Avery sends me apologies during the drive home and a bunch of thanks because she’s realized she could’ve been the one naked. That’s still nice to think about but absolutely not how I’d want to see her like that. I tell her it’s okay and I’m going to sleep.
We drop Jay off at her house. On the next stretch of freeway, Camden says, “I should’ve stopped it. I was going to and then you stood up and took off everything else and…if you need anything, support or something, I’ll help you figure it out.”
“I’m really okay,” I tell her. But I might be blurred with exhaustion from so many hours with people around while I wished for time with Avery. “Ask me again in the morning.”
“I will,” she says. I believe her.
I don’t feel dubious, like Camden said. I feel bright inside and split into two people. There’s everyday me who is too flooding embarrassed to leave her house for the rest of the summer and praying that nobody in the room took a phone pic of me. But under my surface, there’s another me, called forward by the strangeness, the pureness of the moment of being alone and surrounded, naked and strong, revealed to myself in a new way. And that version of me knows no one took a pic because we were all wrapped up in that thick magic.
There’ve been two of me for a long time—since that day at Avery’s house with the statue, if not before. One of me has been living in the world of my dreams and dolls, the world of God and gods—while the other walks around the everyday world of physical things. Tonight the two of them swapped places. The spiritual me stepped forward and I am not ready for how fearless she is…I am.
Kinz pulls into my driveway, next to the huge Dumpster piled with demolished cabinetry, broken marble and tile, chunks of drywall and wood. “You want us to come in?” she asks.
The basement lights are shining up through the windows on the north side of the house, so Mac is home and awake. What I really want is some ice cream and about ten hours of sleep.
“I’m tired,” I say. “You guys go home. Thanks for the ride.”
Kinz rises out of the car and opens her arms. I lean into her and get hugged hard.
“I’m weirdly okay,” I tell her.
“Hero,” she says.
“Jerk,” I reply.
“BFF,” she says and kisses my cheek.
In the house, I go to the top of the basement stairs and yell down to Mac that I’m home and going to bed. He yells back an inarticulate blend of syllables, “Heyyaaargh!” half meant for me and half for his game. Good enough.
There’s nearly a half pint of Karamel Sutra in the freezer that I take into my room. I sit in my bed eating it, gazing at the action figure sitting at the top of the box in my closet. She looks a lot like Inanna.
* * *
The next two days are a storm of texting, everyone making sure I’m okay—and I am, except I want them to leave me alone so I can feel everything that’s opening up around me. But also I want Avery to come over again so I can kiss her. We settle on Tuesday night for a late dinner and hanging out. I’m hoping we end up sitting on my bed, eating ice cream, watching a movie on my laptop. I do my best at meditating, breathing through my nose, and praying some, and trying everything I can think of to make this go right. Can it work that way? Can my meditation sessions be cosmic bank deposits and at a certain point the universe owes me a favor?
Not this time, because everyone comes over again. Kinz invites herself—because she must know how my situation with Avery is going—and of course she’s going to bring Camden, and then we have to include Duke and Jay. At least the weather turns out perfect: the air warm and close, the sun setting a little earlier than a few weeks ago, so by eight thirty when we’re finishing up a late dinner, it’s not too hot and the right amount of dark to see a few fireflies winking at the edge of the trees.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Avery suggests when we’ve carried our plates into the kitchen.
“To that beach?” I ask.
“What’s in the trees at the back of your yard?”
“There’s a cute creek that goes down to the river. But you can’t walk along it very far.”
“So nobody else is going to be walking it. We don’t have to go very far to be alone,” she points out, like the genius she is.
“Yes!”
I head into the backyard and tell everyone we’re going for a walk, which causes a super knowing look to pass between Kinz and Camden. Kinz opens her mouth and I know she’s going to say something stupid like, “Don’t come home until you’ve kissed her,” but Camden puts a hand on her wrist. Kinz closes her lips and smirks.
“There’s pie in forty-five,” Duke says.
“We’ll be back,” I promise.
We walk into the trees without me stumbling over a million roots, only three or four. Avery is light on her feet.
“Dance lessons?” I ask.
“Yep,” she says and pauses to wiggle her hips. “Including some belly dance.”
“Do I get to see that?”
“Hmm, seems unbalanced, what do I get to see?” she asks.
