Our Own Private Universe

No more spending hours with my stupid guitar. I played lacrosse now, and I’d joined the math team, too.

No more music camp, either. I’d signed up to come on this trip the same day our church’s lead pastor announced it was happening. Mainly so my parents would stop bugging me about music camp.

“Well, maybe you could all do a presentation together at the end of the summer,” Dad said.

“Ugh, do we have to?” That would be even worse than doing a song. I hated standing up in front of people and just talking. In class, whenever we got assigned to do a presentation, I begged the teacher to let me do a separate extra credit project instead. In church I always kept my head down when they asked for volunteers to read Bible verses.

I didn’t want to present. I wanted to perform. But I wasn’t good enough for that, apparently.

“Well, it could be anything to keep the kids engaged,” Dad said. “What did you do at the clinic?”

“Crafts, mostly.” Last summer, after I’d dropped out of music camp at the last minute, I’d wound up volunteering at a health center in downtown Silver Spring for people who didn’t have insurance. I’d thought I was going to learn how to bandage people’s cuts and test them for viruses and stuff—I’d signed up to work there because I was into math and science, after all—but instead I was a glorified babysitter for the little kids in the waiting room. On my second day I brought in craft supplies from home and the next thing I knew, I was the most popular volunteer in the place. All the kids wanted me to show them how to make my special paper airplanes that were guaranteed to fly in loop-di-loops. “But I don’t have any craft supplies here, except for the jewelry materials Lori and I brought. Those are for us, though.”

Lori and I had been making jewelry since middle school. I’d found some bead patterns online and gotten obsessed with them. I loved anything that involved neat, orderly rows and following a bunch of steps to get it right. Lori and I started wearing our jewelry to school, and soon people were asking if they could buy it. We wanted to sell it online but our parents were afraid people would try to take advantage of us. Parents had no idea how the internet actually worked.

“Well, we could reimburse you for the materials,” Dad said. “I guess it’s my fault for not mentioning this before we left home. I thought you could do a dance or something that didn’t need supplies.”

“Dad.” I groaned.

Dad rubbed his neck again. “For the jewelry, do you think you could have them make Christian-themed pieces? You know, cross necklaces, that sort of thing?”

“Sure.” I didn’t know if we had any cross-necklace supplies, but Dad would probably forget he’d asked me that anyway.

“Good. Well, this is an excellent plan. You can start today after lunch. I’ll talk to Carlos about rounding up some of the girls and I’ll swing by to take photos of you for my presentation.”

“Today? Wow, okay.” It was a good thing we’d brought the jewelry stuff in Lori’s suitcase and not mine.

I went straight back in to tell Lori while Dad stayed outside to help with the fence work. I was trying to figure out how many supplies we’d brought with us and how we were going to teach jewelry making to a bunch of kids whose language we didn’t speak when I saw that a girl in a bright pink hat had taken my spot by the wall. She and Lori had their backs to me, and they were talking and laughing as they painted.

It was Christa. I recognized her by the pink streak in her hair. Which clashed horribly (and, somehow, adorably) with her hat.

I stopped walking. Suddenly I was...what? Afraid? Nervous? Jealous?

What was I supposed to do, exactly? What should I say? The night before everything between us had just sort of fallen into place, like magic.

But that night had been special. That night, I was special. Today I was regular old Aki, with too-short track pants and smears of white paint on my hands.

Lori bent to dip her brush into the pan and saw me. She waved. “Aki! Look who came to help!”

Christa’s face broke into a grin as she turned around. Her heart-shaped sunglasses dangled from a string around her neck. “Sorry! Did I steal your brush?”

She reached up to adjust her hat. There was a speck of white paint on the side.

That’s when I realized it wasn’t a hat. It was a beret.

A raspberry beret.

Wow.

Not only did Christa own a raspberry beret, she’d brought it with her to Mexico.

I didn’t know a single fellow Prince fan who was younger than my mother. It was as if Christa had been custom-made for me.

Just like that, things were easy again.

“Yeah.” I grinned. “But I guess I’m willing to share.”

“Okay.” Christa held out the brush to me. “I’m a big fan of sharing, myself.”

I took the brush from her and smiled when my fingers met hers on the handle. It was the first time we’d touched.

