Something Like Gravity

by Amber Smith

  “You are happy, though, aren’t you?” I’d never seen Isobel show any self-doubt or even the slightest hint of her life not being exactly what she wanted.

  “Happy enough.” She nodded.

  “Aunt Isobel—” I began, but she didn’t let me say any more.

  “Oh Jesus, let’s not get all maudlin.” She waved her hand between us, like she could shoo away all the residue of her words. “The whole point is that I don’t ever want to see you holding back just because it’s safer that way. I want to see you living your life all in. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “I do.”

  • • •

  In my room I changed out of my clothes and got ready for bed. Before I put on my baggy T-shirt and the pair of shorts I always wore as pajamas, I stood in front of the mirror.

  I wasn’t brave enough to do this every day. But sometimes I could.

  I met my own eyes in the reflection. I covered my breasts with my hands.

  Being honest was what I wanted not too long ago—I wanted to go back to regular school, I wanted to be out, I wanted to start living again. It was me wanting to be honest with myself and my parents and the world that led to me being here in Carson in the first place. I really wanted to be all in, like Isobel said.

  But honesty is a lot prettier in theory.

  I closed my eyes and pulled my oversize T-shirt on and didn’t open them again until I was facing away from the mirror. I wondered if it was possible to meet the right person, but at the wrong time. I never thought I would have feelings for someone, not when I’d only just started transitioning, not during this summer when everything was only temporary, not before I had my life together.

  I climbed into bed and brought the covers up tight around my chest, and finally took out my phone. I texted Coleton: How do you know if a girl likes you?

  He wrote back immediately: no idea . . .

  Me: Yeah, me neither :)

  Coleton: Link: How Do You Know If a Girl Likes You?

  Coleton: that’s all I got for ya, sorry

  I laughed out loud.

  Me: Thank you, very helpful!

  Coleton: I try

  Then, after a minute, he wrote again: So, does she?

  Me: I dunno

  Coleton: Who is she?

  Me: My aunt’s neighbor

  Me: Maia

  Coleton: awesome

  Me: Maybe

  Me: So what was your ‘guess what’ about the other day?

  He sent a picture of a scoreboard at the Battleground, the arcade we always went to—it was the Transformers pinball machine. Under the top scores it said:

  1st CTN

  2nd MGF

  3rd CTN

  4th CTN

  5th CTN

  This was a major feat. The Battleground was our haunt; it was where Coleton and I became friends, at a birthday party we both were invited to in fifth grade because the whole class received invitations. Of all the games at the Battleground, including mini bowling and laser tag, Transformers pinball had been, for some reason unbeknownst to me, Coleton’s Achilles’ heel. Only I knew that CTN stood for Coletron, not Coleton.

  I felt really shitty for not responding before, because I could clearly imagine him there at the arcade beating the mysterious MGF’s insanely high top score that had been on the board for the past six years, and having no one to celebrate with.

  Me: Holy shit! You freakin did it!

  Coleton: manager gave me free nachos :)

  Me: When I get back to bflo I need to see irl

  Coleton: cool

  Coleton: Alright, gonna crash out. Good news about the girl who *might* like you

  Coleton: keep me posted

  Me: Thanks! Nite

  The thought of being completely honest and all in with Maia was still terrifying, but the news of Coleton’s pinball victory gave my confidence a little boost. Maybe there was some small part of me that was beginning to let in a sliver of hope. Hope that maybe she could accept me, even if I didn’t quite know how to accept myself yet.

  As I lay my head on the pillow, a sensation of vertigo passed through my body, like I could feel the axis of my life silently tilting.

  Maia was changing everything.

  MAIA

  I LAY DOWN IN BED and smiled at the ceiling. Roxie jumped up next to me and panted in my face, wanting me to share this rare light feeling with her.

  She curled up next to me, and I ran my hands over her coat, feeling the lumps and bumps and muscle waste of her old age. But somehow everything felt just right. Like things would turn out okay, after all.

  The only thing that could’ve made tonight even better was if I had not looked away when we said good-bye. If I had been bold and brave and kissed him like I really wanted to.

  CHRIS

  IT WAS FOUR O’CLOCK IN the afternoon, and I was lying on my bed with my laptop sitting open next to me, trying to not look up any more stupid websites about how to tell if a girl likes you, or trolling for more advice on the LGBTQ social media sites I basically only ever lurked on. There was tons of advice out there. Advice in general. Advice about dating. About coming out. About coming out as trans to a person you want to be dating. When and where and how and if.

  The consensus was: There was no consensus.

  So I did what I always did when I needed to zone out and forget about my tiny human problems. I pulled out my journal and I turned on the International Space Station Livestream channel. I wrote down the date, and scribbled the note:

  Day 21 in Carson, NC

  There was so little I was sure of at this particular moment, I had nothing else to write. Instead I watched the video feed of Earth rotating beneath the satellite. It all looked so calm and clean and orderly from 250 miles above the surface—the oceans seemed so smooth, reflecting the sunlight like a ball bearing. Around the globe, the constants of the planet did their thing: The clouds passed over the land, the Sun rose and fell, the gentle blue halo of atmosphere shimmered ephemerally around it all—Earth transforming into this perfect giant marble where nothing bad could ever happen.

