First Comes Love (12 page)

“That’s a great question,” I say. “I’d teleport.”

I ask her what she would do.

She stares at me, sadly. “I’d control time. I’d make it slow down or stop completely with the flip of a switch. Like right now,” she says.

We have only three weeks before she’s leaving. She’s heading back to Wisconsin to be in her cousin’s wedding. Then, she’s off on her next road trip to who knows where.

“My turn,” I say. “How long have you been pen pals with Coach Clark?”

Dylan sits up and her eyes are guilty. “Are you mad?” she asks.

I stare back at her. Because of her, I get a second shot at my dream.

“Why would I be mad?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “For meddling?”

“I got my scholarship back to play baseball. So, yeah, I’m really pissed off at you, Dylan.”

I explain everything Coach offered me and that on top of playing I still have time to register for classes, and I can live with some guys on the team.

Dylan’s beaming. She doesn’t have to ask me what my decision is. It’s written on my face.

“Now I just have to break the news to my parents,” I say. “There’s the challenge.”

We’re quiet for a moment and Dylan takes out our Top Ten list and starts asking me the questions. My answers are easy. They all revolve around her. What do I want to come home to? Her, naked. What is my ideal way to spend a day? Having sex with her.
All
day. What do I love? Her and Ms. Pac-Man and her better. But I don’t want to freak her out, so I try to list other things I love and desire and want to come home to, but all those answers sound forced and trivial and fake. It scares me.

By the time we make it through the list, the sun is climbing into the sky.

I wake him up by tracing my finger along his profile.
I’ve been sleeping over almost every night. It helps that he has a basement entrance and parents who never check on him past dinnertime. I told my aunt the truth—that I fell in love with a desert boy with blue eyes and it’s no longer enough to spend every waking moment with him. I need to spend every sleeping moment too.

He opens his eyes and doesn’t have to look at me to know I’m restless. “What’s the plan?” he asks.

“A little road trip,” I say. He sits up and the cotton sheet falls off his bare chest. He stretches his arms out and rubs his eyes and pulls his fingers through his messy tangle of hair. He asks me where we’re going.

“Sedona.”

***

Sedona’s a canyon town north of Phoenix,
hidden inside tall walls of pink rock. As you drive north, the brown desert hills of central Arizona slowly transform into a pinkish-red valley. You feel like you’ve taken a wrong turn, fallen off the earth, and landed somewhere closer to Mars.

We pull over five or six times before we even hit the city limits so I can capture panoramic shots. Gray never rushes me; he never questions why I want to take a photo. He never holds me back. He waits next to the car while I aim my camera at a stack of red rocks, pinned up under a blue sky. I tell Gray I’m going to make his dad a coffee table book of my summer photography.

“You’ve never even met my dad,” he says. “Why do you want to give him a present?”

I climb onto the roof of the car to get a better angle, and he watches me crouch down to take a picture. I wait until a minivan moves out of the frame.

“You said he likes travel photography,” I point out.

“Do you ever think about yourself?” Gray asks.

“Sure.”

He tells me he finds that hard to believe. I look out at the curving highway that snakes through the red valley and disappears inside a shadowed crevice of rocks. I love the way the road twists and fades in the distance, like it’s alive. It makes me want to chase it.

“I think about the people I’m going to meet. Where I’m going to end up,” I say, and zoom in on a pink and white striped rock wall that looks like a candy cane.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to know?” he asks.

I take the picture and hop off the car. “I love not knowing. My entire life has been predictable,” I say. “I just want to imagine it for a while.”

Gray studies me for a few seconds and slowly nods before he turns and gets back in the car.

When we pull into downtown, we stop at a café called Brew with a View, a shop with stucco brown exterior and tall glass windows that look out at a red mountain called Bell Rock. I lean over the counter and ask the barista if he’s local, and when he says he is, I ask him where he recommends spending the day in Sedona. On the drive up, I told Gray that I detest travel books. How is surrounding yourself with a crowd of other tourists an authentic experience? It isn’t traveling. It’s just standing in line. You need to hit up the locals for the best spots.

The barista grins at us, his bright white teeth framed by tan, leathery skin. “What do you want to see?” he asks.

