The Map from Here to There

by Emery Lord

  His smile sloped, the effort there but still a little down. “Oh yeah?”

  “Right now,” I offered, moving my free hand toward my purse. “We can sit in my driveway talking after we get home.”

  “Talking,” he repeated, the slack side of his mouth rising. “Or …?”

  I smiled at him, and we stayed at that table for an hour, joking, flirting, discussing. Being us. But I couldn’t shake a feeling like the first plunking raindrop had hit, when the storm clouds still seemed far away. Was that …? Did I just feel it? My career aspirations already coming between Max and me. In my mind, I wiped the water from my shoulder and stared across the table at blue sky.

  I got to school early Monday morning, hoping to catch Ms. Pepper first thing and break the news about the internship. She all-out beamed about my Mythos news, and she took the schedule conflict in stride. I walked away confident in my choice and grateful for her guidance. Finally, I let myself feel relieved—happy, even. Paige Hancock: Student Intern. I’d add it to my résumé the minute I got home.

  “Why did you let me choose photography for the yearbook?” When I shut my locker door, Tessa’s face was right there, grim as a museum portrait.

  “I didn’t let you. You didn’t even tell me till after you signed up.” I tilted my head, the closest I ever got to sass with her. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Since I’m the rookie, and I can drive, they keep sending me to these awful away meets. Do you have any idea how boring cross-country is?” She gave me her most solemn expression. “It is literally just running outside for a long time.”

  “You talkin’ about me?” Ryan had sidled up beside us, Morgan and Max with him. They’d taken to pooling around my locker at this time, my cool drink of water during these marathon days.

  “I actually like your track meets,” Tessa said. “The speed, the variety of events.”

  “The short shorts,” Ryan continued in a dreamy voice. Morgan laughed, which Ryan was transparently thrilled by.

  “How’d Pepper take it?” Max took my hand, turning to face me.

  “Great. Totally supportive.”

  He looked briefly crestfallen but recovered the landing into a smile. I suspected he thought Pepper would find a way to make it work—that she’d never let me drop QuizBowl.

  “So, better than I did?” he said, only sort of joking. “I’m gonna miss you, that’s all.”

  “I know,” I said, pained.

  “Hey, this doesn’t mess with your weekends, right?” Ryan interjected. “You better not miss the hayride place. Kayleigh will end your entire life.”

  “I won’t miss any List stuff,” I swore, as I peeled off with Max for our next classes. “Rehearsals don’t even start for a while.”

  “You hear that, Miss Dance Ditcher?” Ryan was telling Tessa. She’d planned a visit to Laurel two weekends from now, so she’d miss Homecoming—something she didn’t even pretend to regret. “Priorities.”

  Normally in this two-minute walk to our next classes, Max bubbled over with things to tell me since the morning. I glanced at him, suspicious of his silence. “What’s going on up there?”

  Max slid a hand to his shoulder, under the collar of his shirt, and rubbed at a muscle there. “Um, with Homecoming. You know I don’t really, like … dance, right?”

  I stopped walking. “What? This relationship is built on a lie.”

  “All right, all right.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I put my hand through his arm. “I’m not exactly a dancer either.”

  “Okay.” He still looked a little off, some of the bounce gone from his gait.

  I would have continued to soothe his worries, but Kayleigh was running toward us, a blur with raised arms.

  “She’s here! The baby’s here!” She brandished her phone at us, showing a squishy little face in a striped hospital hat, and promptly dissolved into tears. Her oldest brother’s little girl.

  “Aunt Kayleigh!” I hugged my friend close as she shook a little, face buried in my shoulder. “Congratulations!”

  Get Morgan, I mouthed to Max, and he shot back down the hallway.

  “This is a little early, right? But she’s good?” I asked.

  “She’s good,” Kayleigh said, pulling away to look at me. Her eyes were filled to the brim with water, dark irises swimming behind the tears. “They named her Sawyer, Paige. Sawyer Bloom.”

  Kayleigh’s mom’s maiden name. By the time Tessa and Morgan rounded the corner, the bell was ringing, and I was crying, too. We clutched Kayleigh in a group hug until she had to examine the photo again.

