Our Own Private Universe

Rodney wasn’t bad-looking. I probably should’ve been excited that he wanted to talk to me. But all I wanted was to be alone with Christa again.

Other people came over to sit with us. Christa kept saying stuff that made everyone laugh, me especially. Then the group got so big that a bunch of different conversations were going on at once.

A short white guy came over and sat down next to me.

“Hi.” He waved awkwardly. “I’m Jake. I go to Holy Life of Harpers Ferry.”

“Hey, Jake.”

Jake, it turned out, was really, really chatty. He kept trying to ask me questions about the people who went to my church and about the national conference that was coming up at the end of the summer for all the Holy Life churches. I knew absolutely nothing about the conference, so I mostly nodded while Jake talked.

It actually turned out to be kind of cool hanging out with new people—people who didn’t automatically see me as a music-dork preacher’s kid—but even so, I couldn’t focus. I wanted to talk to Christa again. She was funny. And I liked how her eyes caught the light.

Lori came over and motioned to me, so I apologized to Jake and got up. It was good to have an excuse to get away. It was hard to think clearly with so much happening around me.

I followed Lori through the courtyard’s tall, swinging wooden door. A patch of gravel ran behind the row of houses and faded into dirt as the hills rose up behind the edge of town. Lori and I walked out a few yards past the gravel into the pitch-black night so we could talk without anyone hearing us. It took all my energy to focus on Lori instead of those stars again.

She wanted to tell me about the blond guy she’d spotted earlier. She’d found an excuse to talk to him. It turned out his name was Paul, and he went to Christa’s church in Rockville.

“He’s going to be a senior at King,” Lori said. “He has a car and everything. A Toyota.”

“Do you like him?”

“Uh-huh. He’s really cute and funny. Plus, older guys are more mature, you know?”

“Do you mean mature, like, emotionally, or mature, like, he’s done it?”

“Oh, shut it.” Lori giggled. I did, too. “I took a picture of us goofing around. Want to see?”

Lori took out her phone and showed me a poorly framed photo of her and Paul sticking their tongues out at the camera. It made me think of Christa and her gorgeous photography. I flushed, glad it was dark so Lori couldn’t see.

“Do you think you’ll ask him out or something?” I said.

“I don’t know. What is there to even do around here? Maybe we’ll just hang out at the volunteer site. And find someplace to sneak off to when the time is right.”

We both laughed again.

We were supposed to start work tomorrow. None of us were sure exactly what that meant. We’d come here to do construction on a church that the local congregation had already started building. None of us knew the first thing about construction, but my dad and the other chaperones said they’d teach us. I only hoped they didn’t make me climb ladders. I was afraid of heights.

My back felt stiff from sitting on the ground, so I stood on my tiptoes and stretched my arms over my head, arching my spine so my braids hung straight down. This time, I couldn’t resist gazing up at the stars. They were closer out here than they were within the stone courtyard walls.

In that moment, it felt like we were the entire world. Just me and those gorgeous stars.

It was colder out here, too, away from the lights of the houses. We weren’t really in the desert, even though that was what I’d expected when I signed up to come to Mexico. Here there were trees and stuff, and it had been hot during the day but not that hot. Now that it was dark, it was only sixty-something degrees.

I lowered myself back down from my toes and rubbed my bare arms, wishing I’d worn more than my T-shirt and jeans. Then I remembered my missing suitcase. I didn’t have anything else to wear.

“We’re going into town on Saturdays, right?” I asked Lori. “Maybe you and Paul could do something while we’re there.”

“Or maybe you and that girl could.” Lori smirked.

“Oh, whatever.” But I couldn’t help smiling.

I wasn’t sure if lesbians even went on dates. Did anyone, really? I’d been on one official date in my entire life, to a dance at a school I didn’t go to with a blue-haired guy who threw up because he drank a beer.

I’d wondered what it would be like to have a real boyfriend. Maybe a girlfriend, too. Someday.

Just the idea of a girlfriend seemed like it was from a whole different life. I mean, even if Christa had been flirting with me back in the courtyard, that didn’t mean she actually wanted to go out with me. She must’ve been able to tell I didn’t know anything about being gay.

Heck, she probably thought I was straight. I might as well have been, for all I’d done so far.