What I always want to see. “A place I’ll never forget,” I say. The barista looks at Gray.

“She’s optimistic,” he notes.

“You have no idea,” Gray says.

“I want to know the secret spots,” I say. “Not the tourist traps.”

He hesitates for a second, but then he grabs a brown paper bag off the counter and draws a map to a vortex called Heather’s Knoll. He tells us tourists rarely go there; it’s more of a local meditation spot. I ask him if we can get there on bikes. He nods and I thank him and reach for Gray’s hand. When we walk outside, I examine the map.

“What’s a vortex?” I wonder out loud. I hadn’t expected an answer, but Gray explains it’s a power spot and supposedly Sedona is full of them.

“What do you mean, ‘power spot’?” I ask, and he tells me there’s magnetic energy moving through the earth and supposedly these energy fields connect at certain places around the world, and Sedona is one of them. People think it has healing powers.

We head toward a bike rental shop and pass crystal sellers and bookstores, healing centers and acupuncturists.

I ask him if he believes in that sort of thing, and he shrugs.

“I’m not really into New Age stuff,” he says. But he tells me people from all over the world travel to Sedona to meditate or pray. He explains vortexes are considered more spiritual than anything. It’s a place where you can feel more in tune with the universe, that if you sit still and listen long enough, you’ll hear answers to your questions.

We walk into the Golden Word bookstore and I buy a book on Sedona vortexes written by a local author. I pick out a postcard for Gray of a car crushed under the weight of a huge cactus. I buy my mom a sterling silver ring and my sister a bookmark picturing Cathedral Rock, the famous red cliffs in Sedona that look like church steeples. Gray gets me a postcard featuring Snoopy Rock because he likes the name of it.

We stop to order sandwiches at the Black Cow Café and we fill our water bottles for the ride. Sedona is a city of hills, and in the ten-mile bike ride, we steadily climb. We stop twice for water breaks and once so I can photograph a snake slithering across the road. As we travel farther away from downtown, I’m more aware of the silence. I can’t hear anything except the sound of our pedals inching us forward and the rubber tires gripping the asphalt. It’s as if we’re inside a dream dipped in red ink. The barista told us about this—he said we’d be surprised by the silence around a vortex.

We find the dirt road he drew out, marked only by a green sign bleached from the sun. We can barely make out the word
HEATHER
. We turn and pedal up a red gravel road, until we reach a dirt parking lot where the ground is padded smooth. We hop off our bikes and lean them against a tree trunk. We don’t worry about locking them up. We don’t worry about anything.

A sign in the parking lot reads
RESPECT THE SILENCE
. I grab Gray’s hand and we follow a dirt trail that winds through a tunnel of trees. We pass a circle constructed on the ground, outlined with smooth round rocks. The circle is divided up into pieces, like a pie. I whisper and ask Gray what it is. He tells me it’s a medicine wheel, used for meditation.

“It’s supposed to create positive energy,” he says. “I think Native Americans started it.” He tells me each piece of the wheel represents different people coming together. It’s about respecting people and creating a peaceful balance in the universe. I watch him with surprise.

“You said you weren’t into New Age stuff. How do you know all this?”

He smiles. “Amanda loved Sedona,” he says. “We used to drive up here every summer. That book you bought downtown, she owned the same one.” I feel my shoulders sink.

“Why didn’t you tell me? We didn’t have to come here,” I say, and he tells me it’s okay. He wants to be here.

“I’ve never seen this spot before,” he says. He pulls me along and we pass another sign saying,
QUIET:
FOR PRAYER AND MEDITATION.
The path opens up to several lookouts, but I keep going. Gray follows me and I veer off the trail, where the trees open up and warm, flat rocks rise out over a high cliff. We walk out to the edge and I inhale a deep breath and soak in the silence. The air feels different out here—lighter, crisper, charged with energy.

We’re surrounded by a rusty canyon that’s streaked with black and gray rocks. It looks ancient, as if we’re standing at the feet of a philosopher. I stare out at the beauty that embraces us and feel one thing. Humbled. It puts me in my place to know these rocks have existed thousands of years before me and they’ll survive thousands of years after I’m gone. It makes me feel inconsequential. My problems become so small and meaningless they evaporate and blow away in the desert air.

