Burning (20 page)

“I do not understand.”

“Well, you’ve kind of got to translate it. Basically he’s saying, this girl Jenny was coming through the rye field, dragging her petticoats. She wore a long skirt, like you. And it’s all damp, you know, from brushing against the grasses. And she met somebody. A man. And the poet asks—can two people meet, and kiss, and go on their separate ways?
Does that have to be a tragedy? Does the rest of the world need to know about it?”

We were not in a field of rye. And I was not a girl named Jenny. I was Lala White, daughter of Mickey White,
rom barò
, and in my life privacy and secrecy were not allowed.

I was here, with Ben Stanley—this other body. I had kissed him once. I yearned to kiss him again. But I suffered no delusions that this was without a cost.

“Thank you for telling me the poem,” I said. “I feel I understand the book more clearly now.”

“Do you like to read?”

“Very much. It is—it has been—a way for me to see the world.”

“I’m not much of a reader,” Ben confessed. “I read all the books required in my English classes, but it’s not really my thing.”

“You prefer action.”

He nodded.

“What is it like,” I asked him, “to compete as you do?”

He smiled, showing his white, even teeth. “It’s the best feeling there is. It’s like nothing else. You train so hard, you know, to prepare for a race, but when it comes down to it, what really matters, aside from all the practice, is if you can find it right then, when you need it. If you can bring it up to the surface. And when I’m running like that, flat out, there’s nothing like it. The guy breathing down my neck, whether or not the people are cheering, all of that sort of goes away. It’s just me. And if I don’t win, that’s all me, too. Some guys
don’t like the pressure of racing. But I love it. Because it means that no matter what, win or lose, it’s all on me.”

This I understood. The desire to feel that kind of control, that kind of responsibility. It was what had brought me here.

The sky above us was the brightest blue I could imagine, shot across with streaks of white. The air was perfectly still, as if the world was holding its breath.

“My people tell many stories,” I said to Ben Stanley. “I would like to tell you one of them.”

“Okay.”

“It goes like this: Once there was a rich Gypsy magician who lived alongside a magical river. His one sadness was that he and his wife did not have a child. But one day while he was washing his face in the river, an eagle flying by dropped a mouse from its talons and it landed right in front of the magician. He picked up the mouse and dipped it in the river, transforming it into a little girl. He took the little girl home to his wife, who cried with joy, and they raised her as their own daughter.

“But the time came, as it always does, for the man to marry off his daughter. He loved her dearly, and wished to marry her to the most powerful man in the world, so he summoned the Sun God and asked his daughter if she would like to be married to him.

“But she said, ‘No, Father, he would burn me with his rays.’

“So the magician asked the Sun God if he knew of someone even more powerful to whom he could marry his daughter.

“The Sun God said, ‘Yes—the Cloud is stronger than I, for it can hide my face.’

“But the daughter did not wish to marry the Cloud, either. She found him too dark for her liking.

“And when the magician asked the Cloud if he knew of someone even more powerful to whom he could marry his daughter, the Cloud suggested the Wind.

“Unfortunately, the girl was not happy with this choice, either. ‘He is too changeable and cold,’ she said. ‘He will freeze me.’

“So the magician asked the Wind for a suggestion—who was more powerful than the Wind?

“ ‘The Mountain,’ suggested the Wind.

“The girl found fault here, as well: ‘Too big,’ she said.

“Frustrated now, the magician asked the Mountain, ‘Does there exist one more powerful than you?’

“ ‘Yes,’ replied the Mountain. ‘The mouse, for given enough time, it can destroy even me.’

“And so the magician asked his daughter, ‘Do you want to marry the mouse?’

“To this she answered, ‘Yes. But you will have to transform me into a mouse again.’

“And so he did, and the two mice were married, and they lived together happily for all of their days.”

Ben Stanley was quiet for a long time after I finished telling him the story. At last he said, “I don’t get it.”

This made me laugh. “It is meant to teach a lesson.”

“What lesson?”

“Ah, that is the question. Some of my people say that it
shows that people should stay with their own kind—that Gypsies should stay with Gypsies and
gazhè
should stay with
gazhè
. Nothing but trouble comes from trying to become something you are not.”

“And the others? What do they say?”

“They say that it is a lesson about why we should let people make their own choices. Without freedom, the girl would have been married to the wrong man. Given freedom, she chose correctly.”

“What about you, Lala? What do you think?”

Now I was the one who was quiet. At last I said, “I am not a mouse. And I am not convinced that the girl in the story was anymore, either, not truly. She may have once been a mouse, but then something changed and she was not. The mouse girl was wrong to think she could return to what she had once been, and the storytellers are naïve to teach that happiness can come in this way. It is possible that I am not yet who I will become. It is possible that none of it is for me. I may not yet know what I want—but I am coming to understand what it is I do not want. If I stay where I am—with my family, with my people, I know what lies ahead for me. I have seen my future on that path. I have seen it in the face of my mother, in the belly of my sister. That is not what I want. Not now. Perhaps not ever.”

I’d said that I didn’t want to cause Lala any trouble. That was a lie I’d told myself, I think, so I’d have the nerve to get her here alone with me. If not causing her trouble had been more important to me than finding a way to be close to her, I never would have offered her my helmet.

So here was proof—as if I needed any—that I was a selfish fuck. I guess it was pretty easy for me, with a full ride waiting for me at UCSD like a fucking leprechaun’s pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, to go screwing with other people’s lives. If I were a better person—a stronger person—I would have ignored her at the store.

She didn’t look worried about it, though. She looked … peaceful. The expression on her face reminded me of something. But I couldn’t remember what.

