First Comes Love Read online

  I’m such an idiot. Why didn’t I ask for her phone number?

  ***

  She isn’t in the courtyard the next day either. I bought her a pack of black-and-white film to surprise her in case she showed up. I scour the campus for the one girl wearing baggy jeans. I listen for her heavy tennis shoes brushing against the dry cement. I walk around the asphalt parking lot and scan the cars for Pickle, but all I discover is the ground is so hot I can feel the heat penetrate through my shoes until my feet burn. I could try to retrace my drive to her aunt’s house, but I wasn’t paying attention when I dropped her off. I even consider finding the photography professor and begging him to give me her last name.

  I spend Creative Writing mentally kicking my own ass. Mrs. Stiller assigns an essay to write about a person who’s recently made an impact on our lives. Seriously, this woman is my nemesis. I want to slide-tackle her for magnifying my mistake. While having to list characteristics of this heroic person, I realize with disgust that I wasn’t even nice to Dylan. I spent half of the time avoiding her. I treated her like a scab I wanted to pick and flick off because lately I’ve grown so used to bleeding. And when I did open up to her, all I did was crap all over the world. What a fun guy. No wonder she stopped hanging around campus waiting for me. She doesn’t like me. And why the hell would she? These days, I’m all the fun of a funeral.

  I stare up at the ceiling as this obvious truth hits me. She gave me a chance. She gave me multiple chances until she finally realized I’m an antisocial outcast. Life is too short to waste time on people who don’t lift you up, who don’t inspire you—they’ll eventually drain you. She’s moved on to people who will make her laugh, make her feel like her presence is appreciated. All this time, I completely missed out on getting to know her.

  I sink down in my seat. I am such a stupid asshole. She was different from any girl I’ve ever met, and I was too cynical and scared to act on it.

  ***

  After class I drive to Video Hutch for my work shift. I pass Taco Boys to grab lunch, and there, in bold black letters on the sign outside are the words GRAY’S SPECIAL. HALF OFF QUESADILLAS! I pull into the parking lot and blink up at the sign with disbelief. I walk inside and instinctively pull my hat low over my head. I scan the room to make sure I don’t recognize anyone. I saunter up to the counter and there, on the wall next to the cash registers for all to see, is every page of Dylan’s ridiculous letter, framed like an award. Surrounded by hearts and rainbows in classy script, is my name: Gray Thomas.

  I pick my jaw up off my chest and stand in line for my order. I duck my head low and listen as everyone in front of me asks for Gray’s Special. When it’s my turn, I tighten my lips and ask for two beef burritos and a side of nachos to go. The worker types in my order with a bored look and asks for my name. I hand her the cash and avoid her eyes.

  “Mike,” I say.

  ***

  I was counting on work to distract me. I planned on playing a comedy. Major League or The Jerk. Maybe a slasher film would be a good distraction. Saw III. Or, I could go all-out depressing. Schindler’s List. That film would make my problems seem minuscule. But when I clock in, my manger, Dillon (nice name, huh?), sticks me in the back to unload and label new movie arrivals as if he’s trying to punish me, as if the local news announced to the entire city what a dipshit I am for passing up the most amazing woman in town. I sit in the storage space, the size of a closet, where my thoughts threaten to crush me.

  After work I drive home, my mood close to depressed, and pull in next to my mom’s car. My dad’s out of town on another business trip. I haven’t seen him in weeks. My mom usually works herself to exhaustion and comes home long enough to take a shower and pass out by eight p.m. She’s a high school history teacher, and she used to take the summers off to golf, paint, and plan family road trips (usually of historical importance, to my boredom). Not anymore. This summer she’s teaching two classes at the high school. Two more at a community college. Distractions, distractions.

  There’s a note for me on the kitchen table.

  It was a really long day! I’m beyond tired—dinner is in the fridge! I love you. Good night.—Mom

  I glance at the clock and push out a heavy sigh. It’s only 8:23.

