Harry and Nat were riding the bikes into town.
The town was on the Baja Peninsula.
Everything about the fact that they were there, in Mexico, together, was so strange to Nat that she could hardly get her head around it. But there they were, pedaling up a steep hill, sweating like crazy and squinting in the dazzling sunlight.
The bikes came with the house that Nat’s dad had rented on Airbnb. It was wrong to call it a house. It was a glass palace. The house was the kind of house that famous people stay in when they are on vacation and want to be hidden away from everyone else in the world. It was not the kind of house that the Brasches were used to, or had ever seen before, except on TV. It was four whole stories of glittering glass and polished floors and swimming pools and a rooftop deck where you could see for miles and miles.
The Brasches—especially Harry—were trying very hard to pretend the whole thing was completely normal, but Nat kept catching them whispering in one room or another, picking up a weird brass sculpture and inspecting it carefully, like robbers, assessing it for value. Once, she caught Mrs. Brasch taking a photo of the toilet. To be fair, it was an interesting toilet. It had a lot of different push buttons on the back. In the tank, there was a clear window where there seemed to be a tiny aquarium with actual fish.
“Gross,” Harry had said, and Nat privately agreed. Why were there fish in the toilet? It seemed super cruel to the fish, like keeping a whale in a tank at SeaWorld or something, except worse, because it was a toilet.
But also not as bad. Because fish were fish, not whales.
Nat thought those things, all in a jumble, but she didn’t answer. She was still feeling prickly toward Harry for mostly ignoring her all fall and winter while he got closer and closer to Seth and his “squad” and farther and farther from Nat.
Nat had remained mostly alone. She was sort of, she guessed, friends with Maggie and Amelia, but maybe they just didn’t mind her being around because she sat with them and read a book. Or pretended to read a book.
It could be worse, Nat thought. Maggie and Amelia were sometimes funny, with the dry kind of sense of humor that Nat had seen only in British films. They were quietly funny. Nat liked that. She didn’t like it enough to want to invite the girls over or to hang out with them on weekends though, so mostly she was pretty lonely until her dad decided to make it his own personal mission to be BFFs with the entire Brasch family. He even went hunting, once, with Mr. Brasch. “It wasn’t my thing!” he exclaimed joyfully when he got home afterward. “But I think I know what to do! I think I’ve got this! You and Harry! I’m going to fix everything! You’ll never have to hang out with Hell again!”
Nat had giggled. “Heaven, Dad. Not Hell.”
“Oh, right!” he’d said, and slapped the table so hard that a bowl of apples had toppled over. He’d picked them up off the floor and juggled them while raising his eyebrow.
“DAD,” she’d said. “Do you even like Mr. Brasch?”
“Des? Oh, sure! Sure, I like Des! He’s a different kind of guy. You know, very straitlaced. Old-school. Pretty religious, too. He’s a good person! He just doesn’t know how to be one all the time. But we’ll get him there! I’m gonna help him!”
“Dad,” she’d said. “Not everyone wants your help, you know.”
But he had been busy catching one of the apples in his gigantic mouth.
“DAD.”
Whatever he’d said and done had worked, though. Nat’s dad claimed that Mr. Brasch was really “trying hard” to understand Harry, thanks to him. He also somehow magicked this trip into happening.
That was the best part.
Nat pedaled up to Harry. “I was thinking that the toilet fish are probably actually pretty happy. Think of all the people they get to see! Always something going on.”
He slowed down a little so she could keep up. “Uh, OK. All those fish get to see are people’s backsides. Which are private. Anyway, even with the weird fish, this place is amazing. I wouldn’t have thought your dad would pick a place like this. Like if any house is an insult to the Earth or whatever, it’s a house like this one.”
“He’s trying to impress your parents,” Nat told him. “He does stuff like this when he wants people to like him.”
“Why does he want my parents to like him? He’s this huge movie star! He can have John Cena over for dinner! Or whoever! My dad is a jerk and my mom is just a normal person. They don’t know anyone. They don’t know how to act in front of your dad. It sort of feels like he’s adopted them or something. My dad’s talking about all kinds of weird stuff he’s never mentioned before. And he joined a gym. Like he’s going to start lifting weights now? And my mom blushes whenever she says your dad’s name. It’s gross. They are sort of creeping me out.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Nat, but she did know. “I guess he just likes them. He likes normal people.”
“Uh, they are not normal.”
The truth was that her dad wanted to impress the Brasches so that Harry would be her real friend again.
But she could hardly say that. So instead she shrugged. “They seem pretty normal to him, I guess.”