And I was certain it wouldn’t be the last.

CHAPTER 3

“What did your dad want?” Lori asked.

I was still grinning at Christa. “What?”

“Your dad? He took you outside for something?”

“Oh, yeah.” I forced myself to turn toward Lori. “He wants us to make jewelry with the kids here. I told him we’d start after lunch today.”

“‘We’?” Lori paused her painting mid-brushstroke. “Who, you and me?”

“Yeah. He said we should do some kind of side project and I told him we already had the supplies. They’re going to reimburse us.”

“Oh. So we’re doing this for the whole trip?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Christa had found another paintbrush somewhere and was dipping it into the pan. When she bent over I could see her bra strap peeking out from the neck of her tank top. “I guess?”

“All right.” Lori looked out the window, studying the yard critically. “We can set up over there if someone can loan us a blanket for the kids to sit on. During lunch we’ll need to go back to the old church to get supplies and plan what we’re going to do. Will they give us a translator or something?”

“Um,” I said. Christa was wearing sweatpants. How was it fair for anyone to look that cute in sweatpants? “I don’t think so.”

“So we’re teaching a bunch of kids in a language we barely speak how to make the jewelry designs it took us two years to learn?” Lori narrowed her eyes.

Christa reached up to paint a new section of the wall. The movement made her tank top ride up. Her skin was tan under the hem of her white shirt. I could see her belly button. She’d drawn a star around it with a purple marker. I wondered how it felt to touch her there.

“Actually, never mind.” Lori handed me her paintbrush. “I’m going to go see if they need help outside.”

“See you later, Lori,” Christa called after her.

“Yeah, see you.”

I leaned down to dip Lori’s brush into the pan, making sure to tap off the extra paint. When I glanced up, Christa was watching me. I looked away so she wouldn’t see me getting flustered.

After a minute, I stood back up and we painted in silence. I snuck glances at Christa every so often. The third time I looked her way, she was watching me, too.

“I thought you’d be wearing another vintage T-shirt today,” she said, nodding at my outfit.

“Oh, yeah. Well, actually the shirt I had on yesterday was from his 2014 tour so it isn’t vintage, it’s...” I trailed off before I said something totally nerdy. “But anyway, I don’t have any of my other clothes here. They lost my suitcase on one of the planes.”

“Oh, that sucks.” Christa made a sympathetic face, her lips turned down. Once again, I wanted to touch her. “Let me know if you need to borrow anything. I mean, you’re about two feet taller than me so my stuff probably wouldn’t fit you, but still.”

I imagined putting on Christa’s sweatpants. My skin, right where hers had been.

I needed to change the subject before I had a total meltdown.

“That’s a great beret,” I told her.

“Thanks.” She touched it, spreading the white paint farther along the side of the hat. “They said we should bring a hat, since we’d be painting, so I went to the thrift store. I thought this one was hilarious. I wear a lot of funky stuff, but I never heard of a bright pink beret before.”

“Well, it’s a raspberry beret,” I said.

Christa blinked at me.

“You know,” I said. “The Prince song?”

“Oh.” Her smile faded. “Do you mean the singer Prince? The guy from back in the eighties or whenever?”

All right. Okay, so she wasn’t a fan after all.

Well, most people our age weren’t weirdo Prince obsessives like me. This didn’t have to be a bad sign.

I recalibrated.

“Yeah.” I tried desperately to think of something new to ask her. “So, um, did your parents make you come on this trip? Or did you beg them to let you? It seems like everyone’s either one or the other.”

Christa gave me a sudden sharp look. At first I thought I’d said something wrong, but then her face softened. “I guess it was my parents’ idea. Pretty much whenever there’s a church trip anywhere, whether it’s counting cans at the food bank or painting walls in Mexico, they sign me on without even asking me about it first. All they care about is church.”

“I hear you. My family’s pretty hardcore about church, too.”

“Yeah, I’d guess, with your dad being a youth minister and all.”

“It’s annoying. Some days I think I’d rather just be a heathen, you know?”

For a second Christa got that sharp look again, but then she laughed. “Most of my life consists of trying not to let my parents know about my heathen ways.”

