“I feel like I should ask you questions, but I don’t know what to ask,” said Noe when she recovered her breath. “Was it thrilling?”
I picked up the pillow she’d thrown at me and hugged it to my chest. “Um. Yes.”
“Did he seduce you or did you seduce him?”
“It was a mutual seduction,” I said.
We both started cracking up again, the giddiness of the conversation too much for the small bedroom.
“Are you going to see him again?” said Noe. “Or was it, like, a crazy one-night thing?”
The question had been buzzing around in my head all morning. I’d imagined every possible scenario—from never seeing Oliver again and keeping our night at the orchid house as my wildest, most fabulous memory, to starting a whirlwind romance involving three weeks of orchid house escapades before Oliver’s tragic departure for Alaska.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We traded numbers, but it was more of a thanks-for-a-great-night thing than a hey-let’s-be-boyfriend-and-girlfriend thing. I don’t think we’d have much to talk about.”
“Steven and I haven’t done anything,” Noe said. “We tried making out with our shirts off one time, and it was so awkward. We were both like, ‘Let’s put our shirts back on and play another round of Speed.’”
“What made it awkward?” I said.
“I don’t know,” said Noe. “Steven’s family’s really religious, and he was afraid of accidentally doing something wrong or disrespectful. We talked about it for a long time, and he was like, ‘I just want to kiss you and bring you lots of flowers and not do things for a long time,’ and I was like, ‘That’s okay with me.’”
I suppressed a smile. Noe had always been skittish about physical stuff, and had kissed her last boyfriend exactly twice. She never seemed to realize that the awkwardness came as much from her as from the boys she dated. It was cute and a little heartbreaking, this inability of Noe’s to admit her own apprehension. It made me want to protect her even more.
“Do you feel different?” said Noe.
“Kind of.”
“How?”
We lay back on Noe’s bed, our bodies blanketed in sunlight.
“It’s like . . .” I struggled to find the right metaphor. “When you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about jumping off a high diving board, and wondering if it will be scary, and if you’ll get water up your nose, and then you do it and you’re like, ‘Okay, I could do that again,’ and the next time you see someone do it in a movie you’re like, ‘I’ve done that.’”
“I just can’t believe it was last night. It’s so random.”
“So perfect,” I said.
Outside the window, cicadas were going chirrrrrr-chirr-chirr-chirr-chirr. Noe squeezed my hand.
“It feels like everything’s happening, Bethy. You know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean,” I said, and the room seemed to glow and pinken like a flower about to burst into light.
19
“SO, ANNABETH,” SAID STEVEN. “WHAT’S this I hear about you sneaking off from the dance?”
We were in the cafeteria, and Noe and I had been telling Steven about our restaurant idea, with the tiny spoons and the order slip where you could specify exactly two and a half ounces of soup so there would never be any waste. Last night, Oliver had texted me when I was still at Noe’s house, and we’d pored over the message together—hey—and determined my response, a noncommittal yet encouraging hey ☺. I’d turned off my phone before he could text back, too overwhelmed by the drama of the first exchange to contemplate a second move, or a third.
“Can I tell him?” Noe said to me. “Please?”
“Noe—”
“Annabeth went to the orchid house,” she said, waggling her eyebrows on orchid house and shimmying her shoulders like a burlesque dancer.
“She got arrested?” said Steven.
“Yes,” I said. “Public indecency.”
“No,” said Noe, “it means she took acid.”
“No,” I said, “it means I frequented a brothel.”
“Actually,” Noe said, “Annabeth is a drugged-out criminal prostitute.”
“I knew it,” said Steven, smacking his hand on the table.
I laughed into my milk carton. I had a vision of Noe and me at Northern next year, the cool intellectual table in the cafeteria, trading jokes until they shut down the dinner service and practically had to kick us out. Later, in our dorm room, Noe would chat with Steven on the computer, and I’d stretch out on my bed and recall the details of my latest romantic encounter.
Steven’s theater friends came up to our table to talk to him, and soon they’d squeezed onto the benches beside us and were dealing out a card game. Noe hooked her arm through mine.
“Shall we?” she said.
It took me a second to catch her meaning. “Sure,” I said.
We got up to make our escape. As we left the crowded cafeteria, Steven’s voice wafted after us—“What? What? You guys aren’t going to play euchre?”—until we were both doubled over in the laughter of conspirators who can’t even remember what the conspiracy is.
That afternoon after school, I walked to the train tracks. The train tracks are my favorite place in our town. They run along the edge of a psychedelic forest that thrums and buzzes with insect song until you are sure you have crossed into another world. This forest is filled with bee balm and goldenrod and dusty stands of sumac. You can break off a furry red horn and suck the berries for their fuzzy, sour juices and in this manner avoid getting scurvy.
When I got there, the last of the fireflies were bobbing and flashing in tunnels of leaves. I sat against the abandoned car that has been rusting there since Mom was a kid and listened to the freight trains shudder and moan.
I built a little pile of leaves and sticks and gravel, like a shrine to something, I don’t know what. All I knew was I felt happy and loved, a trembling leaf on the great big tree of the world. The cicadas mounted their deafening drone around me and I stood up and danced, a private madness overcoming me, the madness of being seventeen and no longer a virgin on the last warm night of fall.
Thank you, I whispered to no one in particular. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
A train whistle blew. I bowed and touched the ground, aware of how crazy I must look, and how little, in that moment, I cared.
20
OLIVER STARTED CHATTING ME EVERY night after school, but we didn’t have much to say, and after making vague plans to get together again before he left for Alaska, the chats tapered off and then stopped. I was relieved. The truth was, Oliver himself was almost peripheral to the whole experience. More intoxicating was the romance of it, the movie-script perfection of the evening we’d shared. All week at school, I’d been buzzing, trying to keep the tremulous brightness of it inside myself. Now and then, Noe and I would exchange a glance, or we’d walk home after gymnastics with our arms around each other’s shoulders, feeling the hugeness of things.
When we get our tattoos, we kept saying.
When we have our dorm room.
When we open our restaurant.
I thought of the birdcalls in Mom’s book. The birdcall for Noe and Annabeth: When-we, when-we, when-we.
21
OCTOBER TURNED COLD THE WEEK before Halloween, just gave up its hold on the summer like a doomed mountain climber letting go of the edge of a cliff. The leaves dropped off the trees and Mom brought our winter box up from the basement, the one with all the hats and scarves and mismatched mittens. Slowly, slowly, the thrill of the orchid house gave way to commonplace things.