Saturday finally comes, and when I meet Geneva her smile has a tense, guarded look. It’s like the words waiting in her mouth are made of two distinct strands, twisted together until even she doesn’t know which one she’s going to say: Hey, Angus! Ready to blow up some elves? Or, Angus, hey, sorry, but I’ve decided this isn’t such a good idea.
“Hi, Geneva,” I call when I get close. But lightly, lightly, so she’ll forget about telling me the date is off. If my tone is even a hair’s breadth too eager, I’m done. “Elf-Blast 3 was all sold out. How do you feel about people-eating aliens?”
I see her hesitation play out as the tiniest adjustment in the slope of her smile. Then it broadens and warms. She glances at my pendant and smiles to herself, so it’s good I’m wearing it over my shirt this time.
“Do the aliens explode? Into flying nimbuses of gratuitous green goo?”
“If the goo isn’t green,” I say, feeling pleased with myself for getting the attitude dialed in so well, “then how will it reverse the space-time continuum?”
“You raise a compelling point.”
“It’s gotta be green.”
“It simply must! Or we’ll need a team of scientists to investigate!”
“But burritos first, right? The aliens don’t start exploding until seven twenty.”
She walks along a couple feet farther away than I’d like, but she comes with me. It feels a little too much like I’m on an obstacle course, like she’s constantly looking for pretexts to reject me.
“Hey,” I say. I need to distract her. “Am I allowed to ask you questions tonight?”
Sidelong glance and a twitch of smile. “I’ll consider it. Oh, perhaps a few.” She does a great mock-severe schoolmarm voice.
“Erm,” I say. Where do people even start? “Tell me about yourself?”
That gets a laugh. “That seems rather general, Angus.” Then the schoolmarm character breaks. “I’m studying video editing at an art college. Junior year. I’d like to make documentaries, but you know. Marketable skills take priority. I’ve watched my mom struggle way too much.”
I notice that she doesn’t name her school. “Are your parents divorced?”
“Yeah, and I still live with her. The irony is that I’m named after the city where they met. I bet my mom loves the constant reminder.”
“So…” A little gust of confusion spins in my brain. “So they’re Swiss?”
“Nope. Dad American, mom Turkish. My grandparents on her side were diplomats, so she was in Geneva with them. She met my dad when she was only eighteen, in an elevator. It was love at first sight, but a few extra years of sight did a number on that. Funny how that works.”
I let the information settle in as we reach the burrito shop and find a booth near the back. Something about what she’s telling me weirds me out, but at first I don’t catch what it is.
Then I realize. It’s so damned easy for her to trot out all these very specific facts, and I get the feeling that she could just keep going and going, like tell me stories about her grandfather in some war or something. I mean, how old was my mom when my parents met? What city were they in at the time? I’ve never considered any of it.
I’ve never wondered about them meeting at all. Frank-and-Trudy Farrow sit in my brain as an established unit. A solid lump of my life. But when I think about them, there’s no sense of that lump having any history. It’s as if the two of them possessing their own story would be excessive, like some kind of unnecessary decoration.
Huh.
“Angus?” Geneva’s reading my face. “You look like something’s bothering you.”
“Oh.” It would be nice to be honest with her, wouldn’t it? The trouble is that I don’t know what counts as too honest. “I was just feeling sad that I don’t know stuff like that about my parents.” God, how do I explain it to her? “They’re not big sharers.”
Her eyebrows are up. “Really? Not even basic biographical details? They never told you anything?” A pause. “Had they taken a vow of silence or some shit?”
Her questions hurt. They worm around in my brain, threading it with empty, aching tunnels. Because I don’t know how to answer.
“I mean, they were perfectly capable of telling me I was doing everything wrong, so I guess no vow of silence? Because they could do that at a pretty high volume.”
It sounds like I’m playing for sympathy. Geneva’s been looking down at the table, her fingers tracing the graffiti scratched into the wood, but I’m almost certain I can feel her oscillating between warmth and cynicism.
Geneva looks up. “Would you tell me a story from your childhood? Like, a memory that means something to you.”