  “Look at her,” she whispered, zooming in. Her mother’s granddaughter. A family first, a new chapter. “Would you just look at this spectacular girl?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The next weekend, Morgan pulled into my driveway before noon. Kayleigh was off to visit Baby Sawyer in Chicago and Tessa was on assignment for yearbook photos. Max’s mom was taking him to Wash U for a tour, and Ryan tagged along. And Morgan—well, she was doing Morgan stuff. Namely, driving to Indiana University to attend a workshop on sexual education. She’d invited me so I could look around at the campus again.

  “So, remind me how Reid and Brady became a part of this?” I asked. Kayleigh’s brothers were both at IU, of course, and their a cappella group had hired a presenter to do this workshop.

  “At the end of the summer, Reid suggested I write a proposal for the Oakhurst school board, for more responsible and realistic sex ed. I was really upset about all my stuff,” she said, gesturing at her lower body to summarize her reproductive organs. “And he thought channeling it might help. He was saying how colleges should step it up, too, so he got their group to bring Sexplanation to campus.”

  “Does Kayleigh know?”

  “Don’t make it sound weird. Yes, Kayleigh knows.”

  I knew Reid, Kayleigh’s youngest brother, best of the three Hutchins boys. He was studious and passionate and really sweet to all of us, if always bickering with Kayleigh. Brady, now a senior here, shared Kayleigh’s gale-force charisma and the natural leadership skills that landed him as president of two student orgs here at IU. Impressive guys—and cute, though Kayleigh would retch at the thought. I tried to imagine sitting in this seminar with them, while a presenter said the words “spermicide” and “cunnilingus.” I would have blushed the entire time. “But aren’t you a little relieved that they’re in Chicago meeting Sawyer?”

  “When,” Morgan said thinly, “have I ever been relieved for people to miss a sex education opportunity?”

  In a floral sundress and denim jacket, Morgan strode into the building like a sleek-haired, preppy Miss Frizzle of sex. She settled in to take notes, and I shifted in my seat, glancing out the window.

  “You don’t have to stay,” she said. “You should explore.”

  “You sure?”

  “I mean, I just invited you to sell you on IU instead of NYU,” she said, only partly joking, I thought. “I’ll text when they’re wrapping it up.”

  “Wrapping it up,” I said. “An important takeaway.”

  Morgan struggled not to laugh. “Go on.”

  I wandered the building, inside the perfume of old books and floor polish, and stared at students like they were animals in a zoo. Where are you from? Are you happy here? I wondered at them as they sprinted, late to class.

  Outside, Bloomington’s grid of streets felt like a Monopoly board—a little daunting at the start of the game, but I could imagine chipping away at experience real estate. I could imagine studying in the local coffee shop, fellow students working all around me on silver stickered laptops. Max visiting every few weekends, holing up in my dorm to watch movies, then nights out with Ryan, Morgan, and Kayleigh.

  I walked past a kids’ museum and smiled at the displays inside—primary-colored play zones and large-scale science projects come to life. Max would love it.

  IU didn’t scare me, but maybe that was good. Maybe college should feel like coming home.
These burnished trees, these quiet streets, these groups of girls walking three-wide down the commons—it was easy to envision my place in it.

  “I like it here,” I told Morgan, on our way out of town. She’d already given me the rundown of her seminar, a rush of ideas for how she could pitch them to the Oakhurst School Board.

  “Why do you sound surprised?” she asked. “You toured it with your parents this summer!”

  “Yeah, I know.” We’d come shortly after I got home from Manhattan, and Bloomington—anywhere—seemed quiet and small. Joltingly so. But now, after months at home in Oakhurst, it seemed kind of perfect. “It’s growing on me, apparently. And I can really see you and Kayleigh here.”

  “Well, I can see you here, too,” Morgan said. “Not even because of me. I think you’d be happy.”

  It should have been great news—feeling like I’d fit in at a great school with my friends nearby and in-state tuition. But now it would be harder to justify a big-ticket school in a big city with my big, ridiculous plans. I had so much goodness close to home; why on earth did I feel pulled away? Proving something to myself? To my grandmother, to Maeve? Or was it just that nearly every big change in my life had happened to me? Maybe I wanted to be the driving force for once.

  I watched out the window as Morgan merged, steering us back up the map and toward home.

