Maya stands at the mirror in her cutoffs. She pulls the shirt over her head. She knows this is one of Aubrey’s favorites.
“Looks good on you,” Aubrey says, and the mirror confirms this. The white sets off the summer gold in Maya’s skin—although it doesn’t fit her the way it fits Aubrey, who has cleavage.
“I don’t know,” Maya says. “I don’t want it to look like I think this is a date.”
“Isn’t it, though? I mean, don’t we want this to be a date?”
Maya grins. “We do.”
“So?”
“All we’re doing is going for a drive.”
“A lot can happen on a drive.”
“I don’t even know if Frank likes me.”
“Of course he does. He picked you up at the library, of all places.”
They laugh, although Maya’s not sure why it’s funny. She feels giddy and nervous: she’s supposed to meet Frank in twenty minutes and still isn’t sure why. She leaves for BU in three weeks, and all they’ve shared so far are two conversations at the library: the first when they met, and the second when Maya went back in the hope that he was working.
Hey, do you want to hang out sometime? She had been the one to ask. She’s had plenty of crushes in her life, but this might be the strongest, the most sudden. She can’t stop thinking of that look he had given her, glittering and sly, like they were in on a joke together. Maybe she’s just setting herself up to be hurt, but she had felt compelled to see him again. And she felt comfortable asking him out, which is a first for her. She’s made out with boys—three, to be exact—but never had a boyfriend.
“Mascara?” Aubrey says. She approaches, mascara wand in hand, and Maya closes her eyes. She feels the bristles dragging through her lashes and smells the Jolly Rancher on Aubrey’s breath, and beneath the candy, the smell of a cigarette snuck out back. Maya opens her eyes again, and there they are, side by side in the mirror: Maya-and-Aubrey—their two names had blurred together since ninth grade. A clique of two. Hard to say what high school would have been like if they hadn’t sat beside each other in honors English.
Aubrey’s green eyes are stark against the cherry-black dye of her hair, and her outfit, as usual, is more stylish than Maya’s. A man’s vest over a bralette and black bicycle shorts. Beside her, Maya wears the borrowed shirt with its silver clasps and her own fraying cutoffs. And behind them, the familiar mess of Aubrey’s room. Piles of clothes on the floor, notebooks, novels, orange soda cans, and CD cases. Polaroid pictures on the walls, more than half of which Maya is in, and strings of Christmas lights. Maya knows this room as well as her own. She knows it’s not just with Frank that she is running out of time. She believes she and Aubrey will always be friends, but they will never get this time back.
The digital clock by Aubrey’s bed reads 6:48.
“I better go,” Maya says.
“Have fun. Don’t forget about next Friday.”
“Next Friday?”
Aubrey frowns.
“Oh, right . . . Tender Wallpaper. Duh.”
Aubrey’s favorite band. Maya likes them too, but not as much; she likes music that makes her want to dance. She knows the steps to every new dance as soon as it comes out, even if she only dances in her room.
“I seriously can’t wait,” she says as she heads out the door.
* * *
— At seven, she waits in front of the library for Frank to get off work. It’s as muggy and bright as it was all day, but that’s not why her palms are sweating. When the doors swing open, she does her best to appear casual, but it’s not him. She waits. Strange now to think of how often she must have walked past him without noticing him. When she’d asked how long he’d been working there, he had said six weeks. How many times had she strolled obliviously by?
Maya had told Aubrey he was hot, but he isn’t really. It’s something else, some other quality he possesses. A magnetism. Frank exits the library a few minutes past seven, smiling warmly, but his hug feels platonic. A quick, one-armed clasp.
“Hey, sorry I’m late.”
“No worries.”
His car is a boxy sedan with cracked leather seats, and it’s not actually his, he says—the car belongs to his dad. As he steers them out of the parking lot, Frank explains to Maya that, although he is from Pittsfield, he hasn’t lived here for years. His parents had divorced when he was twelve, and his mom took him to live in Hood River, Oregon, which was where Frank had been prior to this summer. The reason he came back, he tells her—the only reason he’d taken a part-time job at the library—was that his father was now dying.
“Oh,” Maya says, “I . . .” She imagines how it must feel to have a father and to lose him. She reaches for Frank’s hand, then stops herself. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”
He gives her a sad smile, then changes the subject. He drives them along Onota Lake, its shimmering blue surface flashing through the trees. Maya wonders if he plans to stop here and park, but then the car keeps going, the lake receding in her side mirror. The cool wind tousling their hair. Frank asks her what her favorite book is, and she tells him that she has more than one. She says Like Water for Chocolate is the best book she’s read all year, A Wrinkle in Time was her favorite as a child, and as far as she’s concerned, nothing compares to the Greek myths. Frank’s attention on her is delicious, total absorption, like she’s the most interesting person in the world.
“What about your father’s book?”
“My father’s book?” She can’t explain why the question takes her aback, but it does, and in that moment Maya realizes she has no idea where they are. She had been so caught up in the conversation that she hadn’t noticed them turning onto an empty narrow road through the woods. A flash of disorientation, then a fear too quick to articulate, a fear of strangers, of night, of forest. Very soon it will be dark out.
“Where are we going?” she asks.
“You ever been to Balance Rock?”
Now that he’s said it, she recognizes the place—she has been here, but not in years. Once on a field trip in second grade, and other times to hike the trails with her mom. As the small, familiar parking lot comes into view, and Frank pulls a bag of weed from the glove compartment, Maya’s fear melts away as quickly as it had taken shape. She hopes Frank hadn’t heard it in her voice.
They’re just here to get high. She watches him roll a joint, his quick fingers reminding her of the magicians Aubrey likes to watch.
They smoke in the parking lot, at the edge of the trees, Maya on the lookout for people while Frank doesn’t seem to care. He smokes as leisurely as he had at the library, his brazenness casual and confident, and yet to her, he is so conscientious, careful to blow his smoke upward so that it won’t waft into her face. She falls quiet as they inhale, and so does he, but the silence isn’t awkward; it fills with the singing of cicadas and the rustling of wind through leaves. A much more comfortable silence than might be expected between two people who hardly know each other. “So,” Frank says. “Should we check out the rock?”