“What does he know?” said Harry. He started pedaling faster. “He’s so far from normal, he has NO idea.”
Nat wondered if that was true. Maybe it was.
Maybe it was true of her, too.
I love you, she said to her dad, telepathically, as she watched Harry distance himself from her, pedaling faster and faster, like he was desperate to get away.
Her dad didn’t answer, because duh, but she could pretty much perfectly imagine that he would’ve said, “Yeah, you do.”
And then he’d have laughed.
• • •
The bikes, in contrast to the house, were rickety and old, spotted with rust and mysterious algae. They looked as though someone found them one day at the bottom of the ocean and hauled them back to the house, relics from the deep.
The bike Nat was riding was green and much too small for her, which was quite something, as she was a very small person for her age. Especially for her age as it would be on Monday, which was thirteen.
The trip was a present for Nat’s birthday. All she wanted, she’d told her dad, was to go somewhere to see whales. She was desperate to see them. She felt like seeing whales would fix everything. Somehow.
She didn’t say “see whales with Harry.” He had thought of that on his own.
Maybe he knew.
Maybe he could tell because of that day when Harry met her at the beach and Nat had cried because no whales came. At least, that’s what she’d told him.
She’d wanted whales to be their friendship thing that had started on the day she had said “Nice tattorca!” and he had laughed. Not at her; with her.
Whales were important to Nat. But they were also important to Harry. They must have been, or why the tattorca in the first place? Somehow, she just knew that if she could show Harry how connected she was to whales, he would like her back as much as she liked him.
Whales would make them best friends again.
All through October and November and December and January, Harry had worked hard to get in with Seth and Kevin and those guys, and it had worked, to a certain extent. After school, he hung out with them at the skate park, leaning on his board and scuffing his shoes on the ground. He shouted things like “Dude!” and “Yeah!” She’d seen him. She wasn’t following him or anything—it’s just that sometimes she got her dad to pick her up there instead of at school. Sometimes she felt like walking.
Seeing him there, she could tell that he was happy. That he was feeling more comfortable in his own skin. And she was truly happy for him. Sometimes she totally understood, and that understanding felt like something inside her was cracking open, but in a good way.
She got it.
She got him.
And wasn’t that really what love was all about? Getting someone? Being gotten?
Nat hadn’t really gotten Solly. She’d thought she did, but she had been proven wrong after all.
Her best friend from the year before, Mika, now seemed like someone she just barely knew. They had only been ten! Babies.
In fact, other than Harry and the Bird, her dad was pretty much the only person she just got, 100 percent. She was at about 75 percent with the Bird. (You can’t really know someone you’ve never even met, after all.) And maybe 86 percent with Harry.
Eighty-six percent was an A.
Nat grinned. Now she was in Mexico, with Harry, and they would see whales, and he would finally get her back. Then it would be perfect.
Or close enough.
At least until June. In June, Nat and her dad were going to move to France. Her dad was filming a movie about a Maori warrior who inherited a French vineyard. Nat was going to have an on-set tutor. She wouldn’t even have a chance to make a normal school best friend next year.
Nat wasn’t that keen on France. Not just because of the tutor. But because there weren’t any whales there—at least, not where they would be living.
On the other hand, France might mean that she would get to meet her (French) mother. Ma mère, she thought, and smiled.
“What?” Harry yelled. “Did you say something?”
“No, nothing,” she yelled back.
Harry’s bike was blue. It was too big for him. It had a bent front wheel, like someone had run it over with a car.
When Nat pedaled sitting down, her knees hit the handlebars over and over again and she felt like a toddler, so she gave up and stood, bending forward awkwardly to reach the handlebars. Her dad refused to rent a car because of carbon emissions. They had used up more than their share by flying there in the first place. He was donating money to charity like crazy to make up for it. She hoped he wouldn’t give it all away. Carbon emission reduction was another one of his things.
Sometimes it seemed like her dad was making himself bigger and bigger and bigger so that he could lift up the whole world on his shoulders and take care of it. He would feed it a lot of lean protein and kale smoothies. He would clean it up from the inside out. Somehow.
“You gotta walk the walk,” he said all the time. “Talk the talk.”
He said (and tweeted) that one quite a lot, often enough that it, too, had become a thing. Nat had even seen it on bumper stickers.
“Wait up!” Nat called to Harry. She pedaled harder to try to catch up. He was way more athletic than she was. Faster. Stronger. Taller.
All-around better, she thought, privately. Harry was someone who really knew who he was.
She wasn’t. Who was she?
