“Maybe someday I’ll show you, if I can find the map, ha ha.”
Rebekkah would never show you that map, but after a couple of weeks in that classroom, you had made a different kind of map, an astonishing mental chart of all the cities in which she had lived, which included impossibly exotic places: Singapore, Rio de Janiero, Dubai. (“Exotic?” she asked. “Not really. For me it’s basically just the same McMansion everywhere I go. The same oil people. Only the weather changes.”) You knew, also, that she was a great fan of the music of Joni Mitchell, the novels of the Bront? sisters. From her morning snack selection, you saw she was a lover of cinnamon toast. She said little in response to your long lectures, but you learned that she had a habit of chewing at the curling tips of her hair when she was interested in a topic, and also that she had a habit of drumming her chin with her fingers when she was not. Like ripe stone fruit, she was easily bruised, her skin faintly mottled from various light bumpings. And, of course, you knew what everyone knew, that she had a great singing voice, that Mr. Avalon had cast her as the lead vocalist in his Theater Club’s annual Homecoming Dance performance, The Bliss Township Tejano Espectacular, a selection of Spanish-language standards. And yet, to be honest, you knew little more than that. All Rebekkah had offered to you was her daily early arrival to Mrs. Schumacher’s classroom. But you couldn’t stop yourself from getting carried away. You couldn’t keep yourself from imagining a future with her so unlike your last years. A future that mattered, because she would be there to witness it.
At night, when you considered yourself under the unsparing bulbs of your bathroom mirror, for once you let yourself imagine what your face could be. Someday. You looked at the angular dimensions of your jaw and the pleasingly gray eyes you inherited from your father. You let yourself fill in the blanks of your future with all sorts of imagined promises.
You couldn’t help it: all this emboldening possibility had made you, for the first time, a little surly with your mother. Just last week, as Ma spoke of a new skin-care remedy she was hatching for you, something involving massive dosages of vitamin A, you had scowled. “Doesn’t sound likely,” you told her.
Your acne was a particular concern for Ma, as if a much greater affliction than just an adolescent dermatological stage. The sight of those zits seemed to break her heart, proof that you were growing older, leaving further behind the best moment of her life, when you had needed her entirely. But when, that night, she reached across the sofa to probe your particularly hellacious forehead zit with her finger, you slapped her away.
“You can’t lose faith, Oliver,” she said. “We just have to keep trying, don’t we? Keep trying and trying until we come up with the solution.”
“You don’t know that my body is separate from yours,” you told her.
Your mother then reached once more for the pulsating mass on your forehead. “That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever told me,” she said.
But your body was your own, and at last you had refused to submit it to further humiliations up in the stadium rafters. You were hiding out in the sweet-foul stench of a bathroom stall, gazing emptily at the scratchitti of various sexual positions someone had etched into the aluminum, as you tried to hold fast to the sweet image of Rebekkah’s eyes on yours. And yet, as ever, the murkiness of your doubt seeped in, clouding that happy picture. You thought: she just likes attention. You wondered if perhaps your daily conversations with Rebekkah were, after all, part of some elaborate prank. Preparing yourself for likely heartbreak, you tried to feed yourself some glib hokum, telling yourself that someday you would be a great poet and make beauty out of whatever might come to pass. But then you remembered a few lines of the last poem you’d tried to write, and you cringed.
You refastened your nut holder, emerged from the bathroom, and walked so quickly for the stands that the tray nearly beamed her in the chest.
“Whoa,” Rebekkah said, “hey there.”
“Hey,” you managed to make your mouth say out loud.
“I was looking for you.”
“You were?”
“I thought maybe you’d come say hi, but then poof, you vanish.” This was a sentence whose meaning and implications you could have spent a whole weekend deconstructing, reworking into rhyming verse.
“Heavily lays the crown.”
“Excuse me?”
“All part of my duties as Astronomy Club president.” You gave the nut tray a too-vigorous shake, the Coke shooting up through the straw holes in the plastic lids.
“You are? How did I not know you were president?”
“Oh, yeah,” you said. “Commander in chief of all the stars in the sky.”
“Can’t see many tonight. The lights are too bright, I guess?”
“Do you want to?” you asked. “See some stars, I mean.”
Rebekkah turned back to the thunderous noise of the rafters, as if considering an obligation there. “What about your job?”
“No one wants my nuts anyway,” you unfortunately replied.
You led her past the commotion of the Hispanic kids, presently cheering the bass-thumping pickup as it did donuts in the drive, and made your way to the silent parking lot, where your family’s dented Hyundai, Goliath, sat in the back row. Your parents had let you borrow the car for the game, and you felt manly indeed as you brandished your father’s key chain, with its little pewter longhorn charm. The hatchback popped, you exchanged the nut tray for the one piece of new technological equipment belonging to the family Loving, Pa’s thousand-dollar Celestron telescope in its black Pelican case.
“Geez. You people really are serious about this stuff, aren’t you?”
“Very serious.” You tried to strike a workmanlike air as you set out into the black flat of desert, the stars above winking back into view. Five minutes later, after making fine adjustments to the Celestron’s setting circles, the oblong shape of Saturn, like a ball squeezed from either side, was in the viewfinder. “Look.”
“Is that Saturn? Holy shit. You can see the rings. Well, sort of. It looks squished.”
“The light you are looking at is already an hour and a half old.” Trying to imitate a man, it was Pa’s teacherly voice that came to you. “It took an hour and a half to get here. The light from those stars behind? Thousands of years old. Millions. You are literally looking into the past.”
“You know,” Rebekkah said, “I’ve been meaning to come back to your astronomy club. I lost track of the schedule, I guess. But I’m sure glad I got to see those meteors. Never seen anything like that before.”
“You should,” you said. “You should come back.”