Was Christa bi, too? Maybe she was into Rodney. Or someone else. Maybe she hadn’t really been flirting with me at all.

“So do you like her?” Lori asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe?”

“I knew it!” Lori pumped her fist. “I could so tell when you were looking at her before.”

“It doesn’t matter. She isn’t interested.”

“How do you know?”

I shrugged. There was no reason someone like Christa would want someone like me. I’d never even kissed a girl.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t want to. Lately, kissing was all I thought about. Boys. Girls. My daydreams didn’t discriminate.

That was where my theory had really gotten started.

Christa had probably kissed tons of girls. And done more than kiss.

I’d been daydreaming about that a lot lately, too.

“You’re smiling again,” Lori said.

“Oh, shut it. Hey, do you think—”

Before I could finish, Lori clapped her hand over my mouth and held her finger to her lips, her eyes bulging. Now that we were quiet, I could hear it, too. Gravel crunching behind me, then footsteps on the dirt.

“Hi, you guys,” a voice said.

I turned. It was too dark to get a good look from this distance. But I knew it was Christa.

“Hey there.” Lori was grinning, as usual. “I’m glad you came out here. I wanted to ask you something.”

Oh, no. I was too far away to elbow Lori, so I glared at her. She ignored me.

“Shoot.” Christa was close enough now that I could see a design on the inside of her wrist. It looked like a tattoo, but I could’ve sworn it wasn’t there when I’d seen her in the courtyard earlier. It was purple. Some kind of complicated knot.

Lori lowered her voice. “You’re into girls, right?”

My eyes jerked up. I couldn’t believe Lori said things like that. I would never say something like that to someone she had a crush on. But Christa didn’t seem to mind.

“For sure,” she said. “But don’t tell my parents, okay?”

“Deal.” Lori laughed. “So what kind of girls do you like? You know, generally. Tall, short, long hair, short hair...”

Christa glanced over at me. I tried to smile, but my face felt all wobbly. I shifted from one foot to the other. Why did Lori have to be this way? Why?

“I think,” Christa said slowly, “right now, if I were to describe exactly the kinds of girls I like, I’d say...tall, with long hair, in braids. With big dark eyes and pretty smiles. Oh, and I especially have a thing for preacher’s daughters who wear vintage hip-hop T-shirts.”

I beamed and tugged on one of my braids. I’d worn my favorite Usher shirt on the plane. It was only three years old, so it didn’t exactly qualify as vintage, and Usher wasn’t so much hip-hop as R&B with some light hip-hop influences. But I did not care even the tiniest bit about those things right then.

“And I like girls with nose rings who draw stuff on their wrists,” I said. It wasn’t the cleverest thing I could’ve come up with, but the truth was, just saying “I like girls” took so much out of me, I didn’t have energy left for cleverness. It was the first time I’d admitted it to anyone but Lori.

Now I was definitely doing something.

Christa took a step toward me. Someone else was coming through the swinging door, but I didn’t look to see who it was. I didn’t want to see anyone but Christa.

“That’s truly excellent news,” Christa said. “Because I happen to believe that the process of creating is what makes people interesting. Any kind of creating, I mean, but let’s be honest—music is the best art there is. It’s the purest. And, well, I’m actually a little obsessed with musicians. It’s kind of my thing.”

My stomach tightened again. I could tell from her voice that Christa was joking, at least sort of. But now I really wished I hadn’t messed up my verb tenses earlier. I’d already promised myself to never again create so much as a single note.

But with the way Christa was looking at me now, I knew there was no way I was ever going to tell her that.

And that meant I was now most definitely lying to her. About something she seemed to care about a lot.

I swallowed and dropped my gaze down to my feet.

“Er, I mean, sorry, Lori, no offense.” Christa turned her still-joking voice to my best friend. “I don’t know if you’re an artist. It’s totally okay if you’re not.”

“I make jewelry,” Lori offered.

“That totally counts!” Christa turned back to me, smiling. I met her eyes, folding my shaky hands behind my back. “Anyway. I have to go, because I promised my friends we’d go back early to claim the best spot for our sleeping bags. But can I come find you tomorrow?”

“You most definitely can.” My palms felt all tingly. I couldn’t believe I was talking this way, as if this conversation was no big deal at all.