Her gaze has an analytic intensity to it. This isn’t a casual question, and it’s not an easy one either. I don’t have memories like that, I almost say. But then something flares into consciousness, abruptly, like it’s just coming back to me after a trip to the moon.
“Okay. It’s kind of sad, though?” It’s horrible, actually. Overwhelming. My mind’s eye rolls into eclipse, seeing it all again. God, the way they flashed in the hot summer sun, their ferocity, how hard I cried …
“Sure.”
“So I remember this one time I was playing by myself in this park? I think I was about seven. Anyway, there was this huge anthill. I was crouching there watching it when these tiny silver things started pouring out of the top; like, very clearly not ants. I peered closer, and they were miniature soldiers in armor. The kind of armor you see in museums? They started fighting once they reached the grass, and I realized they were going to just massacre each other. So I put both hands over the anthill to try to stop them. But I couldn’t hold them in! They kept on erupting between my fingers, and I knew they were all going to die and there was nothing I could do! I—”
Tears blur my eyes until all I can see is the dazzle of that swarming army, silver degenerating into a crawl of bloody light as the soldiers fell in droves. Each soldier leaked a perfect dewdrop of blood, and the surface tension was enough that tiny corpses dangled in the tasseled grass. When I brushed the grass with my hand they plinked down, their little helmets jangling.
Geneva cracks up laughing. Oh, God, I never would have believed that she could be so callous. “There’s nothing funny about—”
Then I understand. She thinks I’m lying. Because what I just said—it’s outside the bounds of what she considers reality.
“Wow. I don’t feel like I get you, Angus. But your bullshit game is on point. That was the best fake impassioned angst I’ve ever seen.”
They call out the number for our burritos, and I practically jump up to get them. Because I really need a moment to regroup. If my memories aren’t as substantial as hers, what else can they be?
“Your turn,” I say when I get back to the booth with our foil-swathed food bricks: veggie with sour cream for her, pulled pork for me. “Meaningful childhood memory.”
“Right.” She peels back the foil and takes a first bite, then chews in this speculative way. “When I was five, I was kidnapped by a witch who turned me into a pink flamingo. My mom got me back to normal in the end, but I still have this strange habit of standing on one leg when I’m nervous.”
“That’s awful!” I say. “I’m so glad your mom got you back.” It’s only the way her smile spreads across her face that tells me she was lying. Oh, jeez, she thinks this is a game.
Then it’s a game, Angus. She’s having fun with you, and that’s all that counts.
Not those soldiers? Not their tiny entrails glimmering like wet rubies on the grass? I’m supposed to just pretend they don’t matter at all?
“The preening is the worst part,” Geneva adds. Her grin is huge and flourishing, like a gigantic carnivorous flower, and her hazel eyes are full of complicated gleams. “Totally embarrassing when I start doing that in class.”
She likes this game, but I hate it. I mentally flail for some way to kill it. “Are you an only child?”
“Yeah, no. There were almost ten thousand of us in my brood.”
She doesn’t throw me this time. “No, I mean really?”
“Yes. Unless you count my three half siblings from my stepmom, but I almost never see them. As far as my lived experience goes, it’s just me and my mom.” Another bite, along with one of her too-assessing looks. “You?”
Oh, God. I should’ve known better than to introduce this topic. It’s something I’ve wondered about before, and the answers that bob to the surface don’t feel definitive. “I have a little sister?” I hope that’s right. It might be. “She’s twelve?”
“Yeah? What’s her name?”
Is she trying to trip me up? What the hell are little sisters named, these days? “Evelyn. Evie for short.” I’m supposed to say more about her, aren’t I? “She’s cute. She’s really into figure skating.”
I wouldn’t lie to Geneva. Of course not. The things I’m telling her about my sister aren’t lies; more like educated guesses. There’s every chance it’s all true.
Geneva nods in a that’s-settled way and starts talking about varieties of alien detonation, and I’m so relieved I practically prattle my way through the rest of the meal. We share a flan, then wander out into the street to catch our movie, and being with her feels almost as magical as I imagined it would.
