First Comes Love (18 page)

All of the CDs were labeled using our summer memories:
Running down Mulholland,
Santa Monica,
and
Camelback Mountain.
One mix was titled
Walking with Boba
(obviously featuring slower songs). Gray informed me the most difficult and crucial element to making a mix is to choose its title, since it sets the mood for the entire compilation.

The last mix he made has the word
love
in every song. It’s my favorite one.

I gave Gray a scrapbook to give to his dad. It’s a coffee table book of collected photography. It captures our entire summer together. It’s frozen memories: shots of our hikes around Phoenix, pictures of cactuses, shots of motorcycles parked along the curb of Mill Avenue, their chrome chests jutting in the sun, shots of Sedona, even a few of Los Angeles. I included the photograph of the two geckos talking in the sun. I love that picture. It’s the day we met. Strange to think that two geckos brought us together.

I made Gray a gift, something thin and rectangular that I wrapped in newspaper. I told him to open it after I left. He gave me a CD case to strap on my visor with the ten mixes inside. He said he hoped Pickle would make it for two thousand miles of freeway driving. He told me to stay in the right lane unless I wanted to instigate road rage. Good advice.

We said goodbye in the morning, early, when the sun was still low in a mauve-colored sky. The air was unseasonably cool. He wore a jacket. It was the first time I’d ever seen Gray in a coat. It already made him feel distant. We both hate goodbyes, so we made it quick, like ripping off a sticky bandage or pulling a sliver from our skin.

He wrapped his arms around me and held me so close our ribs were connecting. He kept breathing me in. I could feel my heart rise and sink, rise and sink with every breath.

I couldn’t stop the tears spilling from my eyes. He swept them away with his fingers. I knew saying goodbye would be hard, but I never knew it could physically
hurt,
as though a rope were strangling my heart.

I told Gray I loved him over and over. He told me he loved me. He said I changed his life. I couldn’t put into words how much he changed mine. But then he said something that wasn’t fair. He said if I really loved him, I wouldn’t leave him.

“You’re leaving too,” I reminded him. I said we both needed to leave in order to live.

“I want to see you again” is all he said.

I promised him he would.

He told me he loved me again. He’s like one of those cactuses we saw hiking this summer. His center is finally exposed.

I told Gray to keep on loving. To love as many people as he could. I promised it would come back to him if he did. He shook his head. He told me he could only love me, and it scared me because I knew he meant it.

“I’m not your only love, Gray,” I insisted. “I’m just your first love.”

I’m sitting in my room staring at cardboard boxes
stuffed with things I don’t want. Crap I don’t need. All I want is you. U2 nailed it.

I can still see Dylan’s car driving away, the rusty orange station wagon growing tinier in the distance like a fading sunset. I can still feel her tears on my fingers. They were hot to my touch, like desert rain.

This fucking hurts. Why does loving someone have to fucking
hurt?

I don’t know when I’ll see Dylan again. She doesn’t use any online networks. She doesn’t have a profile. She’s the only person I’ve ever met my age that doesn’t own a cell phone. Things with wires, with signals, with connections, don’t fit her. Anything that has a definite place, with an end and a beginning, doesn’t suit her. She can’t be tied down. It’s cruel that what I love most about Dylan is the very reason why I can’t have her.

I stare down at the photography book she made for my dad, just like she said she would. Dylan always follows through with what she says. It’s a little scary sometimes. I know he’ll think it’s bizarre that a girl he’s never met is giving him a glimpse of the world through her eyes. But what can I say? That’s just Dylan.

I pick up the gift she gave me and tear through the wrapping. Inside is a framed poem. The memory of the title makes me smile.

“Ode to the Mighty Green Ones.”