  I sit on the couch in the basement and finish off leftover pizza. It’s stale and lukewarm and the cheese is cemented to the dough. I don’t care. I don’t really taste it anyway. As I flip between ESPN and Comedy Central, I hear a knock at the front door. I walk upstairs, and when I open the door my stomach leaps as I see Dylan, smiling brilliantly, holding a bouquet of orange and purple flowers.

  “Dylan!” I say, and almost grab her in my arms. I hold on to the door frame to keep myself from acting so overjoyed. I have to be somewhat cool.

  She holds out the flowers. “They’re for your mom,” she says. She tells me they’re birds of paradise, her favorite flower. I accept the bouquet but my eyes are fixed only on her. Her hair is loose and falls around her shoulders. She’s wearing a baggy T-shirt and jeans with rips to expose both of her knobby knees. I wonder if she’ll ever try to look feminine. I’m also starting to wonder what her body looks like underneath all her oversize clothes.

  I realize my memory’s parched, and I drink her in. Did I really mistake this gorgeous girl for being awkward? Staring at her now, she’s the most confident person I’ve ever seen.

  “I hope your neighbors won’t mind I picked them out of their garden,” she says as she breezes past me into the foyer. My eyes snap off of her body to examine the flowers.

  “You picked these from next door?” I ask, my voice tense. I know very little about our retired neighbors, the Paulsons. But one thing I am aware of is that Mrs. Paulson is more protective of her desert garden than a mother bear is of newborn cubs.

  Dylan grins and tells me she’s kidding. She’d never be so mean. She follows me down the hall to the kitchen and I glare at her over my shoulder.

  “Where have you been all week?” I demand, like I’m her boyfriend and she hasn’t called to check in. She doesn’t look bothered by the time that’s lapsed since we’ve seen each other. She runs her fingers along the marble countertop and studies pictures on the refrigerator. She tells me she went to Tucson with her aunt for a few days to volunteer at an art festival.

  “Did you miss me?” she asks, and leans close to me, her eyes fixed on mine. My eyes fall to her lips, curved in a small grin, like she’s trying to be sexy. And it’s really sexy. I clear my throat and turn away to look in the cupboard for a vase.

  She asks, with a tone of disappointment, if I have a dog. I say no and her mouth falls a little.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  I set the flowers in a glass jar and she tells me she misses her dogs back home and needs a puppy fix.

  “What made you come to Phoenix for the summer, exactly?” I finally ask.

  She tells me she’s always wanted to walk on her hands.

  “What?” I ask.

  “You know, break free from the norm. See life from a whole new perspective. Arizona is about as opposite from Wisconsin as you can get.”

  She says they don’t have deserts in Wisconsin. They have humidity and thunderstorms and mosquitoes. They have lakes, huge lakes, and rivers and dark forests and fields full of fireflies.

  “But no saguaros,” she adds.

  I raise my eyebrows because I think there’s more to her decision than a change in landscape. “You drove thousands of miles from home to see a cactus?”

  “No,” she says. “I came out here to start my life.”

  “You weren’t alive in Wisconsin?” I joke. “What, were you in a coma?”

  She nods. “I was cryogenically frozen until two months ago.”

  “Right.”

  “I might as well have been,” she says. She tells me she grew up in a small town where life was safe, but that was the problem. It was too known, too predictable. It’s hard to feel adventurous when you know where every road lea
ds. It’s hard to be unique when everyone in high school is grouped together and pre-labeled, like a packaged brand.

  I nod because I can relate. In high school so much of your life is already scheduled out for you, you barely feel like you’re living it—more like you’re assigned to it. Your future doesn’t loom—it just sways lazily like an old familiar blanket drying on a clothesline in the sun. It isn’t liberating; it’s confining.

  “If you never leave where you come from, I don’t think you’ll ever figure out who you are,” she says. “Because how much is forced on you? How much of your personality is imposed instead of created? That’s why I left. I think people need to leave in order to find their potential.”

  “Don’t you miss your friends?” I ask.