Maybe that was the problem.
Her dad knew who he was.
Harry knew who he was.
The Bird knew who she was.
Even Solly knew who she was.
But did Nat?
She didn’t like thinking about it. It made her feel funny. Light-headed, like she’d just seen blood.
“Harry!” She was panting hard already.
“Hurry up!” Harry yelled back. He coasted back toward her and then turned and pedaled up the hill again like it was nothing. Nat’s legs burned. The town was still two more miles away. Maybe she wouldn’t make it. Maybe she’d just die, right there, by the side of the road.
“Wait,” she gasped. “Up.” Gasp. “For.” Gasp. “Me.”
“Town” was not the right word for where they were going anyway. The word “town” made Nat think of crowds of people, of neatly parked cars, of buildings with clean edges, lined up in an even row, with colored awnings and lit-up signs. Here, the scattered handful of spread-out buildings all seemed to tilt either one way or another, like they were caught in the act of sighing. When Nat and Harry finally crested the top of the hill, they could see it laid out before them, like a third-grade diorama project that had been knocked sideways on the school bus and maybe had been stepped on by more than one someone.
“That’s it?” said Harry, dubiously. He wasn’t even slightly winded.
“It’s probably better than it looks from here.” Nat tried to sound normal and not like she was about to die. “Things are usually better up close.” But even as she said it, she wasn’t sure. This was her first time in this part of Mexico. She really had no idea.
“Dude,” Harry said.
Nat didn’t say anything. “Dude” wasn’t a thing you had to answer. Besides, she wasn’t a dude at all.
It was so quiet. They could hear the wind pushing through the low-flung shrubs on the brown hills and the sound of their own breathing. They kept pedaling. They passed a house with a trailer parked in front that had a clothesline covered with T-shirts emblazoned with the words BAJA—BEEN THERE, SURFED THAT. Beside the trailer, there was a restaurant that looked permanently closed. There were boards on the windows. But it still had a folding billboard out front that said Una copa de vino: buena bebida, buena comida. Glued over that, there was a loose piece of tattered paper. On it, someone had written 15 PESOS BEER in marker.
“This place looks like where the zombie apocalypse is gonna start,” said Harry, skidding to a stop.
Nat stopped, too, dragging her sneaker through the dust.
“Buena bebida, buena comida,” she read. Her voice sounded weird, all wooden and splintery. Of all the languages in the world, Spanish was the hardest for her to speak. The words didn’t have sharp enough corners. It made them harder to hold on to. German was very prickly, almost like Velcro. She had no problem saying weltschmerz, for example. It was one of her favorites. It was a word that described a feeling of a weary sadness about everything in the world, something that she was feeling quite a bit too much of lately.
“Weltschmerz,” she murmured.
“What?” said Harry.
“No entiendo,” said Nat, instead of answering.
When Nat and her dad lived in San Francisco, people often assumed Nat was Mexican. She learned to say “No entiendo,” which meant, “I don’t understand.” And “Lo siento, no hablo español,” which meant, “Sorry, I don’t speak Spanish.”
Harry wandered over to the trailer. “Helllloooooo,” he called. “There’s no one here.” He held a T-shirt up to himself and posed. The T-shirt was huge. It hung down to his knees, like a dress. “Should I buy this?”
“No entiendo,” she repeated.
“What?” he said. “Why do you keep saying that?”
“It looks like a dress,” Nat told him, and he hung it back up again, quick. Harry was dress-phobic, for obvious reasons. She felt mean for saying it, but also too weltschmerz-y to say “sorry.”
“You could get one,” he said.
“Me and my dad are No-Stuff People. You know that. I already told you.”
“Oh yeah. I guess I forgot. But what does that even mean?”
“It just means we don’t have stuff. Stuff takes too much time and space. I mean, it’s like having stuff means you are responsible for the stuff.”
“I don’t think it takes a lot to look after a T-shirt,” Harry said. “It’s not like a puppy or something.”
Nat shrugged. Sometimes her dad’s things were hard to explain, even if they made perfect sense to her. Everything that mattered to her, she stored in her head, like words and whales. Well, memories of whales; not the whales themselves.
“You don’t own stuff!” her dad liked to say. “Stuff owns you!”
But Nat did like how the T-shirts billowed on the line, like giant pillowcases, dusty from the road and wind. She held up her hands and took a pretend photo: Harry and the T-shirts against the gray of the sky and the brown dusty everything.
“Insta-perfect,” she said.
“Upload that, stat,” said Harry, wiping his forehead on one of the shirts. “Put it on the Twitter.”