The poem we wrote together when we first met. On the side of the poem is a photograph taped to the paper, from our hiking trip. It’s a single, saguaro cactus standing proud in the desert sun. Its arms are stretched out like it’s embracing the air and trying to touch the sky. I read the words and even though I wrote half of the poem, every sentence reminds me of her:

My Phoenix cactus
My tall saguaro tower
Strong and independent
Silent and wise
You live to be two hundred
But you are too prickly
If I fell on you
My body would be contaminated
With needle-point stab wounds
As if a crazy old woman
Tried to kill me by using
Her sewing needles
But I admire your arms
Stretched out in the wind
On more arms stretched out
On more arms stretched out
On more
And I love arms
But yours are too prickly
Because if you hugged me
I’d die in your embrace
Literally
I will always adore you
From a distance
And want to water you
But you don’t need me
Is that why I’m fond of you?

She’s gone.

And it feels like my heart is drained of something solid. Empty. But, she was right. She never belonged to me. Now one thought gives me hope.

I told her I wanted to see her again. And she promised me I would.

One Month Later

Hey, God, did I do something to piss you off?
Because I’m starting to think you enjoy twisting the knife in my heart every chance you get. If too much happiness dares to encroach on my life, does some siren go off up there? Uh-oh, Gray’s too happy right now. We can’t have that. Time to shit all over his life again.

Apparently I’m not cut out for happiness. Not my destiny, I guess.

Those were the majority of my thoughts as I drove east to New Mexico. The rest of the time I tried to block out my mind with Rage Against the Machine and Ludacris and Limp Bizkit—people that share my current hostility toward life, and beats that are loud enough to keep me awake during the dozing-off points on boring stretches of highway.

I filled up my hatchback with the most crucial essentials: baseball glove, stereo, music, guitar, and computer. I packed a few bags of clothes. I thought about stealing Dylan’s photography book from my dad and bringing it with me. Not because I want vivid memories of every moment we had together so I can torture myself with daily reminders. But it has a picture of her inside, the only one I have access to. It’s a picture I took in Phoenix: She’s standing in between Boba and this iron statue of a man pointing, and she’s pretending to be the person he’s pointing at. She’s trying to be funny, but she looks gorgeous with the sun hitting her hair so it’s shining, and it captures her wide smile and her slender body from head to toe.

I moved into a four-bedroom house on campus, a ten-minute walk from the Tow Diem Facility, where the baseball team weight trains. It’s also close to Lobo Field, our main practice field. We play our season games at the Isotopes Park, a stadium that UNM shares with a triple-A baseball league in Albuquerque.

My three roommates, Miles, Todd, and Mark (Mark’s nickname is Bubba), are all baseball players. Todd and Bubba have girlfriends, who are always over, pestering them to do things or hang out or study, and the guys act like they can’t be bothered. Miles desperately wants a girlfriend and he’s the one who’s single. It always seems to work that way.

I just like living with people who move and talk and make noise. It’s a nice change.

My room’s tucked up on the third floor and has white walls that smell freshly painted, and it’s furnished but in an old-school way, as if the person before me had a thing for antiques. I don’t really care. It’s a fresh start with no memories attached, and that’s all I need. I have a full-size bed and a wood desk that’s barely big enough for my legs to fit underneath. There’s a dresser in the corner of the room with a mirror over it, which I take down and replace with a Bob Dylan concert poster Amanda bought me. I stuff Dylan’s framed poem in the bottom drawer of my nightstand. I set my guitar case against the wall next to the door. It only takes an hour to unpack my life.

My favorite part of my room is a door leading out to a fire escape. Whoever designed it figured there might as well be a sitting area in case you need to catch your breath while you’re dodging a burning building. So I’ve inherited a private balcony that faces southwest over rooftops sprawled out below. It’s an oasis from the rest of the world. It’s a place I can just be alone, which I need more than the average person. I crave space. It charges my batteries. It helps me breathe. Being around people can be so exhausting, because most of them love to take and barely know how to give. Except for a rare few.

My body is sore and tight from muscles that haven’t been used in more than a year. Coach Clark wasn’t kidding about his training intensity. He meets with me almost every day to make sure I’m lifting, doing squats, running, jump-roping, throwing, swinging. To make sure I’m paying for taking an extended vacation. But I like the physical pain. It reminds me that I’m finally focused on the future and on a goal I have some control over. And the endorphins give me this natural high. Like I’m immortal. Like nothing can hurt me. Kind of like sex. But not nearly as good.