“Excellent,” she said. “Maybe you could play me something, if you have anything recorded? Or even just sing something? Is that weird of me to ask?”

“Um.” I could feel Lori’s quizzical eyes on me. I silently begged her not to give me away. I hadn’t sung since my MHSA audition, not even in the shower. Not even in church when the rest of the congregation opened their hymnals. But how could I tell Christa that now, after she’d just said you had to create art to be interesting? “I, um—”

“You coming, Christa?” someone said behind us. It was the girl with the short hair Christa had been hanging out with at the beginning of the party.

“Yeah.” Christa smiled at me, then ducked her head. I smiled back at her goofily. Then she turned around and was gone.

“Wow.” Lori was already by my side as Christa and the other girl disappeared through the swinging doors. “You were wrong. She definitely likes you.”

“I guess.”

Lori let out a mini squeal. “And you like her.”

I shifted again. “I guess.”

Lori’s eyes shone. “And what was all that about you singing for her tomorrow?”

I scrubbed my face with the heel of my hand. “That part is...actually kind of a problem. She’d heard I did music stuff, and I didn’t tell her I’d quit, and somehow it turned into this.”

“So you’re, what—pretending you still do all that stuff?” Lori’s forehead wrinkled. “I mean, there’s no way she won’t find out. Everyone from our church knows how obsessive you are about not ever singing or anything. Your brother talks constantly about how he wants you to get back into music.”

“I know.” I scrubbed my face with my hand again. “Listen, promise you won’t say anything.”

“Yeah, of course.” Lori’s lip quirked upward. “Wouldn’t want the truth to stand in the way of true love. Or true hooking up, at least.”

I forced a laugh. Yeah, I wanted to hook up with Christa. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to. In fact, standing in the dark, watching her walk away, I realized exactly how much I wanted to.

But was she only into me because of a lie? Because she thought I was some amazing artist, when in reality I’d proven to be anything but?

I didn’t know what to think. I’d never dealt with anything like this before.

There was only one thing I knew for sure.

What I’d done tonight definitely counted as doing something.

So far, my theory was proving 100 percent correct. Doing stuff was a lot more fun than not doing stuff.

And, yeah, maybe some of the stuff I was doing wasn’t completely honest. But I’d deal with that later.

First, I needed to focus on testing out my theory some more.

Because now that I’d met Christa, there was suddenly a lot of stuff I wanted to do.

CHAPTER 2

“I can’t believe we have to sleep in there.” My paintbrush glided down the back wall of the church, leaving a thick wet trail of primer. “For a whole month.”

“I know,” Lori said. “I feel stiff all over.”

“The adults totally get to sleep in beds. And take showers. In houses, even.”

“My aunt said we’re staying in the church because we’re young and our backs still function. I told her my back wasn’t going to be functioning after this, but all she did was laugh.”

The night before, we’d slept on the floor of the town’s old church. The pews had been stacked along the walls to make room for the mats and sleeping bags we’d brought from home. My suitcase full of clothes was still somewhere in the Dallas airport, so I was stranded in Mexico with nothing but my duffel with my sleeping bag, a toothbrush, and some underwear, plus the clothes I’d worn on the plane. Lori had lent me an old pair of track pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt to wear today, but I was a lot taller than Lori, so my ankles, wrists and part of my stomach were bare.

Plus, we had to shower outside in these camp shower things the chaperones had brought. They were basically really small tents with a bag of tepid water at the top that sprinkled on you if you pulled a cord. That morning I’d showered for about sixty seconds while a line of girls huffed and waited for me to finish. The experience had left me feeling decidedly unfresh.

Not that it mattered, given that our agenda for the day consisted of manual labor in an un-air-conditioned cement building. We were painting the town’s new Holy Life church. When it was done, this one would replace the old building where we were camping out.

“Is this how we’re supposed to do it?” I lowered my brush and frowned. The church walls were tall, probably twenty feet high, so we were only painting what we could reach. Our little patch of white primer looked kind of pathetic.

“Who knows?” Lori dabbed her brush in the paint tray. “Just keep going.”

I’d tried to pay attention during that morning’s painting lesson, but I’d been standing toward the back of the group, and Christa was at the front. I kept craning my neck to get a better look at her.

