He pulls back, pulling half of me with him, and smiles.
My own smile shrugs itself on,
wrapping me in comfort.
For weeks I have sweated,
labored,
aching to drive Sisyphus’s stone up this eternal mountain, and here: the summit.
Here they are. Here are his eyes. I have arrived in the sunlight of his regard.
It’s one in the morning when I lock us in for our thousandth test of willpower.
His room hasn’t changed an inch: bare surfaces, empty desk, closed drawers, furniture sparse and simply made.
Blank, save his shelves of roommates:
Hemingway and Beukes, Christie and Martin, Márquez and Morrison, Rowling and—his best friend—the Bard.
Every flavor of word treated
tenderly, every corner soft from extensive paging.
I slip into his narrow bed. We lock tight, two-lane traffic on a one-lane street.
I trace his jaw; the stubble nips my fingers.
He brushes my hair back. What did you tell them?
I’m at Olivia’s for the night. I don’t know. We should tell them.
You’ve said that eight thousand times, June.
Eight thousand and one.
I curl into him. He is a brazier, blazing, lighting me mercilessly.
He smells like apple and a touch of alcohol. My feet fold against his calves.
I know we should, he says. But do you want to tell them?
Of course not.
His chest collapses in a sigh under my hand. Then there we go.
Yeah. I guess. I touch my lips to his collarbone, his throat. He hums with contentment.
I’m excited, he whispers. A confession. I’m excited for us. I keep thinking stupidly far into the future, you know?
I tilt my head up, surprised. This is an edit of the usual sentence. David is the here-and-now; David is grounded and pragmatic; David is not fantasy and imagination.
Where is this coming from?
Me too, I whisper, and wonder.
I think about it all the time. After you finish college, us traveling. Brazil. India.
I smile. Let my questions fade
to haze and hope.
Greece, I say sleepily. Mount Olympus.
The world is here in this bed with us, continents quilted together, the cosmos tucked against the headboard.
His finger traces my wrist, a figure skater flying in lazy figure eights. Venice. A room this size that smells like the sea. Alaska. Lit candles, and fighting off an eighteen-hour night.
The Great Wall, I say. Stonehenge. The Sydney Opera House.
He kisses me. The moon. Again, he kisses me. The moon.
Wednesday morning dawns. The air is as chill and damp as drying tears, Autumn’s last battle. (Smells like brittle sap and old fires and cold sun.) That sun in the sky is a dream, when I leave him, when I head home.
I push the oaken door, built to loom;
my feet on the hardwood are parcels of potpourri, featherlight and inconsequential.
I grab my backpack and stop in the foyer. My parents have materialized on the steps.
They stand like stone sentries,
unfamiliar rubies set in their eyes.
My father: Juniper, sweetheart, we need to talk.
But I need to go to school.
My mother: You left your change of clothes here last night. So I called Olivia’s house.
I turn to ice limb by limb. I . . . it’s . . . I’ll explain after school.
Juniper—
After. I turn on my heel. I totter out. Shell-shocked.
Three periods’ worth of thought gets me nowhere. They noticed. They’re asking, finally.
Will I push them away? Cocoon myself in lies again?
In the hall between classes, I pass the door to his room. I glance in, see his fingers wringing clouds of dust out of the chalkboard.
He catches my eye for the briefest second.
Some hand is at my throat,
choking off all sound, all breath, all air.
It should be branded on my forehead—I’m going to tell them—hideous, fiery letters.
I continue down the hall, gaining momentum as I go.
ON WEDNESDAY, IT RAINS AND RAINS. I CAN’T FOCUS in any of my classes, watching the droplets trickle down the windowpanes. I’ve hardly slept since the rumors broke on Monday about Lucas. Of course I can’t turn Juniper in, but what am I supposed to do, knowing that’s a lie? Lucas doesn’t deserve that. Even Norman, douchebag of the century, doesn’t deserve that.
García has avoided my eyes all week, and I keep busy trying not to imagine Juniper at his side. They’d be an unbearably photogenic couple, which makes it about eight times weirder. I don’t think of teachers as having relationships, even friendships. In my mind, they exist in their own space: that twenty-foot stretch at the front of the room, where they’re omniscient and all-powerful, where they rule our miserable lives. Everywhere else, they do not exist.
But since Sunday night, I’ve been thinking: what would it be like to talk to García as if he were our age? Talking about our lives and our interests and the future? It would be so weird, seeing him through that lens.
Though I guess since Juniper dropped his class, she doesn’t know him through the omniscient teacher-lens. And that, more than anything, reassures me.
· · · · · · ·