Because leaning against my dresser became too much of a hassle, I’ve moved my cassette deck to its new home on my bedside table, and I lament the fact that I haven’t gotten any new cassettes since moving here. It’s all I can do to distract myself from a hellish week: a funeral, a hospital visit, and roughly a thousand troll comments to clear off my increasingly viral video. But, hey, my cassette collection can get me through anything.
I inherited all of Aunt Tori’s cassettes when she passed away. Meaning, they didn’t really have anything to give me, and Dad wanted to throw them away like they didn’t mean a hell of a lot to her.
Sure, I started with her massive collection of Dolly Parton and REO Speedwagon, but that was merely the beginning. I’d stumble upon them weekly in Brooklyn, from stoop sales and street markets. Within months, I fell right in with cassette culture—which is totally a thing.
But today, it isn’t helping.
I’m restless. My leg shakes without my brain giving it the command. I feel an itch in my chest, and I almost can’t handle it. It’s seven thirty, and I’m already in bed. I think of Leon. We barely saw each other all week, unless you count a stolen kiss between funeral activities.
I think of his lips, his taste, his …
I’ve got to see him. I shoot over a text without giving my mind a chance to talk me out of it.
“You up?”
“It’s only 7:35,” he responds. “How much sleep you think I need?”
A smile tugs at the corner of my lips. Again, my mind broadcasts that I’ve got to see him. So I ask if he wants to take a drive.
Within minutes, and with a little bit of convincing from me to my mom, I’m in my dad’s Corolla. I pull out of the driveway and roll the windows down all the way. My arm turns into an airplane wing, cutting through the night sky so quickly, I could almost see the wind bend around it.
But since we live so close, that feeling only lasts a second.
“Hey,” I say when Leon gets into the car.
“Cal.” The way he says my name is the way I’ve always wanted someone to say it. Packed with emotion, warm and syrupy.
I turn back onto the road and drive through the Houston suburbs. Stars punch through the night sky, and I’m left with a pit in my stomach, homesick for a world I’ve never had.
“How many views is your StarWatch video up to now?” he asks. “Millions? Bajillions? I’ve seen it linked everywhere.”
“It’s gone so viral, I can barely keep up with it anymore. But honestly? I don’t want to talk about that right now.”
“Okay. What should we talk about?”
“Can you tell me more about Indiana? Were you raised in the suburbs?” I ask. “Like this, with stars and huge lawns?”
He laughs. “Sort of. Indiana suburbs are a little different. Bigger yards, boring brick houses. Same amount of Olive Gardens, though.”
One of the only Olive Gardens near me is the one in Times Square that boasts four-hundred-dollar meals on New Year’s Eve. But I don’t tell him that.
“Sounds relaxing, I guess,” I say. “I’m still not used to sleeping at night without strangers shouting outside my window or cars beeping relentlessly.”
“New York’s that cliché?”
“Brooklyn is amazing and awful, all at the same time. You can get killer vegan Chinese food delivery at midnight, but you can barely see the stars at night. Nothing stops in Brooklyn. Manhattan’s even worse.”
He places a hand on my leg, and sparks fly. I can’t catch my breath, but I keep talking.
“I can’t wait to go back. Maybe try for another BuzzFeed internship? First, I thought I wanted to study journalism, but some of the university programs seem kind of dusty and out of touch, so I’m not positive on that one. And I’d have to take out a hell of a loan, or I could try to monetize my channel to pay for it.” A pause. “The future is hard, eh?”
His grip tightens on my leg. “Not so hard if you refuse to think about it. I have no idea what I want to do with my life. Is that bad?”
“No!” I say, but it’s too forced and quick to feel honest. The truth is, how do you not know what you want to do by now? “I mean, there are so many options. What do you like to do? Any jobs sound cool? Will you be going back into gymnastics? Can you make that a career? Have you looked at colleges yet?”