So many people worry their lives away. They take themselves so seriously. They try to fight time and aging and gravity and death. They spend so much time stressing and planning and overplanning that they miss out on living. I never want to be like that. I never want to waste time. After all, we’re just passing observers, as insignificant to these giant formations as a speck of dust. So we might as well appreciate the view and enjoy the journey.

I feel weightless. I wonder if this is what people mean about the magic of Sedona, if this realization is the vortex whispering a secret to me.

A thin layer of sweeping clouds touches the tip of the canyon peaks, and green trees grow deep in the shaded rocks underneath us. I can hear only my breaths. We sit down on the warm rocks and take off our shoes and eat our sandwiches, whispering a little back and forth but mostly just absorbing the air around us and honoring the silence.

We lie out on the rocks for the rest of the afternoon and let the sun lull us into contentment, and even Gray quietly admits there’s a healing energy to this place.

We eat dinner in Sedona at the Red Planet Café, an alien-themed restaurant.
We’re greeted as earthlings by our waitress as she hands us plastic menus that look like they glow in the dark. I order the Mars attack sandwich, the cyclone fries, and a moon milk shake. Dylan orders the Neptune wrap. We drink out of glowing green straws, and fluorescent alien heads stare down at us from the ceiling. Our table looks like a satellite orbiting space, and our seats look like huge eggshells cut perfectly in half. Electronic music plays around us, as if we’re trapped inside a Super Mario game.

Dylan thinks the atmosphere is funky. I think it’s creepy. We agree to combine our descriptions and call it crunky.

We’re both flushed from a full day in the sun, and strokes of pink color Dylan’s nose and cheekbones. I wonder how warm her lips are. I’m eager to find out. I bet she has some great tan lines after today. I’m anxious to see those, too. I plan on tracing every inch of them with my finger.

When we leave Sedona the sky is turning a bluish black. The red rocks, gray in the distance, look like dinosaurs curled up to sleep. While we drive, Dylan asks me what I was thinking about at Heather’s Knoll. We spent hours there, and I was shocked Dylan managed to stay quiet for so long. She didn’t exactly sit still. She spent most of the time writing in her journal and investigating the other paths around the vortex with her camera. But she rarely spoke.

I look out the window and stall. I don’t want to admit to what I was really thinking all day. When Dylan was leaning back on the warm rock, her eyes closed against the sun, my mind was fixated on her. And I was pretty much thinking about one thing: sex. Wondering if she wants to have it. When. With me? We sleep together every night. I’ve seen her naked. But she always pulls back. She lets me in on everything else. Her secrets. Her soul. But now I want it all. And it’s driving me crazy.

I think about having sex with her every other second. I consider it a healthy obsession. I have a box of condoms shoved away in a desk drawer that I bought two years ago. “Ribbed for a woman’s pleasure.” Unopened. Taunting me.

I decide to tell Dylan I wasn’t thinking about anything. I was trying to empty my mind.

“What about you?” I ask. She also stalls before she answers, and then admits she was thinking about my family. I can feel the mood shift in the car. There’s a serious edge to Dylan’s voice.

My guard instinctively takes over. Once you invest in people, once you let them in, they feel entitled to make your problems their own. And I don’t want that. I don’t need that. Not right now.

I blurt out the question before I lose my nerve.

“Have you gone through any counseling since Amanda died?” I ask. A few weighted seconds crawl by.

“Counseling?” Gray repeats, his voice hard. He’s already on the defensive. “Where is
this
coming from? I haven’t gone through counseling,” he insists, as if this would be weak. As if it would label him as something.

“Has your mom or dad?” I ask, and I try to keep my tone light, as if this is a casual conversation. He sees it as more of an interrogation.

“No,” he says flatly. “I don’t know. I doubt it.” He’s glaring at my profile, and I try to concentrate on the road, but I can still feel the heat from his eyes. “We don’t need to see a therapist,” he adds. “Not that my family’s psychological condition is any of your business.”