I’m the new kid on the team, and so far everyone’s welcomed me in like a brother. Todd’s the only person who’s brought up Amanda, and I get the feeling he’s more sensitive than the average guy, because he admits he enjoys watching reality shows with his girlfriend and her friends. He told me how sorry he was and if I ever needed to talk he was there and if I wanted to come to a Bible study with him sometime I was always welcome.

The whole team knows why I’m a year late to accept the scholarship. I don’t mind that people don’t bring it up. It’s not a subject conducive to locker room talk. But I appreciate Todd’s giving me an outlet if I need it. I hope I won’t.

The girls on campus have been especially attentive to my needs. I’m the shiny new fresh meat, and they’re not shy about hinting they’d like a taste. One girl in particular, Amber McCaphrey, a sophomore volleyball player, has made herself particularly available. She took it upon herself to pay me a personal visit when I moved in, and volunteered her time as my private welcome committee. She showed me around campus, gave me a tour of the library, and her house, and even her bedroom. Ideally, that’s where every great tour ends, right? But my mind’s too occupied to think about her, and my heart’s too full to make space for her. She only magnifies what I miss about Dylan, and instead of making me forget, she makes it harder to move on.

The guys on the team think I’m crazy to pass her up. Amber’s got legs that keep going. Typical volleyball player body—long and lean and an ass that’s made for spandex, or maybe it’s the other way around. But she knows it. And she knows how to use this arsenal of sexual energy to get what she wants. She wears the miniskirts to prove it. And her hair and her face are always done up, even when she’s working out.

She also plays the leaning game. Very well.

But she tries too hard. She notices her appearance in anything she passes that offers a reflection. She smells like a box of perfume. Nothing is ever out of place. And to most people she’s perfect. But to me it’s so far from it, because my idea of perfect is being too busy laughing at yourself to care what you look like.

I don’t go more than an hour without wondering where Dylan is and who gets to hear her stories and make her laugh, and I have to shove the thoughts out of my head before I want to shred something.

***

After a month has passed, I decide it’s time to call her.
It occurs to me that I’ve still never talked to Dylan on the phone. We’ve fallen in love and had sex and told each other our life stories, but we’ve never even called each other. This is so backwards.

I made her give me her home phone number in Wisconsin before she left. She tried to convince me that we shouldn’t try to get ahold of each other. We should leave it in fate’s hands. Well, she can be the daydreaming optimist, but I’m going to be the levelheaded realist and know fate can only get you so far. It can put you down the right path or introduce you to a particular person, but the rest is up to you. Even the strongest storms need a wind to carry them in.

I pick up the white card her number and address are scribbled on and tap it on my nightstand. I sit on my bed and lean against the wall and dial the ten digits that will connect me with somebody that still holds the world in her hands.

It rings four times, and I’m about to hang up, and then a woman answers, sounding out of breath. I know it isn’t Dylan, because she sounds older.

“Hi, I’m a friend of Dylan’s?” I say it like it’s a question because
friend
isn’t quite the word I’d choose, but
lover
or
sexual partner
probably wouldn’t be appropriate. We never tried to label what we had.

“Oh,” she says. “You must be Gray.” Bam. Nails it on the first try. I can see where Dylan gets her intuitiveness from.

“Yeah,” I say, and hesitate, because I hadn’t planned this out. I don’t want to sound all needy and ask where Dylan is and who she’s with and if she’s talked about me and if she misses me and all the things I’d pay to know.

“I’m Dylan’s mom,” she says, all light and easy. “I was wondering when you’d call. It’s been, what, a month now?”

It’s been a month and six days since the morning she left. Way too long, in my opinion. But who’s keeping count?

“Yeah,” I say.

“I’ve heard so much about you,” she says, and she tells me she feels like she knows me. I rest my elbow on my knee and I’m starting to relax. Then I hear her scream, “Serena, Dylan’s boyfriend is on the phone,” and my stomach cramps at the word
boyfriend
because even Dylan’s never called me that, and then I hear the other line pick up and this younger girl gets on the phone.