Zac and I were in my car, driving to the Kirstenbosch gardens for the first time. Google Maps took us all the way around Table Mountain National Park, so no matter what direction you drove in, the mountain was a constant in your window. What I liked most about Table Mountain was not the mountain itself, but the trees that dotted it. Tall and crooked and bent over by the wind. They were all leaning as if they might fall over at any moment, as if one more gust of wind could uproot them and toss them through the air. I connected my phone to the car and pressed Play on one of our favorite songs of the moment. One of the things I loved about our relationship was how important music was to both of us. We could listen to music together for hours without saying a word, and yet feel like we’d communicated everything. The song “Nebula” by XOV came on, and we both turned and shared a small smile before the beat kicked in and we found ourselves bobbing our heads back and forth. I think Zac likes this song so much because it speaks to one of his obsessions.
“Did you know,” Zac said over the music, “that there are over three thousand nebulae in the Milky Way?”
“Wow,” I replied. “Did you know that Tutankhamun was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh who lived thousands of years ago, and when he became king, he was the same age as you?” I offered up another fact about some of the other lyrics in the song. Zac loved facts; he got so excited about learning new information that no one else knew and I often found myself googling interesting facts just to tell him.
“He was eight years and five months?” he asked, being his usual literal self.
I nodded. “Somewhere around there.”
“Around where?” he asked, and I tried to stop my smile.
“Around here!” I pointed out the windshield, distracting him. “Look how cool and big this mountain is.”
Zac leaned forward and stared up and the mountain, and I made a mental note to google some facts about Table Mountain later.
The song continued and I could see Zac was thinking. I sometimes wish I could be inside his brain for a day, to see how it all works in there. To see the connections it makes and . . . and . . . sometimes I wish I knew how he felt about me. He’s never told me that he loves me spontaneously. It’s usually in response to me saying it, and I’ve often wondered if he just says it back because he thinks it’s what he’s supposed to say. He struggles to show affection, even though I know he feels it. I just wish he was able to express it more often to me. It’s weird, Zac is the one person in my life that I invest more in than anyone else, and I’m not even sure how he really feels about me.
We arrived at the Kirstenbosch gardens five minutes before two, and I was barely able to contain Zac, he was so excited. He jumped out of the car and I had to grab him by the shirt before he raced into traffic.
“Cars!” I said quickly as I yanked him to a stop.
“Cars,” he repeated.
“You wouldn’t want to be squashed like a pancake.”
He turned and looked at me. “People can’t be pancakes.”
I widened my eyes at him playfully. “You never know.”
He folded his arms. “Impossible. Pancakes are made of eggs and flour and we are made of blood and flesh and bones.”
“Mmmm . . . good point. I guess bloody, bony pancakes would taste gross.”
“What would taste gross?” a familiar voice asked.
I turned. It was Jake. Messy hair blowing in the breeze. Casual T-shirt with a small hole at the collar, which for some reason, made him seem even hotter to me. Imperfect. He was holding Lisa’s hand. She beamed at Zac, and he looked away quickly, his cheeks going bright, tomato red.
“We were discussing how gross it would be if pancakes were made from people,” I said.
Jake laughed and then gave me a smile. Killer smile.
“I can’t escape weird conversations with you.” He sounded amused. We had an in-joke already. An actual in-joke.
“Eeeew. Why, why would you want to make a pancake from people?” Lisa shouted the one why. She had this unique way of talking in which some words reached out from the sentences and punched the air.
“It’s impossible to make pancakes from people,” Zac quickly jumped in, moving over to Lisa and talking at her intensely. I watched with a smile as Lisa offered up some ways in which that might be possible, Zac rebutting each one with huge hand movements as he talked loudly and quickly. Jake moved over and stood next to me.
“Never a boring moment,” he said playfully.
“Never.” I watched Zac and Lisa as they discussed how the most you could do was put human hair or cut fingernails into a pancake. The idea made my stomach churn.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Jake had turned his head and looked at me. Dear Lord! Should I turn and look at him too. Should I . . . ?