Saying “the Twitter” was one of their inside jokes. Harry’s dad didn’t know anything about social media. “Is that the Facebook?” he said sometimes when Harry and Nat were talking about something he didn’t understand. “Will you put that on the Twitter?”
“Someone might buy that! And now it’s all sweaty! Don’t be gross,” Nat said.
“It’s a bonus. I’ve, like, imbued it with magic,” he said. “The Magic of Harry.” He grabbed an imaginary mic like a rock star, shaking his sweat into the audience.
Nat laughed. This was her favorite version of Harry. Not the slumpy, skateboarding dude version. This was more like the sitting-on-the-beach-waiting-for-whales version, but not the part where he was rejecting her. Her heart surged. She really liked him.
Maybe she even like-liked him.
The thought made her blush.
“I’m hot,” she said quickly.
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re all red.”
“I know, duh. Let’s get out of the sun.” She was starting to duh more and more often now. Her dad said that you ended up mimicking people you liked. So now she was an eye roller (Solly) who duh’d (Harry). She hoped her next BFF wouldn’t do anything too weird. One of those things was fine, but doing too many of them was probably not so good.
It made her even less herself.
Too much of herself was taken up by being other people.
The sun was dead center in the sky, and even behind the veil of clouds, it was blinding, big, and mean. Harry got on his bike. “Go time?” he said.
Nat nodded. “Buena bebida,” she said. “Bebida bebida bebida.”
As soon as she stopped saying it, it tried to escape from her memory, like a fish slipping through holes in a net. “Bediba. Bebida, babida, boobida,” she chanted.
Then she blushed even harder.
“Boob” was not a word she said out loud, ever, especially not in front of Harry. Maybe in a whisper to Solly, but even that was mostly just Solly talking and Nat listening. There was just something about thinking about all of that growing-up stuff that made Nat’s heart race. When they had Life Class in school, she had nearly passed out. Everyone thought it was because she was squeamish about blood, but it wasn’t that. It was more like there was a voice in her head that was shouting and then echoing, like her brain was a canyon.
The voice was saying, You’re not ready for this yet. Not yet! Not yet! Not yet!
Maybe one day Nat would be ready, and then she would be BFFs with Solly again. She would get her. Like magic. And Solly would get her back, because obviously, Nat would have caught up. Then it would be like when they were first becoming friends and Nat felt like Solly could read her mind. And Nat felt like she knew what Solly was thinking without having to ask.
“Solly, Solly, Sol,” she said out loud while she pedaled. She reminded herself to buy a postcard. Solly was still doing letters, not postcards. She didn’t seem to notice that Nat’s replies were sporadic and didn’t say anything, sometimes literally. Right before she got on the plane, in the airport, she mailed Solly a postcard with a picture of a frog in a sunhat and sunglasses. On the back, Nat wrote, Why are frogs always happy? It was a riddle but the kind with no answer. A hypothetical riddle, or something like that.
She was going to make up an answer and write it upside down at the bottom, but Harry wanted to get doughnuts before they got on the plane, so she didn’t. The answer, she decided, would be something about how they can just eat what bugs them. Eating bugs! But was that funny? She had no idea anymore. She was just sending the postcards so that Solly would write back. She didn’t want to read about boobs and kissing, but she didn’t want Solly to stop telling her those things, either.
Solly had perfect handwriting, which was nice to read. Her A’s and O’s and E’s were all almost perfectly rounded, like a real font.
In her last letter, Solly didn’t mention that her mom had a new hit song. She didn’t mention her mom at all. She talked mostly about her new haircut (something about ombre balayage highlights), and there was also a long story about who said what to who at a party that Nat couldn’t even imagine. It sounded like a teenager’s party, which was normal, obviously. They were almost teenagers. But reading about it made Nat anxious. Would she know what to do at a party like that? Would she know what to say to a boy she was alone with on a porch?
Nat couldn’t figure out why the fact that Gracie had a hit again didn’t make it into the letter, above the part where someone she didn’t know threw up in the swimming pool. Did Solly think they didn’t have music in Canada? Maybe she just didn’t want to remind Nat that her mom was famous, in case Nat tried to exact her revenge, a type of revenge that would only be possible if Solly were as famous as Nat.
Famous for being the kid of someone famous, that is.
Nat squinted up the road. Harry was way ahead now. She had to pedal about a hundred times for every one time Harry did on his too-big bike.
“What?” Harry yelled then, for no reason.
“I didn’t say anything!” Nat yelled back. “I’m coming! Wait up!”