Our Own Private Universe

For the next month, the youth groups from our church and two others would be working together on a volunteer project. All Lori cared about was that we’d be spending four weeks with guys who weren’t the same seven guys we’d been hanging out with since we were kids.

I didn’t see what was so bad about the guys at our church. Sure, most of them thought of me as a dorky, preacher’s-daughter, kid-sister type, but, well, that was pretty accurate. And I’d never been great at meeting people. I wasn’t shy or anything. It was only that sometimes, with new people, I didn’t know how exactly to start a conversation. I liked to listen first. You could learn a lot about someone that way.

The welcome party was at one of our host families’ houses. The local minister’s, maybe. But all the adults—my dad and the other ministers and chaperones, plus our Mexican host families—spent the whole time in the living room, which meant the forty-or-so of us from the youth groups had the outdoor courtyard to ourselves. That was a good thing, since whenever the adults were around I could hardly understand what anyone was saying. I’d gotten an A in freshman year Spanish, so I thought I’d be able to get by in Mexico all right, but we hadn’t even made it out of the Tijuana airport before I’d found out the truth. The woman at customs had asked me a question and the only part I understood was por favor. So I stared at her with my head tilted helplessly until Dad whispered for me to unzip my purse so the woman could check it for bombs or whatever.

Along the back wall of the courtyard, where the adults couldn’t see them from inside, a handful of people had started dancing. I turned back to Lori and stole a chip out of her hand. She pushed her long, curly blond hair out of her face and raised her eyebrows at me.

“See, aren’t you glad we didn’t skip this?” Lori lowered her voice. “The guys on this trip are already way more interesting than our usual crowd.”

She meant that they were older. Lori and I were the only two sophomores who’d been allowed to come on this trip. The others were mostly going to be juniors or seniors in the fall. Some, like my brother, Drew, were already in college. Lori and I got special permission because my dad was our church’s youth minister, and he and Lori’s aunt Miranda were both chaperones on this trip.

“Why are you so into meeting new guys, anyway?” I asked Lori.

“I don’t know. I just want to expand my horizons. Have something new, something that’s all mine. You know what I mean?”

I nodded. It sounded like Lori was testing a theory of her own.

We fell into silence. A new song had come on, one of the big songs of the summer that had been playing in every store back home for weeks. Half the group was up and dancing. One of the guys from our church and his girlfriend were swaying slowly with their arms wrapped around each other, even though the song was a fast one.

“Do you want to go dance?” Lori asked.

I gave her a weird look instead of answering. Lori knew very well I never danced in front of people.

I tilted my head back to get another look at those stars. They swam dreamily in the sky.

“Stop looking up so much,” Lori whispered. “Your neck is already freakishly long. People are going to think you have no face.”

“My neck is not freakishly long,” I said, but I lowered my chin anyway.

Two white girls I didn’t know were half dancing, half standing in the darkest corner of the courtyard. One girl had hair so short you could see her scalp and leather cuffs with silver buttons on both wrists. The other girl had dark hair that curled around her ears, heart-shaped sunglasses perched on her head, a tiny silver hoop in her nose and a quiet smile that made me want to smile, too.

“Aki, you’re staring,” Lori said.

“Sorry.” I looked away from the girls.

“Do you like one of them?”

“No.”

“It’s okay if you do. You can tell me.”

“I don’t. I was distracted, that’s all.”

Last year I told Lori I thought I might be bi. Ever since, whenever she saw me looking at a girl, she asked if I liked her. Lori didn’t get that sometimes it was fun just to notice people without having to think about whether you liked them or not.

The girl with the sunglasses turned toward Lori and me. Oh my God. She wasn’t that far away. Had she heard us? I was going to kill Lori.

The girl was still smiling, though.

She was cute, but she made me nervous. I wasn’t used to looking at girls that way. Being bi, just like the rest of my life, had always been mostly hypothetical. I scanned the crowd, trying to look for a guy who was equally cute.

“Is there anyone here you might like?” I asked Lori.

“Maybe.” She nodded toward a super-tall blond guy drinking from one of the frosted glasses our host family had set out. “What do you think of him?”

I studied the guy. He had to have been a senior, at least. He had a T-shirt with a beer company logo and he was laughing loud and sharp at something his friend had said, his mouth open so wide I could see the fillings in his back teeth.

“He looks like a tool,” I said.

“Whatever, you think everybody looks like a tool.”

The girl with the sunglasses was coming toward us. She was even cuter up close.

Oh, God.

“Look who it is,” Lori whispered.

As though I hadn’t already seen her. As though she wouldn’t see Lori whispering and think we were incredibly obvious and immature.

“Hi.” Somehow, the girl was now standing in front of us, her head tilted at a startlingly attractive angle. “You guys seem cool. I’m Christa.”

I had no idea what to say. I shoved a chip in my mouth.

“Thanks.” Lori glanced over at me. “I’m Lori.”

“Hi, Lori.” The girl turned toward me, expectant, but I was still chomping on my tortilla chip. I probably looked like the biggest tool in Mexico.

But Christa didn’t seem bothered. “What church do you guys go to?”

“Holy Life in Silver Spring,” Lori said. I swallowed, nearly choking. Lori ignored me. “What about you?”

“Holy Life in Rockville,” Christa said, her eyes still on me. Then she turned back to Lori. “Does your friend talk?”

Lori nudged me.

“Um. Hey.” I was positive there were chip crumbs on my face. Would it look weirder to leave them there or to wipe them away? What if I was just paranoid and there weren’t chip crumbs on my face, and it looked like I was wiping my face for no reason like a total loser? “I mean, hi.”

My face must’ve been bright red. Why was Christa still looking at me?

“What happened to your girlfriend?” Lori asked, tilting her head toward where Christa had been dancing before.

“She went out around the back to smoke.” Christa lowered her voice and added, “And she’s not my girlfriend.”

“Smoking is revolting,” I said, because I didn’t want to say anything about whether Christa did or didn’t have a girlfriend. Or whether she might want one.

“For real, right?” Christa said. “I try to tell her, but some people, you know?”

She smiled at me. I smiled back. There was a pink streak in her shoulder-length hair that I hadn’t noticed before. She was wearing jeans and a yellow tank top, and her sneakers had red hearts drawn on the sides with a marker. I’d never known it was possible for a person to look as cute as Christa did.