“Other than me naked?”
She stumbles over a root and catches herself against the next trunk.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Don’t, I should’ve gone first or stopped Nadiya, it’s…just, sit down.”
The trees block out most of the distant backyard lights from the houses around us, but the moon is already up and nearly full. I sit on a fallen tree and she moves so the moonlight is behind her.
Avery dances, hips swaying and circling, arms making impossibly fluid sweeps in the air. When we were little, she was only ever graceful when she danced. Now I can see how that grace has permeated her whole body.
“What song are you dancing to?” I ask, because the only sound in the night is crickets and one complaining frog.
“Sosin,” she says, twirling and swaying. She sings a line in a language I don’t know and couldn’t name, the only part I recognize is the word “sosin” repeated four times.
“Which is?”
“Sosin means ‘lily’ and what I remember of the translation, and I’m probably messing it up, I don’t know Kurdish, is that the women are dancing with their scarves and the fever of their kisses makes wisdom abandon passion. I think traditionally it’s implying that men are kissing the women, but I prefer to think of it as the women going out together, dancing and kissing each other.”
“I like that,” I say. “A lot.”
She stops and holds out a hand to me. Inviting me to dance? I stand up, but shake my head.
“Remember how I was also a clumsy kid,” I start.
“Most kids are,” she says.
“Well I’m about twice that clumsy now.”
“You don’t have to dance.”
I put my fingers in hers and let her tug me a step closer.
“I don’t know how to kiss you,” she tells me. “I’ve wanted to for so long. I wanted to when we were eleven, but in a different way. And I had this idea that maybe we’d go to college near each other and I’d see you again and it would be…like this. Except.” She stops and shakes her head. “Almost like this. Not quite exactly. Emma… Synclair.”
“Avery,” I say. I touch her cheek and her lower lip that is so much more kissable than at eleven, but then, to be fair, I wasn’t thinking about kissing anyone back then.
She’s shaking, which makes it easier for me to feel confident, to slide my fingers up her cheek and align myself so that I lean in and kiss her softly, solidly on her lips. She pulls back and ducks her head, dark hair falling across her face. I drop my hand but she catches it, puts it back on her cheek and kisses me.
We stand by the creek and kiss each other, despite the water edging into one of my shoes from the damp ground, until in the distance Kinz bellows, “Pie!”
We walk out of the woods holding hands and Duke yells, “Huzzah!”
Mac says, “Jesus, finally,” and then with a glance at Kinz adds, “Sorry.”
She shrugs. “If He has a problem with it, I trust He’ll take it up with you.” She still says Jesus’s pronouns with capital letters, you can hear it. “But if you wind up in hell, don’t say I didn’t tell you so.” She’s trying to joke, but it comes out with the edge of having grown up with her parents, like sometimes she needs to slap us around with religion because our coping with it becomes hers.
“Atheists go to heaven if they follow their conscience or their ideals,” Jay says, matter-of-factly. “According to some traditions.”
“What, really?” Mac asks. “Why do you bother with all that other stuff?”
“It’s not a bother,” Camden tells him. She asks Duke, “Is there a Jewish hell?”
“Heartburn, if you listen to my dad. But not really, at least how I was taught. There’s a kind of purgatory-like space that a person can spend just short of a year in, but not longer.”
“That’s cool,” Camden says. “Some Christian theologies don’t have a hell outside of this world, only heaven.”
I want to hear more about that, but I’m afraid of how much I enjoy hearing Camden talk theology, so I ask Avery, “Is there a heaven in Wicca?”
“Depends on whatever their personal beliefs are.”
“What are yours?” Kinz asks.
She looks at me. Kinz groans the “ugh, this is so sappy” groan, which is profoundly unfair considering what I’ve had to put up with involving her and Camden.
“I think we reincarnate,” Avery says. “But it’s hard to remember past lives so it’s best to live this life as if it’s our only one.”
“You two weren’t star-crossed lovers in some past life?” Duke asks us, smirking.
Avery plays along. “Oh it was a terrible tragedy. Synclair was but a lowly groom in the stable and, sadly, I was one of the camels.”
Jay snorts, inhales the juice she was drinking, and sputters as we scramble to hand her napkins. I’m grinning so hard half my face might fall off. And I’m counting the seconds until I’m alone with Avery again.