“Whoa, whoa, slow down, babe. I don’t know. Any of that. I kind of think it’ll hit me when I realize what I want to do.”
I sense that I should let it go. But I get an itching in my skin—a need to put him on the right track before it’s too late. We’re about to be seniors! I breathe. I can let it go.
“But what if it doesn’t?” I ask, apparently not letting it go.
I know I can help him.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” he says, like he’s reading my mind. “I’m not lost, just indecisive.”
“Well, let’s think about it logically. What about your gymnastics? You still go to open gyms from time to time, right? Even if you don’t want to compete, there are plenty of scholarships out there, I’m sure, and I assume colleges have gymnastics teams, right? Like, that must be a thing.”
“That’s definitely a thing. Just … not a thing I’m really into.”
“You know, I watched the videos of your last competition before you came here. You were incredible.”
“I was, I guess.” He sighs. “It’s like one day I woke up, like really woke up. And realized I’d given thirteen years of my life to gymnastics. Time I can never get back. And it hit me really hard: it didn’t make me happy anymore. I … faked being sick that day and canceled my practice.”
“Is this related to your depression? I mean, there’s so much my mom avoids because of her anxiety, and I wonder if it’s something like that.”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he says with a shrug. “I must have liked it at some point, you know? But even now, I can’t think of a meet where I was actually happy. Not since I was a little kid, when they’d just let you do somersaults all day.”
The thought makes me chuckle. “Oooh, look at my athlete. You’ll have to show me your somersault someday.”
“Oh, so I’m your athlete now?”
My face flushes with heat, and I reach for the air-conditioning. As I direct all vents toward me, he leans forward, slowly, and plants a soft kiss on my cheek.
“I like the sound of that,” he says. “Being yours.”
“Really, it’s kind of an antiquated way of looking at relationships, if you think about it. Me being possessive over you? That’s toxic, right?”
“Hey, Cal?” He laughs. “Maybe spend less time on social media.”
We pull onto Jordan Road, a silent, dusty road with no lights. All is still. And the tension inside my shoulders eases.
I should be alive with sparks and fire and romance, but I’m a little more focused on the point of our conversation. I feel so obnoxious—Why does someone else’s lack of career ambitions make me this anxious? I wonder as I stop the car on the shoulder of the road.
Leon lets out a fake gasp. “Is this where you murder me?”
“It is a deserted road,” I observe. “Left my weapons at home, though, so I guess we should just make out?”
Instead of leaning in and kissing me, like I made it very clear he should do, he gets out of the car. It’s pitch black now that I’ve turned the car off, and there’s nothing to hear but the crickets shouting. It’s like a weird sensory deprivation tank.
I step out of the car, and a cool breeze hits my leg. Well, cool for Texas. I take a deep breath and release it, blowing out all the bad feelings from the past week.
Leon leads me to the middle of the road—it’s not like many cars actually drive down here—and I survey the area around me. As my eyes adjust to the blackness of night, I see a few old wooden fences, keeping in acres upon acres of land on both sides. Cattle farms, I assume, since it doesn’t seem like they’re growing much else out this way.
“What about this—is this like Indiana? Just with different farms?” I ask.
“No, it’s different,” he goes. “It just feels different, you know? Like, we would be flanked by giant cornfields, or rows and rows of soy. The wind moves everything there. Giant trees, the farm crops. Everything’s moving, and alive. Here everything feels so …”
“Dead?” I assume. He doesn’t respond, so I guess he feels it too. “I get that. New York’s alive in a very different way, but here it feels so plain. Simple, I guess. I don’t hate it, though.”
I let my gaze wander. The only source of light out here is a large building and complex about half a mile away. The glow of the space center looks eerie from here, looming. Like it’s the one thing that can disrupt this calm and perfect moment.
My mind starts to process something I’ve been ignoring until just now. How quickly Bannon was erased from our lives.
“Mara Bannon left this week,” I observe, though it seems pointless to say.