For some reason, that sounded really sexy. I flushed and looked away.

“How did they react when you got your nose ring?” I asked.

“They flipped. They tried to order me to get rid of it, but I refused, so they grounded me for two months. They thought I’d change my mind and take it out, but it was nothing I didn’t expect. I mean, if I’m totally honest, the main reason I got it in the first place was to piss them off.”

“Wow. You went through all that just to annoy them?”

“Well, at first. But now I think it’s legitimately awesome.” Christa turned so I could see the ring glint in the light from the window. It was really simple, only a little silver hoop, but it made her look amazing. Rebellious. Hot, too.

Okay, she probably would’ve looked hot anyway.

Crap, I was getting flustered again. I had to distract her so she wouldn’t see what a fail I was.

“Are you allowed to get paint on it?” I asked her.

“I don’t know. Probably not?”

“Then look out!”

I reached up with my paintbrush like I was aiming for her nose. She squealed and jerked back, reaching out to steady herself, so I tapped her bare elbow with the tip of my paintbrush. “Got you!”

“Hey!” she pulled her arm away, laughing. “What, are polka-dotted elbows the new trend?”

“Sorry! It was an accident.” I held up my hands in fake shock/apology. “Besides, I mean, you’re into art, right? Consider it an artistic statement. An accidental one, I mean.”

As soon as I’d said it, I wished I hadn’t. I didn’t want to remind Christa about the art thing. The guilt from my lie the night before rose up in my throat.

“Well, I suppose accidents do happen...” She lunged toward me with a cackle and painted a streak across my bare wrist. It looked like I’d been slashed by a snowman.

“That was so not an accident!” I tapped her cheek with my brush, leaving a tiny white dot. Behind it, she was blushing.

“Hey!” She shrieked and bopped her brush onto my nose.

“What are you guys doing over here?” We both turned, hiding our brushes behind our backs. My brother stood behind us, holding a dirt-caked shovel over his shoulder. He chortled when he saw me. “Sis, you look like a shrink-wrapped Rudolph.”

I rolled my eyes at Drew and bit back a snappy reply. I was trying to be slightly less snarky to him than usual, which was hard.

Drew and I had always been close, especially when we were younger. But things changed when he left the private school we’d both gone to since kindergarten and transferred to the public high school. He liked going to school with more people, he said, and getting a chance to play on a bigger basketball team. He was always bringing his new friends home.

After I didn’t get into MHSA, I asked my parents if I could transfer to Drew’s school instead. They said no. Dad thought I wouldn’t like it as much as Drew did, but I never knew how he was so sure about that. It wasn’t as though Dad had gone there.

Drew’s life in high school, as far as I could tell, was basically perfect. When he got to college, though, things changed. I hadn’t realized how much until the day before in the Tijuana airport.

When we’d landed in Mexico and gone to pick up our bags, everyone had grabbed their suitcases off the turnstile right away except for me. The bags kept going around in their loop, and mine kept not showing up. Dad went ahead with the others and told Drew to wait with me until my suitcase showed up.

For a while my brother and I talked about the usual stuff. Dumb TV shows. Basketball. How annoying Dad had been on the plane with the way he kept trying to read out important geographical facts about whatever we were flying over—The Gulf of Mexico didn’t even exist until the Late Triassic period! Did you know that, kids?

Then out of nowhere, Drew said, “Okay. Listen. I’ve got to tell you something.”

I looked away. I was certain this would be more of the same.

After I didn’t get into MHSA when I first auditioned at the end of eighth grade, everyone I knew—but Drew most of all—kept nagging me to audition again the following year. It would be my last chance, since MHSA didn’t let anyone in after ninth grade.

They had tons of different programs—acting, singing, dancing, visual art, instrumental music—but I’d auditioned for the music composition program. I brought my electric guitar and played them the best piece I’d ever written. Then I got a callback where I had to sight-read and play my piece on the piano, which was harder. Two weeks after that, a slim envelope appeared in the mailbox with a single sheet of paper inside. “Although you show significant promise, we are unable to admit you to the Maryland High School for the Arts at this time.” It might as well have said You’re a giant loser. Buh-bye.

