First Comes Love Read online

  “Duke and Stanford?” he asks, still smiling. “Why not Harvard? Are you trying to lowball my intelligence?”

  We start walking and I ask if he’s mad and he shakes his head. He tells me he’s just annoyed that his past caught up with him on Mill Avenue of all places. I nod, but I know what’s really bothering him—that an overly perceptive girl he barely knows was there to witness it.

  He looks at me and grins again, and I know it’s his way of saying thanks. We’re both silent as we reach the end of the street, where it dissolves into a city park along the edge of Tempe Town Lake, a shiny jewel of water with a tall bridge built on top of it like a crown. Geckos run around our feet and I walk down the grassy hill to the lake. Gray follows behind me and I turn to see him watching me like he’s waiting for something.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what that was all about?” he asks.

  I study him. His mouth looks bolted shut with a dozen locks. “No,” I say simply. “You don’t look like you’re aching to talk about it.” Gray exhales a long breath of relief and shakes his head. I don’t pry any further. I lift my camera and aim it at the calm water, mirroring the sky. The shutter clicks when I take the picture.

  “I should take you home,” he says.

  I nod, but first, I need to capture a memory. I want to freeze my favorite part of this day. I turn and focus the lens on Gray and take a shot of his profile before he can turn away.

  “Hey,” he says, and tries to block the camera with his hand. He tells me he never agreed to a photo shoot, but he’s grinning again and his eyes are lighter. That’s three smiles in five minutes. I feel like I deserve a medal. Sometimes the smallest victories in life are more rewarding than the greatest milestones.

  ***

  Gray drives me home and I point out directions to a sprawling estate in a gated community in Scottsdale.

  “Are you kidding me?” he asks as we drive by homes that look large enough to be hotels. I tell him to turn into a driveway leading to a three-car garage, and he asks me what kind of trust fund I recently inherited.

  “Not what you expected?”

  He stares down at my baggy, faded jeans. “You dress like you should be pitching a tent in a state park.” He cuts himself off as if worried he’s offended me. “You just don’t seem . . . I don’t know. Materialistic.”

  “I’m not, but my aunt got a nice divorce settlement. Plastic surgeons must do pretty well in Phoenix.” Gray smirks and we look at the house, which appears to be three homes glued together, perfect for a family of twenty. He notices the beat-up orange Volvo station wagon parked next to us. The bumpers are covered with rust and the paint is warped and peeling.

  “Looks like her car could use a face-lift,” he says.

  “That’s my beast. His name’s Pickle.”

  He wrinkles his eyebrows at the orange car.

  “I see the resemblance,” he says, and points to my Wisconsin license plate. “You’re a long way from home.”

  I nod. “That’s the idea.” I open the door but I stall before getting out—one foot’s on the driveway and the other’s still lingering in his car like it doesn’t want to move. “Can we do this again tomorrow?” I ask easily, as if we’re already friends. Because I feel like we are. From Gray’s stunned expression, he doesn’t agree.

  “Do what?”

  “Explore the city.” I tell him maybe we can avoid Mill Avenue. “I’m glad I got to see it, but those people take themselves way too seriously. I feel like you need to be on a guest list just to walk into some of those stores.”

  “Welcome to Phoenix,” he says. He stares back at me with stubborn eyes, like I picked the wrong local if I’m looking for excitement, but I return the look because I think he’s wrong. He has a venturous side, I can sense it, but for some reason it’s buried.

  “Listen, Dylan, I don’t do a whole lot. I don’t think I’m the guy for you.”

  I smile at him. “Of course you are,” I say, and hop out before he can argue. “See you tomorrow.”

  I take long, confident strides toward the giant, shiny oak door, past manicured trees and shrubs and a lawn that manages to be lush with thick green grass in the dry desert heat. In my baggy jeans and messy hair, I know I don’t fit into this plastic palace. But I don’t want to fit in. That’s when no one notices you. You leave a longer impression when you’re brave enough to stand out.