I hadn’t seen her after the party. By the time we got back to the old church someone had hung up a tarp to separate the boys’ half of the floor from the girls’, but the single lightbulb that lit the whole room was on the boys’ side. Our side was a strange dark cave, quiet except for a few people whispering and swarms of mosquitoes buzzing past the windows. There was no way to spot Christa in the dark. Plus, every time I saw a shadow move I was positive it was a snake. (I had a thing about snakes.)

“So, question.” Lori painted another slow, uneven line. “Regarding your new paramour.”

“She’s not my paramour.” I smiled.

“Only a matter of time, babe.” Lori glanced at me with her eyebrows raised. “But what’s your dad going to say about you being gay? I mean, bi?”

I’d carefully avoided thinking about that. I returned my focus to my paintbrush. “I don’t know.”

“What about your mom? And your brother?”

“Come on, they don’t all have to know everything. Mom isn’t even here.”

“Ooh, so you and that chick are going to sneak around Mexico having secret liaisons under preacher daddy’s nose? Gnarly.”

“Liaisons?” I laughed. “Gnarly? What is this, 1980?”

Lori laughed, too. “For real, though. If you’re not having secret liaisons, what are you going to do, lesbian it up right in front of everyone?”

I shifted again. “I met this girl five seconds ago. Nobody’s lesbianing anything yet. Besides, I still like guys.”

Lori tried to arch one eyebrow, but she couldn’t do that very well, so her face just wound up amusingly strange and contorted.

“You know what I really want to do this summer?” she said. “Have a fling.”

I laughed. “What kind of fling?”

“You know, where you have a boyfriend, or a girlfriend or whatever, but only for the summer. You hang out, you hook up, and at the end of the summer you go back to your regular life. Short, meaningless, but fun.”

“What’s the point of that?” I said. “Don’t you want a regular boyfriend?”

“Yeah, sure. But this summer is our perfect fling opportunity. Most of the guys here go to other schools, so we’ll basically never see them again. The girls, too.”

Hmm. “I sort of see what you mean.”

“I know what we should do.” Lori put down her paintbrush and grinned at me. “We should both have a fling. Let’s make a pact.”

I laughed again. Lori and I used to be really into pacts. When we were younger we’d make pacts to eat the exact same number of conversation hearts at the Valentine’s Day party, or to include the word hickey somewhere in our fifth-grade Life Science reports. In middle school, Lori was obsessed with having her first kiss, and she got me to make a pact that we’d each kiss someone before the end of the school year. But when I kissed Tim Mayhew at the school Chrismukkah party that December, she’d been furious. I’d actually forgotten about the pact by that point—I only kissed Tim because he came up to me at the party wearing one of those mistletoe headbands all the guys had that year and I liked the way his green eyes locked on mine when he smiled—but Lori remembered everything. She said I’d violated the pact because we were supposed to have our first kiss at the same time, even though I didn’t remember agreeing to that part at all. It turned out to be fine because Lori kissed Barry Tuckerton at his New Year’s Eve party the next week, but I still felt kind of bad. Barry Tuckerton’s breath smelled like cheese.

“We should do it,” she said. “For real. Come on, it’ll be fun.”

I thought about Christa’s face again. Her voice. I especially have a thing for preacher’s daughters...

“Yeah. Let’s do it.” I was getting excited now. “Okay, rules. We’ll each hook up with someone—um, how about three times? Three’s a good number.”

“Okay,” Lori said. “And it doesn’t have to be that girl and Paul—it can be anyone. Also—wait, how are we defining hookup, exactly? Is kissing enough, or does it have to be more?”

I acted surprised, even though I’d been wondering the same thing. “Wow, that’s—um. Do you really think—”

She started laughing. “Kidding. Of course kissing counts. I mean, that’s all either of us has done before, right? But whatever we wind up doing, we have to tell each other every last, sweaty detail, the way we always do. So, are we both in?”

She held out her hand, her little finger curved up, for our standard pact-agreement pinkie swear.

I glanced around the cavernous space of the church. I didn’t see any sign of Christa now, but I remembered how she’d smiled at me in the dusty shadows the night before.

I’d have given anything just to have her smile at me that way again.