“You’re amazing at guitar,” Drew kept saying when this year’s audition season was coming back around. “Why do you have to get in for composition? They have a regular music program. All you have to do is play them one of those Prince guitar solos you’re always practicing at home. Those judges will throw down their stupid scorecards and beg you to come to their big nerdy art school.”

I didn’t bother explaining that there weren’t judges or scorecards—just a single bored teacher with a simpering smile—or that the idea of getting into MHSA just to play an instrument made me want to cry. Anyone could play guitar. I’d been doing it since I was a kid, when I first picked up the choir director’s old acoustic while Mom and Dad were in one of their endless meetings at church.

I loved playing, sure—I loved it even more once I started taking actual lessons, and especially once I started picking out my own songs on it for the first time—but I didn’t want to get into my dream school for something that came so easily it was basically one step up from breathing.

I wanted to get in because I was special. I wanted to get in because I could do something, create something that no one else could. And I wanted to spend four years learning how to do it better.

Prince wrote a song every single day of his life. I’d only written a handful, but even my very best song wasn’t good enough to get me past the starting line.

There was no way I was going to put myself through that a second time.

So that’s what I thought Drew was going to talk about in the airport that afternoon. I thought he was going to berate me again for throwing away my greatest opportunity ever, blah blah blah.

I folded my arms and braced myself. Then he surprised me.

“This past semester wasn’t so good,” Drew said. “I didn’t let anybody see my grades, but listen—Sis, they were bad. Really bad.”

“What?” I’d known Drew had some problems with his first semester of college—he’d gotten a D in his required math class, which was weird because he’d always been good in school when he was younger—but he’d done okay in his other subjects. “How bad?”

“Academic probation bad.” Drew swallowed. “I’m going to have to take pretty much everything over again.”

“Everything? Are they holding you back?”

Drew shook his head. A new load of suitcases came across the belt, but my bag—purple with red flowers—was nowhere in sight. “It isn’t the same as high school. You don’t get ‘held back.’ But it’s the same idea.”

“Wow.” I was still struggling to get my head around the thought of Drew failing. My brother had always won at everything he’d tried. “Dad is going to freak.”

“You can’t tell him, okay? Promise you won’t tell him.” I’d never seen that look on Drew’s face before. Drew was usually a cheerful guy, always making other people laugh. But there was no trace of a smile on his lips now.

“Yeah, yeah, of course. So what are you going to do, take all the same classes when you go back again this year?”

“Maybe.” He tugged on his ear. “If I go back.”

It took me a second to understand what he’d said. When I got it, I whirled around to face him, the hunt for my suitcase forgotten. “If?”

“Calm down, Sis.” Drew held up his hands. “You don’t need to turn into a banshee on me.”

“Are you talking about dropping out of school?” He might as well have said he was considering Satanism. All Mom and Dad had been telling us since birth—probably even longer; they probably told us while we were still in utero—was how important our educations were.

“I don’t know.” Drew ran a hand over the back of his head, the way he did when he was anxious. Dad did that, too. “All I’m doing is considering my options.”

I stared at him, my jaw on the floor. How long had he been thinking this? I’d thought I knew everything about my brother. I thought his life was golden.

“Listen, for real,” he said. “Promise you won’t tell Dad.”

“Of course I won’t.” I was offended he’d even ask. Drew and I had been keeping each other’s secrets forever. “But tell me when you decide, okay? And if you need help in math, I can tutor you.”

Drew laughed and elbowed me. “I’m not getting tutored by my kid sister.”

“Whatever, I’m better at math than you. Even college math.”

“Yeah, okay, genius.” Drew scanned the belt again. “Also, Sis, I hate to say this, but I don’t think your suitcase is here.”

“Oh...crap.”

We went to the airline counter to tell them about my suitcase. Drew had to do most of the talking, since his Spanish was better than mine. Then Dad came back to check on us and we didn’t have another chance to talk about what Drew had said.

But I kept thinking about it. My brother—dropping out of college? Mom and Dad would never let him. They’d kill him.

“We’re priming the wall,” I told Drew now, since I couldn’t say any of that.

“Yeah, looks like it’s getting there.” Drew eyed our white patch, which still looked really uneven. “You’re Christa, right? From Rockville? I’m Drew, Aki’s brother.”