  First Challenge

  Gray

  I walk out the front doors of the English building the next afternoon and there she is, sitting on a bench in the courtyard, her camera adorning her neck, quick to access, like she’s a paparazzo waiting to snag a photo of a celebrity student. She’s wearing her usual black tennis shoes, but today she has on green hiking shorts with gray socks pulled up to her knees. When she sees me, she jumps up and sprints to my side before I even reach the sidewalk. I blink at her, still half asleep from class. Her presence jolts me awake like an alarm clock, and I’m not exactly happy about it.

  “Normal people slow down when it’s this hot,” I inform her.

  “Do you have plans today?” she asks, her eyes wild. Before I can formulate an excuse, she nods. “That’s what I thought.”

  She grabs my hand in hers and swings them back and forth as if we’re childhood best friends. She pulls me toward her car and informs me that she took over the job of itinerary coordinator because I lack the necessary enthusiasm. Then she announces we’re going on a hike. I yank my hand out of hers and tell her she’s nuts.

  “It’s eight hundred degrees out,” I say. “Have you ever heard of heat stroke?” She smiles and informs me that we’ll be fine, that she brought sunscreen. I decide there’s no point in talking common sense to this girl. She doesn’t speak the language.

  She unlocks the door of her rusted jalopy wagon.

  “Live a little,” she tells me. “You’re never going to experience anything if you wait around for perfect conditions. Look at the sky, Gray. It’s gorgeous. It’s perfect right now, and you’re miss- ing it.”

  I squint up at the stark blue sky. There isn’t a trace of a cloud, just a deep blue abyss spread above us.

  “And it’s only a hundred and five degrees,” she adds. I reluctantly sit down in the trapped heat of her car. We pull out of the parking lot and the pedals squeak when Dylan presses down on the clutch. The black leather gearshift is worn smooth, and the car rattles defiantly as if the engine is going to explode when we accelerate onto the highway.

  “Pickle doesn’t like going over fifty-five,” Dylan explains. I stare at her and raise my eyebrows. She informs me Pickle’s favorite music is oldies, he gets along best with Ford makes and models and he prefers to brake rather than accelerate. She lightly presses her foot on the brake and Pickle immediately hums in response. “See?” she says with a knowing smile.

  I let out a long sigh. I can’t believe we’re having a conversation about her car’s preferred music taste and driving style. I can’t believe she tricked me into spending another day with her. I have a life, I want to tell her. I have four episodes of Myth Busters to catch up on. Okay, I don’t have a life.

  I look out the window at a range of rolling brown hills in the distance. The word Arizona is written on one of the peaks in white capital letters.

  “Why do people write on the mountains out here?” Dylan asks me over Pickle’s loud rattling.

  “Because they can,” I say.

  Her eyes narrow. “It doesn’t mean they should. It looks like giant piles of bird poop smeared into letters.”

  “I guess you could look at it that way. I see it as white paint.”

  “If you could write one word on a mountain for everybody to see, what would you write?” Is she capable of a serious conversation?

  “Are you capable of a serious conversation?”

  She looks me straight in the eye and insists that this is very serious.

  “That’s a tough one,” I finally say.

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nbsp; Her eyes perk up to discover we agree on something. “I know! There are so many great words, like intrigue and scintillating and serendipity and indecorous and cataclysmically.”

  “Cata-what?”

  “But there are also some terrible words,” she continues. “Like membrane. And moist. And protoplasm.” She emphasizes this point by pretending to vomit next to me. I look over and pretend to be grossed out by the imaginary vomit.

  Dylan continues to banter as we head south, and her voice starts to relax me because it’s a distraction. I stretch my legs out and lift my face to the window to catch the hot desert breeze. I rest my dirty tennis shoes on Pickle’s dashboard, and I’m comfortable. I can’t help but grin to myself, because I realize Dylan wasn’t being rude yesterday. She was just being herself. Why bother asking somebody permission to be yourself?