Except in my daydreams Geneva might be holding my hand at this point. In real life she keeps a careful distance, just far enough away to make it clear that a touch isn’t welcome. There’s something about me she doesn’t trust, and I have no idea what.
What am I doing wrong? I want to say. I love you. If you just communicate what the problem is, I swear I’ll fix it for you!
She’s laughing at the movie, but there’s no soft listing in my direction. No nestling. She sits bolt upright beside me, eating the popcorn she insisted on paying for and cackling. But I can’t make out what’s happening on the screen at all, somehow.
Instead I see that luminous city again, the one I glimpsed from Lore’s car. A moon of a city, dropped at the core of a whirlpool. My mind is knocked free of my head, tossed into a helical gale. Variegated darkness rushes past, carrying fragments—of what? Dusk-colored columns, overhanging hematite trees? Whatever they are, I’m dashing too fast to make them out.
And the girl I heard before is still screaming, on and on, her voice whipping up the gyre. Shit, do I know her?
I’m falling to meet her, her scream twined around me like thread, and I can’t make it stop.
The movie ends, thank God. I blink back into my seat, find my hands gripping the armrests and my breath hacking out of me. And Geneva and I stumble out into the night.
“So,” she says. I already know her mouth won’t drift open under a dapple of shadow. In fact, she’s stopped on a conspicuously well-lit corner with passersby brushing around us, and I bet it’s on purpose. “So, are you still interested? Now that you’ve interacted with me, and I’m not just some girl-shaped abstraction you saw in a café?”
I love you. By definition.
“I’m still interested.” It comes out a little flat; why am I the one who has to do all the devotion? “Are you?”
“I think so.” Oh, how romantic. “There’s something about you I don’t get, like I said. But you’re way more fun than I would have guessed. I like you enough that I’m in for a second date, anyway. If you are.”
This is a good thing, Angus. But her words feel so sparse and chilly compared to what I want from her that anger boils up behind my eyes.
“Cool. Maybe we can even trade phone numbers this time? If that doesn’t seem like too much of a commitment to you. I don’t want to overwhelm you with my wild demands.” Oh. That sounded all wrong. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
Annoyance passes over her in a visible riffling. “You know what I really don’t understand about you? The nature of this thing you have for me. I can almost start to think it’s just an innocent if eccentric crush, but then I’ll get the impression that you’ve glommed onto me in some much weirder way. It’s not a comfortable feeling, to put it mildly.”
She’s waiting for an explanation. But when I think about it, it seems like a bad idea to give her one.
“Are you saying you aren’t special enough for me to have a crush on you?”
“Not at all. I’m extraordinary. But you have no way to know that, do you?”
“What if I can just tell? What if I knew as soon as I saw you?”
“That’s not how it works. I’m not standing behind the counter at Bluebell’s telegraphing my brilliance and sensibility. I’m working the fucking register.”
I said one wrong thing, and she’s ready to turn on me?
“I just had a feeling about you. As soon as I saw you behind the counter, it was like—like you fit. I’ve been looking for the right girl all my life, and I could feel you filling in the space where she belongs. Like color and light came flooding in, and you were the source of it.”
Now, that was a beautiful way to put it! Tender and poetic. She’ll see—
“It sounds like a coloring book.” Her face isn’t yielding at all.
“It what?”
“It sounds like you had the outline of some imaginary girl already in your mind, and you decided I was the crayon you could use to color her in. To which I can only say, like hell you can, Angus.”
“Geneva, I—”
There’s a bus pulling up, and she’s walking toward it. How was I oblivious enough to miss the only important feature of this corner: a blue sign with a white blotch looking way too much like a vehicle whose sole purpose is to carry Geneva away from me?
I only have a few seconds left. “I love you!”
Geneva can’t just leap on the bus, because there’s a line in front of her. She has to wait for that old woman to maneuver on with her fifty shopping bags, for that guy heaving a stroller full of sleeping baby. She uses the delay to glance over her shoulder at me.
“I’m not even real to you. Because you don’t know shit about me, and yet you’ve convinced yourself that you know everything. That differential might as well be a fucking pegasus.”
And then she’s climbing the steps, and the doors are folding shut. And I’ve just blown my entire reason for being.