Yes! my brain screamed at me again, much like it had last night. Okay . . . I’d officially lost my mind.
But the voice ignored the concerns over my sanity and whispered to me again, But do it casually . . . calm . . . casual . . . act cooooool . . .
But I didn’t.
After paying, we all walked into the gardens and I was immediately struck by how sprawling they were. The mountain itself seemed to rise up out of the garden, emerald rolling hills, carpets of flowers so luminous and pink, large aloes—geometric and spikey, and almost alien-looking. Trees that looked like they had been growing here for hundreds of years, their branches huge and tangled—prehistoric-looking, like gnarled dinosaur claws. As we walked in silence across the lawns, Lisa ran ahead of us at top speed, bouncing across the lawn as if her feet barely touched it. Zac looked at me and rolled his eyes.
“I hate running,” he huffed.
“I know. You don’t have to.”
“I won’t.” He released my hand and folded his arms tightly across his chest. He really does hate running, it makes his heart beat too fast, which makes him feel anxious. And also, he constantly worries about things like dehydration. We once watched a documentary about being stranded on an island, and the narrator had said that your first priority should be finding water, or else dehydration would set in. Ever since then, Zac has been preoccupied with getting enough fluids. He gets anxious if we don’t have his special blue water bottle on hand at all times.
Jake and I hadn’t spoken since entering the park. Instead we walked together at the same speed, our strides matching, in a silence that wasn’t uncomfortable at all. We were like this for about five minutes before Jake announced that we’d arrived at our destination, a wooden walkway with steel railings that wound into the thick undergrowth and disappeared behind a tree.
“This is called the Boomslang,” Jake said.
“Boomslang,” Zac quickly repeated. “Tree snake. Highly venomous snake with back fangs that mainly lives in the trees. Hemotoxic venom. You’ll bleed to death if it bites you.”
“I’m impressed,” Jake said.
“I know everything there is to know about snakes. Snakes and dinosaurs and the universe and remote controls and batteries and now I am going to know everything about Tutankhamun who was the king of Egypt when he was eight years and five months old.”
I laughed at this, and all I wanted to do was pull him into a hug to express how much I loved him and thought he had the coolest brain in the entire universe.
Jake held his arm out for Zac and Lisa, indicating the way. “Shall we?”
“What?” Zac asked.
“Shall we go?” Jake qualified.
“Wait!” Lisa yelled, holding her hands up in the air dramatically. “Are there snakes there? Because I haaattte snakes.”
“Don’t worry, I know what to do if we see a snake,” Zac said quickly, and walked straight onto the bridge. “I can recognize all snakes, so I’ll keep you safe.”
“Okay,” Lisa replied and followed him.
We stood there and watched as the kids walked off a little way ahead of us.
“Irony is,” I said, “he probably does know what to do if we see a snake.” I walked onto the bridge.
“Seems like you do too.” Jake shot me a playful look. Teasing and oh-so-cute, and I felt all crumbly and warm. Like a freshly baked apple pie. I looked away quickly so it didn’t look like I was considering putting a scoop of ice cream on his head and eating him with a spoon.
The bridge we were on curved up from the ground, and soon it felt like we were walking among the treetops. As the sky above us disappeared behind a green ceiling, I felt encased in a magical world of tangled branches and leaves. The breeze was soft and gentle, the leaves swayed, and every now and then a bright-blue patch of sky could be seen through the greenery. And then something caught my eye. A particularly interesting leaf hung from one of the trees. It was long and wrinkled, and yet in the middle of it, a round hole. As if someone had pushed a pencil through the leaf. I peered through the hole at a bright-red ladybug below. I pulled my phone out and zoomed in. The light was perfect, rushing through the dappled leaves, creating an intricate web of light and shadows. As it cast a glow across the foliage, the light seemed to reveal a magical world that only it could show me.