  She talks about the photography class she’s taking at Mesa. It’s her Aunt Diane’s idea, she says, to give her something to do for the summer. She’s housesitting while her aunt’s traveling to art shows around the country, and she’s helping out with house projects to make money, mostly painting jobs. She tells me her aunt’s recently divorced and recently out of the closet. Dylan claims she knew all along, ever since a family reunion when Dylan was in middle school. Aunt Diane (Aunt Dan, as she’s now referred to lovingly by her family) spent the entire reunion trying to coordinate a women-only rugby match. A dead giveaway, Dylan claims. She also owns one too many pairs of those khaki hiking pants that can zip off at the knee and become shorts. To my surprise, I’m laughing.

  We exit the highway for Picacho Peak State Park, and desolate dry hills surround us. It isn’t much of a park. It looks like a barren, dusty terrain full of tumbleweeds. We curve along a winding blacktop road until we come to a deserted parking lot. A small state park sign welcomes us, faded in the baking sunlight.

  Her car door squeaks open as if it’s screaming in pain (Pickle has arthritic joints, Dylan claims). She tosses some water bottles in her backpack and checks her film supply, and we head up a rocky trail. The highway is still visible from the park—the scrubby desert bushes and cactus leave miles of visibility in every direction, and the roar of semi engines in the distance compete with the noisy humming of cicadas.

  Dylan talks about her assignment as we head up a winding trail. She has to pick one stationary object and capture it from four different angles. In class, they’ll dye these four images different colors. The point is to show how stepping around things and taking the time to see them from different perspectives changes their entire image. Her dad gave her his old manual camera for the summer. She tells me about shutter speed and backlighting, framing and focusing.

  While we hike, we discover the unique beauty of this state park—it’s home to a sprawling community of saguaros. These cactuses are Arizona’s mascot; they grow to be hundreds of years old and their green, prickly stems look like arms reaching out to the sun. We walk up to a saguaro with a gaping wound in its side, as if a giant bent down and took a huge bite out of its green flesh. Its skeleton is exposed—a core of long, vertical beams of tan wood. Dylan stops to examine it and I stand next to her.

  “It’s dying,” I say. “When the center is exposed like that, it doesn’t have a chance.”

  “But it’s beautiful,” she points out. I stare at the shriveling cactus and try to see the beauty in it. “That’s the way I want to go out,” she decides.

  “What?” I ask. “Torn up and ripped open?”

  She shakes her head. “Totally exposed, with no regrets. You can tell this cactus lived; it has the battle scars to prove it. Why go out looking perfect and put together? It means you didn’t experience anything. You didn’t take any risks.”

  I walk around it and Dylan follows me, snapping pictures. When she isn’t looking, while her focus is concentrated on finding the perfect frame, I steal glances at her. She seems different today. Almost graceful. Her tall, gangly body ducks and crouches, and my eyes are drawn to her movements. I watch her back and neck curl into a squat. I notice her long fingers, with silver rings twinkling in the sun. I watch the muscles tighten on her slender arms, where thin bracelets clang from her movements.

  We analyze what the cactuses are doing. She points out a cactus that’s dancing and one that’s praying. I point out a cactus with all of its fingerly stems curled over, except for the middle one, which is sticking straight up in the air.

  “It’s flipping us off,” I say. She stands next to me and studies the middle finger, stretched out proud and defiant toward the freeway in the distance.

  “You must feel a special connection with this one,” she says.

  She snaps a picture and looks over at me with a smile. She’s smiled a hundred times today, but this one is different. It fills her eyes. It makes my breath catch. I look away and drain the bottle of water. The heat must be messing with my head.

  She turns and steps back on the path, but I stand with my feet planted, mentally trying to coach my feelings into being reasonable. I can’t actually like this girl. She’s too random. She sprawls out on public sidewalks and makes friends with homeless people. She insists her car has a personality. She thinks cactuses move like people. But few people surprise me. And my eyes linger on her body and my mind lingers on her words. I can’t deny that. I internally store this realization in my Oh, Shit file.

  I don’t want to feel anything toward Dylan. It’s safer to stay numb.