  For the first time, I was beginning to wonder about the validity of my big theory, if things really are orchestrated and perfect, like I always thought, or if it’s all just random chaos and happenstance and dumbass luck that we happen to be living and breathing on this spinning rock, held in place by invisible forces at this particular time, in this particular place.

  The ISS orbits Earth every ninety-two minutes, so every forty-six minutes you’re guaranteed to see either a sunrise or a sunset. I had seen two sunsets and one sunrise when I looked up at the ceiling fan. The incessant tapping of the metal chain pull string against the glass light fixture—tick, tick, tick, tick, tick—was driving me insane.

  I stood on top of the bed but then had to stoop under the fan. I held the chain and found that there was one of those clasps that the tiny metal balls click into. I was struggling to detach it; the joints were stiff and tight from probably never being moved since the fan was installed forty years earlier.

  A small hollow knock sounded from the hallway, accompanied by, “That looks dangerous.”

  I looked over to find Maia standing in the doorway.

  “Your aunt told me I should come up,” she explained, hitching her thumb in the direction of the staircase down the hall. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “Yeah, I was just trying to fix this stupid—never mind.” I jumped down off the bed. The tick, tick, tick-ing immediately started up again.

  “It’s different in here in the light,” she said, still standing in the doorway.

  She was looking around, at the bare walls and the tops of the dressers, the laptop that was still opened to the ISS footage, my journal sitting on the nightstand.

  “Come in,” I offered. I was still standing at the foot of my bed. “It’s kind of messy, sorry. And hot.”

  “It’s hot everywhere.” She walked in, toward the center of the room, and then pivot
ed on her heel so we were facing each other. The moment our eyes met, she said, “You should see my room—I mean, because it’s a lot messier than this. I mean, this isn’t even messy at all, so—”

  As she stood there in front of me, I noticed that she was clutching the strap of her bag so that it pulled down across her body. I couldn’t help but linger a moment on her chest, where the strap was pulled between her breasts, tightening her shirt. I pulled my gaze away suddenly, hoping she hadn’t noticed.

  “So, what’s up?” I asked.

  “Nothing really. I got out of work early and I guess I didn’t feel like going home. Thought I’d see if you wanted to hang out. Or something,” she added.

  “Hang out here?” I asked.

  She shrugged and pulled the bag up over her head, but didn’t set it down.

  “Do you wanna sit?” I closed my laptop and moved it off the bed, since that was the only place for sitting. I propped my pillows up against the headboard and leaned into them, and she brought her bag with her as she sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed. She set her bag in between us, and took a breath like she was about to say something, but then exhaled.

  Looking around again, she kept nodding—I’m not sure she even knew she was doing it.

  “Hey, do you want my number?” I asked her. “Just to have.”

  In my brain’s overdeveloped fantasy cortex, I’d already played out a brief vignette in which I asked Maia that question, and in response she held her hand out to me and let me write my number on that soft, fleshy part of her palm. I’d gotten to the part where I was cradling her hand in mine, about to press the pen against her skin—

  Then she pulled her phone out of her bag, and said, “Yeah. Here, save it in my contacts.” She handed me her phone, open to a new contact.

  I hated my brain sometimes.

  I typed in my name and my number and handed it back to her. My phone pinged on the nightstand where it was sitting next to my journal. I tipped the screen toward my face. A message from a number I didn’t recognize.

  Now you have mine. Hi!

  I tapped out a

  Hi back atcha

  She replied with a thumbs-up emoji.

  I added a :)

  And then we looked up at each other and smiled.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked her—with my voice—wishing I could text her everything I was really thinking instead. It would be so much easier. I’d tell her that I liked her, and I even liked her being in my room, sitting across from me like this. I would tell her that even though I liked her (and I didn’t need a website to tell me so), I was scared too—too scared. I wanted to tell her how in reality, nothing could happen between us, even though, yes, I did indeed want to kiss her the other night.

  Because those are not the kinds of things you say out loud to someone.

  MAIA

  I’D GOTTEN MYSELF PUMPED UP the whole way to his house. I was ready to be honest and sit him down and tell him everything—that I’m not the artsy photographer I’m pretty sure he’s falling for, that I know that he’s transgender and he doesn’t have to try to hide it from me, that I really like him—but now that I was sitting here and he was over there, all the courage I had worked up inside me was just coursing through my veins, making me jumpy and twitchy.

  His question still lingered in the air. It was simple enough, but my thoughts were racing.

  “I don’t know,” I finally answered—because what I had planned on saying sounded weird as I rehearsed it in my mind:

  Chris, we need to talk.

  No, that was after-school-special speak.

  That would not work.

  “What were you doing before I got here?” I said instead, stalling the inevitable, buying myself a little more time. “Prior to trying to decapitate yourself with the ceiling fan, I mean,” I said, looking up at the ceiling.

