Everything Leads to You

I shake my head. “The Santa Monica farmers market is the closest I get to nature.”


I feel myself grinning, and soon we are plucking cherries from branches until they fill our hands, walking to a stretch of grass as night begins to fall.

We eat in silence, looking up at the sky, lying close together but not quite touching.

“I want to explain,” she says.

“You don’t have to,” I tell her.

“But I want you to know that I’m not usually like that.”

“Oh, really? You don’t usually throw flower pots through windows?”

She smiles.

“No,” she says. “I don’t typically throw flower pots through windows. I don’t steal things or wreck people’s houses. And, I guess while I’m at it, I’ll say that I don’t usually cry in front of people either, especially on the night that I meet them.”

“That night was uncharted territory for all of us. We don’t usually track down mysterious girls and shock them with the secrets of their ancestry.”

“It had been a hard day.”

“Why?”

She sighs.

“I thought I ran away, but I didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tracey told me all the time that she wished I would leave but I didn’t believe that she meant it. So when I finally did leave, I didn’t turn on my phone for almost a month, because I thought that if I did someone could track it. I moved my car all the time because I was afraid the police would be looking for me, but I wouldn’t drive it long distances. Jamal and I took the bus to Home Depot every night. It took us an hour to get there and back.”

“Two hours on the bus every day?”

She nods. “It’s okay, though. That’s how we became such close friends. At first I thought we wouldn’t really hang out even though we worked together. He had this kind of hardness to him at first, and I didn’t think he’d be interested in getting to know me, this boring white girl from the desert. But we had a lot of time to get to know each other on those bus rides.”

I’m about to tell her that she is anything but boring, but she doesn’t give me the chance.

“Anyway, even after I moved into the shelter I was so afraid that Tracey would track me down and make me go home. I missed Jonah but I waited to call him until my eighteenth birthday, because then I’d be free.”

“Is that when he gave you our number?”

“Yeah. I called you guys right after.”

“It was your birthday?”

She nods. “When Jonah answered, he yelled at me. He was, like, ‘Why haven’t you called me? Why has your phone been off?’ I told him I had to keep it off because I was afraid they’d trace it. I asked him about the car, if Tracey filed anything, a missing person’s report, if they were looking for me. He was quiet for a long time. Then he told me no. He said she hadn’t done anything like that. So then I knew that I hadn’t run away, not really. She wanted me gone. She was through with me.”

“Ava, that’s terrible,” I say.

Then Ava sits up and points.

“The first person I ever loved lives in that house,” she says.

“Really?”

She bites a cherry off its stem and nods.

I sit up.

Below us, a ranch house stretches out in a long L, its windows bright in the dusk.

And before she says it, I feel it coming. Through the energy that is passing from her to me. From the tremor in her voice and the way I can still feel the place on my palm that her fingers touched when she handed me cherries. The way she’s been blushing and the way she looks right now, her brow furrowed, her eyes bright.

The person she loved is a girl.

“Her name is Lisa,” Ava says. “All summer we hung out at the aqueduct. Got drunk. Talked about running away.”

“What happened?”

“She was afraid people would find out about us,” she says, after a long pause. “So she confessed to her parents.”

“Confessed? This isn’t the fifties.”

“Yeah, well, it isn’t Los Angeles, either. The reverend of her church blames gay people for everything. Like every storm and national tragedy is a manifestation of God’s wrath. That kind of thing.”

“That’s insane.”

“Tracey’s a congregant there, too.”

With that sentence, Ava’s life with Tracey snaps into focus. It’s like the final touches to a set, when random pieces of furniture and arranged objects suddenly become a room in a home where people could live.

“And Tracey found out about you guys, too?”

Ava nods.

“There was a lot of yelling. Things were broken.” She pauses. “I broke some things,” she says. “I packed some clothes and a few books and then I waited for the house to get quiet, and when it did I climbed out of the window and drove away.”

“And you didn’t go back?”