I checked the picture on my phone, and when it was perfect, when one of the shadows was casting its magic over the leaf and the ladybug, I took it. Jake walked over to me and looked down at the phone.
“You take amazing photos.”
“Thanks.” I went to Instagram and chose my filter; always black and white. And then I loaded the picture. Jake pulled his phone out.
“What’s your Insta?” he asked.
“JustLori.”
“Cool.” I watched as Jake searched Instagram.
“Wow, you have a lot of followers.”
“I guess.” I tried to play it down a little. I didn’t want him thinking I was posing as an influencer, like Nina-M or my mother.
“Why no pictures of yourself?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged glibly, acting like I didn’t know the answer to that question, even though I did. I only took photos of things I deemed beautiful and interesting, and that had never been me. It was the ladybug, or the autumn leaf. The broken bottle on the pavement, the soap bubble floating in the air, the cobweb wet from morning dew, or the broken tree branch after the storm.
“You’re seriously good at art and photography.” Jake slipped his phone back into his pocket and then, just before we started walking again, he gave my shoulder a tiny nudge. Or had that been a mistake?
“What school were you at in Joburg?” he asked.
“The art school.”
“That’s a bit different to Bay Water High.”
“That would be an understatement. You know, we don’t even have sports at art school.”
“And then you come here and discover that everything basically revolves around sports.” He turned to me and then started walking backward down the bridge, facing me. I could feel my cheeks flush, and it wasn’t from the sun that was now shining on me as we exited the canopy.
“So, what did you do for fun in Joburg?” he asked. “I assume it wasn’t going to parties to celebrate me single-handedly winning the water polo championship.” He smiled jokingly.
I smiled back. “No.”
“So, what?”
“Hang with my friends. Go to art galleries and concerts. There was this cool jazz club we used to hang out in, Maggie’s. Go to the ballet sometimes. Vintage clothing shopping, or shopping for vinyls at this really gross charity store that always had rats, but you could buy the coolest stuff there. Listening to music.”
“Basically, nothing like your life here.”
“Nope.”
“What music do you listen to—wait, no, let me guess—it’s probably some weird, cool band that someone like me has never heard about?”
I laughed at this. “Someone like you?”
“Yeah. You and your arty Joburg scene is just waaaay too cool for us simple jocks down at BWH, right?” He was definitely teasing me now. It was strange and exhilarating, all at the same time. And I didn’t know what to make of it.
“Probably,” I teased back.
“So, what do you listen to?”
“Have you heard of Grimes?”
“Who what what?” he asked with an amused smile.
I laughed.
“Tell me about her or him, or they.” He seemed genuinely interested in what I was saying. Which was strange.
“Well, she kind of looks like this strange alien, pixie creature, but in a really cool way. She’s like a living piece of art, and she makes music that’s not really just music, it’s a patchwork of sounds and vocals that you can’t really hear, but you somehow understand . . . I guess that doesn’t make much sense. It’s hard to describe her music. It kind of paints a picture of something and you’re not really sure what it is at first, you have to listen to it over and over again until you can see it. And she does everything herself. She even shoots her own videos—” I paused. “I don’t know, it speaks to me even though I don’t actually know what it’s saying half the time. I also like XOV and The Knife and Fever Ray, they’re all Swedish and make dark, electronic pop music, or . . . I don’t know what you would call it.”
He stopped walking and looked at me strangely. And then a slow smile spread across his face. The smile seemed to migrate from the corners of his mouth and travel up into his eyes, which now seemed brighter and bluer than they had ever been before. “Anything but JustLori. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who listens to dark Swedish music.”
“Thanks, I think? Or not? Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?” I asked, stumbling over my words.
He laughed. “See.” He spun around and turned his back to me and then shot me a look over his shoulder that literally stopped my heart, dead. D.E.A.D! For a split second my heart ceased to beat and my blood ceased to flow and everything felt hot and cold and blurry and crystal clear all at the same time. Wait . . . what was going on here?