  His smile eased my nerves.

  “What, that doesn’t sound like a fun Friday night to you?” He picked up the notebook that was sitting next to him, and said, “I was just scribbling—doing nothing, really.”

  I had an idea—a clear, nonmuddled idea that might just work. I pulled Mallory’s sketchbook from my bag, the one I’d found in her things, where I had started making my list of her photographs and their corresponding locations.

  “Doing nothing is my favorite,” I told him. I opened the sketchbook to where I had dog-eared a corner, and flipped to a clean page. “We could sit here and do nothing together?”

  “Okay.” He nodded in agreement and opened his notebook in his lap.

  I promised myself I would not let one more day pass with all these secrets between us—I’d have to explain the whole story and I’d have to get it just right or he’d never understand why it started, or how me being outside his window that day was not even about him, that I was never trying to intrude upon him. Maybe if I could write it down in a letter, without the chances for miscommunication that would come with trying to say it all out loud, I could somehow make the whole thing make sense, at least enough sense for him to not hate me.

  I began: Dear Chris,

  I drew a line through it and started over with a simple Chris, but then I couldn’t decide where the actual beginning of this story was. As I pressed pen to paper, the only words that came were the ones that had been spray-painted on the wall at the gas station.

  I traced the words, inking the letters over and over again.

  I looked up at Chris. He was watching me, but he quickly looked down at his notebook once more, the scratching of his pen loud in the quietness that had fallen over us.

  A realization hit me.

  I wondered if part of the reason I was feeling so good about him and me and our time together was because he’s the only person I’ve ever known who didn’t automatically know already, not only about Mallory’s life and her death, but about me. Everyone in Carson knows who I am, or rather, who I’ve been. Sometimes living here felt like I had signed some sort of contract, agreeing to have a certain personality for the rest of my life, and that made it hard to change.

  But with Chris, I had no such arrangement. I was allowed to tell him the things I wanted him to know, on my terms, in my time.

  There’s something to that.

  No, I decided, I wouldn’t tell him that I knew his secret. Who was I to take that from him?

  I would, however, still tell him about the camera and the pictures and what I was really doing. I felt my head nodding, agreeing to the plan I was formulating. When I looked up again, his eyes darted back down to his notebook. He was keeping the pages tilted toward him, like it was a test and he didn’t want me to see his answers. Maybe every secret needs to be told on its own terms.

  CHRIS

  I TRIED TO FOCUS ON my journal, instead of watching Maia. I flipped to a clean page and started a small sketch—it was scribbly and hesitant—not good at all. That wasn’t the point, though.

  I wasn’t being nearly as stealthy about it as I should’ve been; she’d caught me staring at her at least a dozen times over the course of the last thirty minutes. When I looked up at her the next time, she had set her pen down and was leaning back on her hands, looking toward the open door outside. I placed my pen in the page and closed my journal.

  When she looked back over at me, I asked her, “What were you drawing?”

  “I wasn’t drawing,” she answered.

  She studied her sketchbook for a moment, and when she finally turned it around so I could see, I felt my heart in my throat, pulsing. I had seen that quote many times before—it was my mother’s favorite. She even had it on several items in our house: a bookmark she always used, the cover of a day planner she kept at her desk, and in my parents’ bedroom it was printed on one of those wall plaques that you find in home stores, made of reclaimed wood with the words painted on or airbrushed, or something like that.

  Maia licked her lips and read the words on the page out loud, her voice smooth and even: “We don’t see things as they a
re”—she paused, and her eyes met mine for just a moment before she continued—“we see them as we are.”

  Then she bit her bottom lip as she waited for my reaction.

  “Okay, that’s bizarre,” I finally managed to verbalize.

  “Why?” She looked at the page again, then back at me.

  “Why did you write that?”

  “I just saw it, and it’s been stuck in my head, is all.” She was squinting hard at me, her eyes crinkling at the edges. “What, have you seen this before?” she asked.

  I nodded. “It’s my mother’s favorite quote. She has it everywhere.”

  Maia leaned forward, inched herself closer to me, like I’d just told her something huge. She was beaming out this incredible smile at me. This was the most excited I’d seen her since we were in the car and she was telling me about her dreams of traveling the world as a photographer.

  “What do you think it means?” She was looking so deeply into my eyes, I could barely think straight.

  “I—I guess it means . . . ,” I began, only to realize that maybe I didn’t actually know what it meant. “I’m not really sure.”

  “Yeah, me neither.” She turned the sketchbook back around so that it was facing her again. “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.”

  “Have you checked the interwebs?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, but she was shaking her head. “Hey, maybe you could ask your mom what she thinks?”

  I laughed.

  “Or not,” she added.

  “No, maybe I could,” I said. “After she starts talking to me again.”

  “Sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

  “No, please. It’s totally fine, really.”

  She smiled in this pinched, apologetic way. After waiting a beat, she seemed to have decided to change the subject. “So, what were you writing?” she asked, looking at my journal, which was still sitting closed in my lap.