  She shakes her head and says she doesn’t really miss people. “I’m always too excited imagining the people I’m about to meet. If you only focus on the things you leave behind, you’ll never go anywhere.”

  I tell her maybe she’s too good for that small town, but she shakes her head.

  “I never felt better than anyone. Just misplaced. Like there’s something more waiting for me. At the end of the day, I just want to be inspired. That’s it.”

  She helps me arrange the flowers. When she’s satisfied, she asks if we can give them to my mom.

  “She’s in bed,” I say, and Dylan and I both turn to glance at the clock on the microwave. It isn’t even nine. I look down at my feet and wait for the questions, for Dylan to judge my mom. Our lifestyle. Our quiet house. Our lifeless house. But she surprises me, as usual.

  “Want to get out of here?” she asks, as if she can feel the weight of my thoughts. I wonder if she can, if she’s starting to know me that well. I nod and she turns, taking long-legged strides toward the front door.

  First Unfold

  Dylan

  Pickle coughs to life and I turn up the volume to Cat Stevens. As we drive, his weathered voice matches the cracked desert scenery. Gray sifts through my CD collection in the console between us. I ask him what he’s doing and he informs me it’s the ultimate friendship test.

  “I need to approve of your music taste,” he says, as if this is a pivotal moment in our relationship.

  “That sounds a little judgmental,” I say.

  “I am judgmental,” he points out. He explains that if you look at your good friends, you always have similar music tastes. It comes down to an issue of respect.

  “Can someone who listens to Miley Cyrus really have a long-lasting relationship with an indie rock band connoisseur?” he asks.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “Not a chance.” He insists the kind of music you listen to says so much about your choices in life. The girl who listens to Miley Cyrus gets coffee at Starbucks, while the indie rock band connoisseur only buys local. She joins a sorority and he joins a garage band. She shops at boutiques and he will only set foot in thrift stores. She goes to Cancun for spring break. He skis in Boulder. Nothing in common.

  “You have some very interesting theories, Gray,” I say.

  I only have a couple albums, and he’s surprised my car actually has a working CD player. He flips through them and offers short critiques: Cat Stevens’s greatest hits (excellent compilation), the Killers (great album), the Cure (impressive), Paul Simon (essential), and the Clash. He meets my eyes and smiles, and I see his respect for me skyrocket.

  “So, where do you want to go?” I ask, secretly pleased I passed his test. I rarely care what people think of me, but with Gray, even a trace of a smile feels like a compliment because I know it’s sincere. He couldn’t be fake if he tried. He points straight ahead, to a small cluster of lights in the distance.

  “Camelback Mountain,” he says. I nod and turn the music up. We both look out at the fading light in the sky. The desert is world-famous for her sunsets. At night, she dresses up the sky with a shawl of feathery clouds. Her horizon is so vast, so sparse, that the skyline stretches for hundreds of miles and a neon color show highlights the world. Tonight her metallic pinks and oranges drape over the low, purple hills in the distance. The sight is spellbinding enough to make the devil admit there’s beauty on earth.

  We drive up the slope of Camelback and I pull off to the shoulder when mansions creep into view, built against the steep, rocky bluffs. We park and climb the road on foot to get a better look at the monstrous homes, spaced acres apart. Hot air presses against us as if it’s blown in from a distant fire. We stop to stare up at a miniature castle complete with spindly towers and crenellated rooftops. We make up stories about the people who live inside. Gray predicts most of them are lawyers or doctors. I imagine they’re full of scientists cloning endangered species, or kung fu fighters training CIA agents for hand-to-hand combat. Maybe engineers live inside, building a giant robot army to defend Earth from the coming alien attack from Mars. I claim one house is a fancy boarding school for celebrity children and another, a rehab clinic for the celebrity children’s parents.

  We stop walking when we stumble onto an empty lot, where a house is beginning construction. The ground has been leveled and a cement foundation was recently poured. We walk around the cement ground and design the house. We put the bathroom in the corner, the kitchen facing northwest. I map out the living room, where the fireplace will go and how the wing chairs will be situated. Gray informs me the room needs a sectional, or at a minimum, two recliners.