  Dylan

  We loop around the trail and head back to the parking lot, where Pickle is waiting for us in the gravel yard. I open up a cooler and two floating sandwiches slosh back and forth in the melted ice water. I inspect the baggies and they’re still sealed, so I hand Gray a sandwich and a soda. I grab a bag of chips and a pack of licorice, and we sit on top of a picnic table with our legs crossed and look out at the desert plain.

  Gray takes off his hat and runs his fingers through damp, curly hair that’s so dark, it’s almost black. It’s thick and jumps out in all directions, as if to celebrate a rare moment of freedom. It makes his eyes stand out.

  “So,” I say. “You helped me with my assignment. Now let me help you with one of yours.”

  He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and chews on his sandwich. He takes a long drink before he answers me as if he’s contemplating whether or not to open up, no matter how casual the topic. Finally he says he’s stuck in a poetry unit and it isn’t exactly his strength.

  “How can you say it isn’t your strength?”

  “Because it’s poetry,” he says, like it’s some kind of stomach flu.

  “It’s the only style of writing where you can break all the rules,” I say. “It’s so liberating.”

  He chews on his sandwich and considers this. A gust of wind blows his hair over his forehead. “Yeah, but you have to use metaphors and personification and all that crap.”

  “Crap?” I argue. “It’s just sewing words together. Random words in any order. It doesn’t even have to mean anything. It just has to mean something to you.”

  He smirks and explains this one has to mean something. He tells me he has to write a descriptive poem. I take a bite of licorice and tell him it sounds like my photography assignment but with words. I point out the hills around us.

  “You could describe a saguaro,” I offer.

  He finishes his sandwich and grins. “Yeah, a poem about a cactus. How original. Maybe my mom will tape it to the fridge next to the one I wrote in preschool.”

  I unzip my bag and pull out my inspiration log. Gray notices some words scribbled on the front cover. He scoots closer so he can see, and reads out loud:

  “Normal: Conforming to the average or standard type. Weird: Odd, eccentric, suggesting the supernatural.”

  He meets my eyes and I smile. He leans away and studies me for a few seconds, as if he still doubts my planet of origin. It’s a common reaction from people, since most of my functioning brain cells are programmed for random thoughts.

&nbs
p; “Did you make up those definitions?” he asks. I shake my head and tell him I looked them up. He doesn’t have to ask which definition characterizes me. It’s also easy to see which category he currently fits into, and he looks insulted.

  “You know, being normal isn’t a terrible thing,” he says.

  “It isn’t terrible,” I agree. “It’s just a lack of courage.” He narrows his eyes and I point down at the cover. “You have to admit, one of those words sounds a little bit more exciting. Which way do you want to live your life?”

  He glances back at the definitions. “It’s something to think about,” he says. Then his eyes move up, but slowly this time. I noticed Gray’s starting to look at me today. Really look at me. Sometimes his eyes linger.

  I uncap a pen and open up to a blank page and start to write. Strands of hair blow into my eyes and I brush them away. I hand the journal to Gray, and he tries to decipher my small, messy penmanship.

  “I think too fast for my hand to keep up,” I inform him. He reads the line out loud.

  “‘Ode to the Mighty Green Ones.’” He sets the journal down and I nod for him to continue.

  “Am I supposed to do something?” he asks.

  “It’s the title of your poem. We’ll take turns writing it, line by line.”

  I wait for him to say forget it, but he picks up the pen. He throws a few chips in his mouth and starts writing. He tosses the journal back at me, and his writing is clear and neat and legible—the opposite of mine. I shout his words into the wind, and it makes him jump with surprise.

  “My Phoenix cactus,” I yell, and clench my fist in the air for dramatic emphasis. I look over at Gray and nod. “That’s a solid start.”

  This goes on for an hour. We scratch out lines; we take turns standing on the picnic table and reciting our poem to the family of cactuses around us for approval. I try sneaking the words phallic and erect into his poem, since saguaros are the most phallic plants I’ve ever seen, but he points out his classmates will read this and he doesn’t want to sound like he has an obsession with the male anatomy.