I grinned and linked my finger with Lori’s. “I’m definitely in.”

“Hate to interrupt your girl talk, ladies, but you have too much paint on your brushes, there.” Lori and I turned slowly. Dad’s voice had come from far enough behind us that I was pretty sure he hadn’t heard anything, but still, when a parent sneaks up on you, it’s almost never a good thing. Especially when you’ve just finished making a pact that involves kissing other girls. “When you load paint onto your brush, you need to tap off the excess on the edge of the pan, this way.”

Dad took Lori’s brush and demonstrated. Globs of paint dripped off the brush. I could tell he was right, but I rolled my eyes anyway. Dad loved nothing more than telling me I was doing something wrong.

“Thanks, Benny.” Lori smiled as he handed her back the brush. She never understood when I complained about my dad. Her own dad had moved out when she was in elementary school, and she hardly ever saw him. She was supposed to spend a few weeks with him every summer, but her summers were always so packed with activities that it usually only wound up being a weekend trip. Maybe she didn’t realize how annoying dads could really be.

“You ought to be using rollers, though.” Dad stroked his chin. “I’ll see if I can pick some up in town. By the way, Aki, want to come talk to me for a sec?”

I groaned under my breath and followed Dad outside. The sun charged straight into my eyes, so I pulled on my baseball cap. My brother, Drew, and bunch of people were digging a ditch for the new fence, and they all had giant sweat stains under their armpits. I was glad I’d gotten an indoor job. Our whole family sweated a lot, me included, but Dad and Drew got it the worst.

“How are you liking Mexico so far?” Dad asked me, wiping the back of his neck.

“It’s okay. You didn’t tell me we’d be sleeping on a cement floor.”

Dad chuckled. “Why did you think we told you to bring sleeping bags?”

“I thought we’d go on a special camping trip or something. For, like, one night.”

“Well, don’t worry. Sleeping on the floor will build character.” Dad chuckled again.

“Whatever.” Mom and Dad both loved to say anything Drew and I complained about would “build character.”

“Listen, there was something I wanted to talk to you about,” Dad said. “You remember that our first Holy Life national conference is coming up?”

I nodded. Jake, the guy from Harpers Ferry, had said something about that at the party last night.

Some of my friends at school thought our church was weird, but it wasn’t, really. Holy Life started out in Maryland after a couple of nondenominational churches decided to start doing some activities together. Then some churches in other states joined in and even a few in other countries, like this one here in Mexico. Holy Life churches aren’t the kind where preachers talk constantly about how abortion is evil and how we should all vote Republican or anything, though. I mean, some people at my church probably do vote Republican, but mostly we don’t talk about that stuff. Instead we get together for picnics and ice-cream socials, and on Sunday mornings we sing hymns and listen to sermons about whatever Jesus did that week.

But now the different churches were trying to get more officially organized. Everyone had been talking about the conference since Christmas, but I’d sort of tuned it out. Usually, if I paid attention to church stuff, it was because I’d done something wrong that week and knew I should pray about it so I wouldn’t feel guilty.

“Well, the delegates who’ll be at the conference are very interested in this trip,” Dad said. “It’s the first time we’ve brought multiple churches together for an overseas mission project.”

“We didn’t come over the sea to get here,” I said. “It’s more of an overland project.”

Dad ignored me. “I’ll be giving a presentation about this trip at the conference, and one of the things the delegates want to hear will be how we worked with the local congregation. Since you volunteered at that clinic last summer, I thought you and some of your friends might want to take on a side project here with the local kids.”

A side project? Dad wanted me to do more work? “What kind of project?”

Dad shrugged. “Whatever you think they might enjoy. Could you teach them a praise dance or a worship song?”

“Dad.” I side-eyed him. After a moment he gave up and looked away.

My parents knew very well that I’d stopped all that. I didn’t sing in the church choir or the school chorus anymore, and I’d dropped out of the dance class I’d enrolled in the summer before.

I was done with music. After what had happened with MHSA, there was no way I could ever go back. Mom and Dad may have thought they were dropping subtle hints when they asked me to lead a worship song or left a brochure for my old music camp on the kitchen table, but I knew exactly what they were trying to do, and it wasn’t going to work. I’d made up my mind.