She laughs and says, “Good. That’s good. I don’t, either.”
* * *
“It’s Flora and Mimi,” Travis calls out when we get back, and just that sentence—just our names, joined by and—it floods me with happiness all over again.
“It’s hiking time,” Hope says.
Mimi kicks up her foot. “I only brought my sandals!”
“Oh, please,” Travis says. “It’s not that kind of hike.”
We walk into redwood groves, where it’s almost as dark as night, where the air is so much cooler, and then out of them again, into the sun. We walk cliffside with the ocean crashing below us, wildflowers growing between rocks, and into the tiniest meadow I’ve ever seen, where we sit in a circle to rest.
I discover a cluster of California poppies next to me.
“I would pick you one,” I tell Mimi, “if it wasn’t illegal.”
“Laws are for breaking.” She leans over my lap and snaps a stem, weaves the poppy into my hair.
She looks at me.
“Perfect,” she says, and Hope agrees, but Travis squints and shakes his head.
“She needs a second one for symmetry.”
He plucks another and hands it to Mimi, and I don’t know how I got so lucky, to be here with the three of them. It makes no sense that we would meet again the way we did, in a summer school class, us the only rising seniors in a classroom full of fifteen-year-olds.
“I have a question,” I say.
“Tell us,” Hope says.
“Why—how—are you all in geometry?”
“We’re doomed when it comes to math,” Hope says. “We’ve always been behind.”
Mimi says, “It was the only class we had together last semester. First the teacher separated us because we couldn’t stop talking to each other—”
“No exaggeration,” Travis says. “It was, like, physically impossible for us to stop talking.”
“And then we spent the whole time texting.”
Hope shakes her head. “It was terrible. I tried to ignore my phone, but they kept shooting me meaningful looks. We all got Ds! And now here we are in summer school and we’re all together again.”
Travis says, “It’s our second time through, and none of us are learning anything.”
“You guys,” I say. “What you need to understand is that geometry is the best math.”
Hope laughs. Travis says, “Best and math, used in the same sentence … You’ve lost me.” Mimi runs her hand along her tattoo and smiles.
“It’s the most personal. It relates to our bodies.” I stand up and hold my arms out. “Symmetry. Proportion. You guys know that Leonardo da Vinci drawing, where the man stands like this, and then you also see his limbs like this?” I widen my stance and raise my arms higher.
“Yeah, the naked dude,” Travis says.
“I’m pretty sure most of his dudes were naked,” Mimi says.
“But this one has a circle around him, right?” Hope asks.
“Yes! And a square, too. That drawing is all about geometry. And then there’s all this other natural stuff—like when you throw a rock into water, and the ripples spread out, getting bigger and bigger? And the veins on a leaf. And the pattern of scales on fish. The way you can look at a tree trunk and see how it’s grown. Beehives! Succulents!”
“What I don’t get,” Travis says, “is why they don’t teach us that stuff. It’s like they want us to fail.”
“What I don’t get,” I say, “is that I signed up to take geometry because I thought it would be completely familiar and mundane, but I ended up here instead.”
“That sounds like a compliment,” Mimi says.
“It is.” I sit down again and kiss her, quick and light, right at the corner of her mouth.
“Looks like some new dynamics have been established,” Travis says, raising his eyebrows. “When we get back, I’m gonna go ahead and move my sleeping bag back into Hope’s tent. Last night was fucking freezing.”
* * *
Night is falling again. Hope comes back from her car with a ukulele. Travis disappears into the brush and returns with two fistfuls of leaves.
“I’m making tea,” he says. “A very special blend. Mint and some other stuff.”
“Is it going to kill us?” Mimi asks.
“Oh, come on,” he says. “Nobody has ever died from tea.”
I don’t take a single sip, but it warms my hands as the air grows cooler.
“In honor of you, Flora, I’m singing exclusively love songs tonight,” Hope says.
Mimi heats up minestrone over the campfire and divides it among four bowls. Every move she makes is enchanting. A drop of soup splashes on her thumb, and she sucks it off. She hands me a bowl, and our fingers touch.
She doesn’t say much, but she’s still telling me things. She’s saying that yes, there are Januarys, and the terrible things people do to each other when they are no longer in love. She’s telling me that the end of love is a fine phrase to ponder, but it’s a poor choice for a tattoo. Because just as there are Post-its and red condominium doors, there are also tree branches and coastlines. There are sleeping bags and tents and pinpricks of stars, there are people like her, there is the person I’m becoming.
I’m going to have to drive home tomorrow. Maybe my parents will yell at me for going away like this. Maybe they’ll smile and ask if it was fun. Either way will hurt.
In two weeks, our house will be empty. And then the stagers will descend with the trucks full of no one’s furniture and art and try to make it look like a different family lived there, an imaginary family with no photographs or mail or food in their refrigerator. In real life, we were sometimes messy. We didn’t always do the dishes. We left pots soaking. We let the papers pile up, and left too many pairs of shoes by the door, and didn’t vacuum as much as we should have.
We were not always happy, but we were always us.
Tomorrow I’ll walk in and we won’t be us anymore, we’ll be different people; we won’t belong in the way we did before. I don’t know what to do with that yet, but I know that it’s true.
Hope’s singing another love song, though, just as she promised. She strums a little clumsily, but her voice is clear and sweet, and she knows all the songs by heart. When she finishes, she announces that she’s going to bed, and soon after, she and Travis disappear.
Mimi leans in close. I can smell mint on her breath—not like toothpaste or gum, like something real that’s from the earth—and then her lips are on my ear and she’s whispering, “I don’t really snore.”
I’m smiling.
Our heads pivot, until it’s my mouth against her ear, and I say, “I know.”
We’re alone by the fire now, and the wind is picking up, and she takes my hand, and we walk together to her tent. I can hear everything: The pounding of my pulse. The crunch underneath our feet. The rustle of her clothes when she bends over to reach the tent’s zipper. And then it begins: the sound of unzipping, from the ground on one side, and up, and up, and down again. I close my eyes even though it’s already dark, because of this sound. It’s like my life opening up.
And then it stops.
And we climb in.
On the last night of the Cinegore, the sky looked like it needed to call in sick, all yellow-green going dark around the edges like an infected cut, a summer storm heading in hard. Across the highway, bulldozers sat waiting like an army that had the advantage. Come Monday morning, they’d advance to pulverize the old Cinegore Theater into dust, and in its place would be new condos, a phone store, and a Starbucks. Oh, yay.
“Kevin! Just in time.”
As I shimmied under the concessions counter, my best friend, Dave, reached over and dragged me to him into selfie position, his phone held high above our faces.