  “You can’t watch sports in wing-backed chairs,” he argues. I inform him there will be no television in this house, which starts a heated debate, only resolved by a compromise. There will be a television in the basement. And surround-sound speakers. And a poker table.

  We decide it needs a second story for bedrooms and a loft because lofts are perfect for building forts, a necessity in any sensible home design. I point out the dining room would work best coming off the back end of the house, where the view of the city is a galaxy of lights, hundreds of feet below.

  We sit down at the edge of the foundation, both of us visualizing our finished house. I ask Gray if he could live anywhere, where it would be.

  He leans back on his hands.

  “I’d live in New Zealand,” he says, “on the North Island.” He tells me his dad collects travel photography books piled on the living room table and that’s where he discovered the spot. In the tip of New Zealand, the island breaks off into tiny clusters, and those make up the Bay of Islands. He’d live in the middle of them, in a white beach house with huge windows looking out at the sea. He’d sleep outside on the porch every night. He’d own kayaks and speedboats and go parasailing every day. He’d learn how to sail.

  I watch his face change as he talks. It becomes more hopeful, as if he’s looking into the future for the first time and imagining it could be a paradise. It’s a new attitude for him.

  Gray

  I’m trying to concentrate on the city skyline below, but my eyes keep getting pulled down to the rip in Dylan’s jeans, exposing her naked knee. I’m tempted to run my hand over her skin, and the ache to touch her becomes so powerful, my fingers start to burn.

  “Can I ask you something?” I say. I hesitantly pick up my hand and run it through her hair. It falls soft between each of my fingers. My heart races from the touch. Dylan inhales a sharp breath and meets my eyes. Bits of light reflect inside them.

  “Why are you here?” I ask. She stares at me with surprise. I drop my hand out of her hair so I can think clearly. “I’m not stupid,” I say. “I know I’m not a party to be around. I’m cynical and boring and I’m not even nice to you.”

  “You’re not boring,” she insists. “And you can be nice. I think it’s accidental, but it does happen.”

  “You know what I mean,” I say. We both have our sandals off and I run my toe along the top of her foot, down to her bony ankle. She doesn’t move it away. “I’ve spent half the time trying to blow you off. Which I feel really bad about, by the way. And I’m glad you came back. But why did you?”

  She s
miles.

  “And don’t say it’s because I’m cute,” I add.

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. You’re a challenge,” she says. I raise my eyebrows at this simple answer and tell her I’m sure she can find more upbeat, happy people in this city that are also a challenge.

  “But they wouldn’t have your prolific theories,” she points out. Well, that is true.

  “I like people that take time to figure out,” she says. “That’s one thing I’ll never be—mysterious. I put it all out there. So, I’m intrigued by people who make it hard to get to know them. People opposite me, I guess.”

  She studies my confused expression. “You play video games, right?” she asks. I nod. What guy doesn’t?

  “Okay, you know how in video games, the character you’re trying to beat has a life bar at the bottom of the screen that you need to break down? But you need to learn all their moves and defenses before you can? Well, you’re kind of like that.”

  I look away as I visualize this random analogy. “So, you’re trying to deplete my life bar?”

  She smirks as she applies some Chap Stick to her lips.

  I’m jealous of Chap Stick. There’s a first.

  “I’m trying to kick down all these walls you’ve built up to see what’s underneath. The more I knock them down, the more I like what I see,” she says. “And I think you’re cute,” she adds.

  She looks out at the lights below and changes the subject.

  “You know what I love most about the desert?” she asks. I shake my head. “It’s the only place where the earth is stripped naked. Totally exposed. It’s like you can’t help but be yourself when you’re surrounded by it. You can’t help but bare your thoughts.”

  She looks back at me and waits. Her eyes are determined.

  “Okay,” I say. I ask her what she wants to know.