“Hi.” Christa stifled her giggles. She set her paintbrush back in the pan and tried to wipe the paint off her elbow. “I hate to tell you this, but your sister is kind of a meanie.”

“Oh, I’m well aware.” Drew grinned at her. Christa was still rubbing at her elbow. God, she was cute. “By the way, Sis, your clothes don’t fit.”

“They’re Lori’s clothes, genius.”

“Right, your suitcase.” Drew scratched his head. “I’ve got some stuff you can borrow if you want.”

“Drew, you’re, like, a guy.”

“Oof. Harsh.” He clasped a hand to his heart. I rolled my eyes again. Drew turned back to Christa and pointed to the patch of wall she’d been painting when I came in. “Hey, Christa, did you paint this section?”

“I sure did.”

“I figured,” Drew said. “It’s the only part that looks halfway decent.”

“Hey!” I reached out to swipe Drew with my paintbrush, but he stepped away in time.

“Come on, Aki’s section looks great,” Christa said. I beamed, even though she was totally lying.

“Had you painted before you came here?” Drew asked her.

“Yep. Well, I’ve painted one room, anyway.”

“Your room at home?” Drew asked.

“No.” Christa bent down and wiped her paintbrush on the edge of the tray. “I helped my boyfriend paint his room at his dad’s house.”

“Your ex-boyfriend?” I asked, thinking I’d misheard.

Christa stood up, biting her lip. “Uh, no. Current.”

I dropped my brush. Paint splattered onto my pants. Drew jumped out of the way to avoid getting hit.

“Hey, you three!” one of the pastors from the West Virginia church called over. “No roughhousing!”

Christa stood up straight. When she called back to the pastor, her voice was totally different than it had been when she was talking to us. She sounded calm. Demure, almost. “We’re very sorry, sir.”

The pastor came over to us, looking with a frown at our uneven paint job. “I don’t think it’s really going to take all three of you to finish what’s left of that wall. You two are Benny’s kids, right?”

Drew and I nodded, keeping our sighs to ourselves. Preacher’s kids never got a break.

“Come out here and we can get you to work on the ditch.” The pastor nodded to Christa. “You can finish up that wall on your own.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, still in that strange voice.

Stop, I wanted to say to Christa. Wait. Tell me what this means.

“Come on, Sis,” Drew said. Preacher’s kids did as they were told.

I tried to catch Christa’s eye before we left, but she didn’t look my way. She’d already turned back to the wall.

She was out of sight long before I’d stopped shaking.

CHAPTER 4

I poked the rice with my fork. It looked like rice, anyway. It was hard to tell. There was all sorts of...stuff in it. Beans, and other things I didn’t recognize.

Mexican food in actual Mexico, it turned out, wasn’t anything like the Mexican food at Taco Bell. Everyone around me was gobbling down whatever was on their plates, but I preferred to be sure I knew what, exactly, I was putting in my mouth.

Lunch had been torture. We’d split up into groups and gone to the local families’ houses to eat. A nice Mexican lady kept putting more and more food on the table in front of me, but all I could do was nibble on some corn. Then I’d gotten a lecture from Lori’s aunt Miranda about being respectful of local cultures.

At least for dinner we didn’t have to eat in people’s houses. Instead we were sitting at a row of picnic tables near the church. A whole team of ladies had set out big bowls full of rice and vegetables and tortillas and stuff. It was really pretty outside at this time of day, right when the sun was going down. Beams of light shone through the scraggly trees that dotted the hillsides to the west. Plus, this time I didn’t have to worry about getting a talking-to from a chaperone about what I was eating. The adults were at their own table, so far away we could barely see them.

A big pile of toast stood in the middle of the table, still in a plastic bread wrapper. I grabbed three slices. Maybe I could make it through four weeks in Mexico eating nothing but corn and prepackaged toast.

“Hi, Aki.” Jake, the guy I’d met at the party last night, swung into the seat next to me.

“Hi.” I tried to smile through my mouthful of toast crumbs, but I could feel my face arranging itself into an embarrassing half smirk instead. “Did your day go okay?”

“Yeah. I’m beat, though.”

“I know. Me, too.”

I tried again to smile, but it still wasn’t easy.