Leon catches where I’m looking and grunts in assent. “It happens fast, I guess. Never know when we’ll be going back home. I wonder who will take over NASA’s community gardening days.”
He takes a seat, cross-legged on the empty road, so I do the same. We’re a foot apart, but I feel this magnetic pull into him.
I want to be closer than this, though we’re basically touching.
I want to be more alone than this, though no one’s around.
“I don’t want to lose you,” I say. “I don’t … I don’t like how quickly things change here.”
“Things won’t change,” he says, and he leans in to kiss me.
But they kind of will. NASA’s announcing the six Orpheus V astronauts and their backups any day now. They’re dying to get some good publicity after Bannon—“dying” might have been a poor word choice considering the circumstances—and they want to restore some hope that was lost in the death.
“What if they don’t pick my dad, for the mission or backup? He hasn’t been around for long; why would they put him on this first flight?”
Leon looks uncomfortable, like biting his lip will help him hold back something. “I think he’ll be on, as an alternate at least. I wouldn’t worry about that.”
His eyes glisten in the moonlight, and I sense a bit of turmoil in his expression. I should let it go, but I’ve never been good at letting anything go.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
The silence expands between us. I feel it in my muscles, in my chest. Anticipation drives my hand forward, and I place it lightly on his face.
“I can’t stop these thoughts,” he says. “It could have just as easily been my mom who didn’t make it back from Florida, and I should be relieved, but I don’t feel anything but … There’s this heaviness that I can’t shake.”
He breaks eye contact, but I keep my head level with him. “I’m here to listen, if you think it would help. I won’t even interrupt you.”
His eyes greet mine.
“… Much.”
“That’s what I thought,” he says with a smirk.
“Is this something that you’ve dealt with before?”
“Since I can remember.” He pulls back and leans against the bumper of the car. “Sorry, I’m not ready to talk about it. I thought I was, but I’m not. It’s weird—”
“Hey, it’s fine. Just … know I’m here.”
He smiles. “I know.”
We sit like this for five, ten, twenty minutes. We talk about our upcoming school year together like there’s no doubt we’ll both be in Clear Lake, graduating from the same school next year. Like everything couldn’t change immediately. And it’s good to talk about the future. To have a future I can see here, in Houston of all places.
I look away, and my eyes fall on the space center again. The mission launches in the spring.
“This might be the last quiet week we’ll ever get,” I say.
Leon considers me smoothly. I feel my emotions all at once, bursting through my heart, but I don’t know what he’s feeling. He’s calm, I’m frantic. He’s pleasant, I’m panicked.
But I know I need him now.
This kiss is different. We start softly, growing in intensity. Exponentially. I press him into me, and he wraps his arms around my neck. I crawl closer to him, until our legs are entangled. His warm leg slides up mine, causing chills to take over my body. I shudder as I pull him into me.
We’re pressed to each other, and there’s nothing on my mind but his taste. His tongue slips into my mouth, and I press mine against his. I moan softly because it feels so right. So perfect.
I put my palm on his chest, and with a smile, I push him back against the road. He looks uneasy, so I don’t make a move. I just keep kissing him. We keep celebrating our closeness in muffled moans and gasped breathing.
And then my phone starts buzzing.
Then Leon’s phone starts buzzing.
We’re forced to stop. We’re out of breath, but the unusualness of these simultaneous calls shakes me to my core. Our parents know we’re out, not necessarily that we’re doing this. I look at the caller ID.
“It’s my mom,” I say.
“It’s Kat,” he says.
We answer, and simultaneously shout a “hey” into the speakers.
My chest tightens as my mom speaks. Her voice is laced with excitement, worry, panic, and she can barely get the words out. Her words all mush together, and she’s not actually saying anything.
Kat’s much more articulate, apparently, because Leon pulls the phone away from my ear.
“Mom’s on the mission. Your dad’s her alternate.” He smiles weakly. “It’s really happening.”