s big stuff,” I said. “Yeah, I didn’t think about that. You’re right.”
As I reviewed our conversation, I realized I’d never let her finish what she was saying. “I interrupted you before. What were you going to say?”
“Before you called me stupid?”
“Relax, I’m kidding!” She laughed at me again, in this way that made me laugh at myself.
I breathed in deeply. The air was cooling off outside, and it calmed me. “You were saying how it was crazy to think about—”
“Oh, right,” she said. “I just meant, like, I remember when I was a little kid, before I knew about the science of it, I used to stay awake at night actually worrying about Earth, thinking one day it would just stop spinning and fall and fall and just keep falling forever.”
A firework soared up into the sky at that moment and burst above us, casting a rainbow across the car, over Maia’s face.
“I don’t know,” she said, quieter. “Sometimes I still think about that, I guess.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but watching her, I couldn’t tell whether what she was saying made her sad or worried or something else. I got the feeling she wasn’t really talking about the planet anymore.
“When I was a kid,” I offered, “it was the opposite for me. I used to have this theory about the universe and everything that helped me to not be afraid, when I thought about Earth and the planets and the stars and the Sun and all of it.”
“What was it?”
“Well, everything is perfect. It’s all orchestrated in this total balance of creation and destruction. I mean, the scale of the cosmos is so vast that we’re not even evolved enough to comprehend it. But when you think about the beginning, and how much has had to happen for us to be here—how the universe had to evolve, and how our galaxy is just one tiny part, and our solar system is an even smaller part, and Earth is miniscule in comparison—it’s incredible that somehow life evolved on this planet. All the comets and asteroids that had to collide with Earth to give us the oceans and gases and metals and everything we would need. It seems like chaos, but it’s not at all. Us sitting here in this car having this conversation has been like thirteen billion years in the making.” I stopped to catch my breath; I was getting carried away. But she was looking right at me, waiting for me to finish. “And when things are working like that, then it makes me feel like everything else in my life is going to work out too.”
She was quiet, and I could feel the creep of embarrassment crawling up my neck. I’d given her too much of myself, way too much.
“You said you used to have this theory, but you still believe that,” she said. “Don’t you?”
It was like the opposite of being caught in a lie, except it was the same vulnerable kind of naked feeling. She had caught me in a truth. “Maybe,” I admitted. “Is that a bad thing?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s nice.”
As we drove, fireworks exploded on either side of the car, some in the distance, others closer. All different colors. We had both windows rolled all the way down, the wind blowing in. She had her head resting against the frame of the car door, her hair blowing all across her face. I had to force myself to stop watching her.