The heat was killing me. Maybe it was worse because I felt like I was burning up on the inside, too, thinking about what I had done to Lala. The brightness was overwhelming, the way the sun hit all that white and reflected off of it. It was sort of like living in a mirror, being out here at the
quarry. The water looked cool, half-shaded by the wall of the pit mine. I knew from experience that the far side of the pond had a dangerous drop-off and some really sharp rocks, but this side was mellow if you knew where to step.

“Do you want to put your feet in the water?” The question didn’t come out nearly as nonchalantly as I’d intended.

Lala looked out at the pond. I watched her face change from that peacefulness as her eyebrows pulled together and her mouth kind of twisted to the side. She glanced behind her, up to where the road led down into the quarry. She stared off that way for a minute, almost as if she was expecting to see someone driving down it.

I’m not as good at reading people as Lala is, that’s for sure, but her expression didn’t seem that hard to interpret. She looked thoughtful, and then she looked a little scared, maybe insecure.

But when she stood up and spoke, her voice didn’t show any of that. “I would like to swim,” she said.

Of course my mind went immediately to what this could mean—that she might take her clothes off.

Okay, what I felt about Lala, I didn’t have any experience in feeling. There was this vibration between us, a connection, a closeness that I hadn’t felt with anyone else. I felt closest to Pete, and when I was a kid I’d been tight with my parents, but this was different than either of those relationships, of course.

Still, none of these sweet, romantic thoughts were pure enough to keep me from wanting to see her naked.

Conflicted. That was what it was. Part of me wanted to
protect her virtue and talk her out of swimming with me out here in the middle of nowhere—something I was damn sure her family wouldn’t approve of, not in a million years—but the other half of me was crazy giddy at the thought of Lala dripping wet.

So even though I offered her my hand—like a gentleman would—I didn’t feel entirely good about what I was helping her toward.

We walked to the edge of the pond. Lala looked into the milky depths of the water.

“Is it safe?”

I shrugged. “It’d better be. I’ve been swimming here every summer since I was a kid.”

I guess we were lucky that our town mined gypsum. All pit mines end up with ponds, but most of them are toxic because of heavy metals in them. Gypsum isn’t toxic and left the pond safe for swimming, though I wouldn’t drink the water. Didn’t seem to bother the horses.

Silver lining, again; while it was nice that our pond was safe for swimming, if we’d mined something else, even something toxic as shit, my dad would probably still have a job.

I watched as Lala’s hands went to the leather belt at her waist. She began to uncinch it.

So she was going to take her clothes off. I felt my face flush, and Lala looked at me with a smile. “Is this all right with you?”

“Sure! I mean, if you want to. I mean, you know.… Do you want me to look the other way?”

“If you would like to.”

Come on. What kind of answer was that? Of course I didn’t
want
to look away, but if I didn’t, what kind of a guy did that make me?

I settled for sort of turning and facing out toward the water. Even though I couldn’t exactly see her like this, I felt her movements next to me and I saw a flash of white as she untwisted her wrap shirt. There was a hesitation between her undoing her shirt and taking it off, as if she wasn’t quite sure about what she was doing, as if she might change her mind. I’m not proud to admit that I was practically praying that she’d keep undressing, and I felt myself let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding as she made up her mind and tossed it aside. Then she unfastened her skirt. I heard a quiet whisper of cloth as it pooled at her feet.

When she walked forward into the water I could see her clearly.

Her hair was like a cape, cascading across her shoulders and down her back, all the way to her hips. I saw a flash of her white panties—real panties, not butt floss like Cheyenne wore—and then her curvy legs—paler than her arms and face, probably because she always wore those long skirts—as she walked waist deep into the pond.

She turned and looked at me over her shoulder. I could see that she was wearing a bra—also white—and even though these two items of underclothing covered way more of her skin than the bikinis most other girls wore, I still felt like I was seeing her more naked than anyone I’d ever seen.

Her face was flushed, too, and it seemed like maybe she
was acting tougher than she felt. Still, she asked, “Will you join me?”

I was still dressed. Fuck. That made me a voyeur, right? I fumbled out of my jeans, kicking off my sneakers and socks and almost tripping in the tangled mess of fabric, and pulled my T-shirt up over my head.

For a quick second of panic, I couldn’t remember if I’d put on underwear that morning. I peeked down—yeah. There they were, a pair of the boxer briefs my mom had bought for me.

It was pretty clear from the bulge in the front of them that Lala had made quite an impression on me, and I could see from the angle of her eyes that she noticed.

And she took her time looking me over—I could practically feel the heat of her gaze as she looked at my legs, my groin, my stomach and chest—and for a minute I felt … I don’t know, on display, I guess, but I just stood there anyway, at the edge of the water, and let Lala take her sweet time.

The ends of her hair were wet now, dipped into the water, and strands of it clung to her body, across her belly, over her hips. She was such a pretty shape—all soft curves and slopes—and against the craggy, angular backdrop of the pit mine, the desperately hot and blank blue sky, she looked like a delicate, beautiful vase.

“You’re beautiful,” I said.

She didn’t look like my compliment made her really happy. I think maybe she would have preferred if I hadn’t commented on her body at all, but she looked so fragile,
so unsure, standing there in the water, it was almost as if I could see her invisible battle between the urge to cover herself with her hands and her desire to let herself be seen.

Still, she said, “Thank you.” And then she scooped her hand full of water, tossing it at me. The cool drops splashed across my chest. “Come in,” she said.

She didn’t have to ask me twice. I ducked under, closing my eyes tight until I resurfaced. Then I shook my head like a dog, and I could tell from her squeal of laughter that I’d gotten her.