  The lobby of Mythos Contemporary Theater was full of people, pacing with folded-over scripts and moving their mouths in diction exercises. 2BD, 1BA was the yearly young talent show, every actor under twenty-one, but I still felt conspicuously teenaged in the crowd.

  “Do you have your audition confirmation?” a woman asked, over the top of her clipboard.

  “Oh, um, no. I’m a student intern? With Cris Fuentes?”

  She signaled me toward the door like an air traffic controller. “Through there.”

  I’d brought a notebook and a pen, an attempt to look official. But walking through the dark rows of seats, to where the creative team was huddled near the stage, I was sure Cris Fuentes would be shocked to see me. Oh dear, she would say, you must have misunderstood. Why would we offer an internship to a hapless high school senior? I’d crawl back to QuizBowl, mortified and traitorous.

  Instead, Cris said, “Hey, Paige! Come meet everyone!”

  After introductions, they scattered through the front rows to watch auditions at different angles. Cris propped her knees on the backrest in front of her like she was in the passenger seat on a road trip. This theater was her home, every nook a known place. I felt like an interloper, but—instantly and badly—I wanted to belong here, too.

  It was hours of the same two monologues—one for party girl Olivia, one for uptight Flora, coming unhinged in light of her broken engagement. I’d read the script, but seeing it performed, I laughed more than once, from the humor and the familiarity of my odd-couple friendship with Hunter Chen.

  The front-runners, it turned out, were obvious—the electricity in their bodies, the command. When an actress named Marisol recited one particular line, her voice caught on the last word, and suddenly it was the confession of a vulnerable girl instead of the wry commentary it had been in the past twenty auditions. It didn’t surprise me when Cris and her team short-listed her for a lead. I scribbled notes of the words and phrases they used to describe various performances—“sensitive,” “flat,” “playful,” “self-conscious.”

  Callbacks would be in two weeks, on a Saturday I couldn’t get out of at Cin 12, and rehearsals wouldn’t start until after the first of the year. By the time I left, I could feel the theater’s hum, like the space was a living thing—an old, friendly beast, ready to lead me through a fantastical realm. Mythos indeed. How could I already miss a world I’d only just glimpsed?

  For the rest of the week, I found myself procrastinating on writing portfolio work by reading Fefu and a few other plays, hoping to amass enough vocabulary to keep up at Mythos. The Glass Menagerie, at least, could be used as an elective read for my English class. Tennessee Williams called it a “memory play”—the events perhaps skewed by a narrator’s recollection, by sentiment. I drummed my fingers and stared at the tacked-up ephemera above my desk: a photo of my friends, a note from Max, a map of New York, and an I LOVE LUCY sticker that my grandma found years ago. Was this, too, a memory play—how I retold my story to myself, omitting the tokens of anxiety, divorce, grief, phobia? I stewed in that question, uncomfortable, and outlined the idea as a paper for class. My existential crises made for material, at least. Screenwriters’ motto, Maeve would joke.

  I stared back up at my corkboard. For my entire life until last June, I’d thought I’d done it—compiled everything I needed. I was happy. What more could I want? But Manhattan taught me that other important friends might be waiting in the wings, their entrances written for my college days. I learned I could be good at things I didn’t even expect, and I wanted to learn what else I could do when I pushed my boundaries. But I was beginning to wonder, with a growing sense of sadness, if the only way to find out was to be brave enough to start a new collage.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I’d seen enough movies to expect the awkward posing as our parents snapped pictures. I could have guessed that my dad would angle us toward better light, that my mom and Max’s mom would keep saying, “Okay, just one more. Look here!” But I still wanted to experience it firsthand, to collect the details in my beaded bag.

  “Regretting this yet?” Max joked, through a teeth-gritted smile.

  I wasn’t. The summer before sophomore year, I’d daydreamed about Homecoming, hoping Aaron and I would still be together. I imagined a tutu-pink gown and his arms around my waist as the music played.

  By the night of the dance, he’d been gone for months, and I hunkered down at Tessa’s house with my friends, who artfully sidestepped any dance-related topics. Later, I scrolled through photos of my classmates in satin, with heavy fake lashes and good posture. I expected to feel bitter—they were here and he wasn’t. But mostly, I felt sad. And old. I couldn’t fathom caring about Homecoming. Every high school tradition felt pointless.

  Now I stood pressed against Max in a galaxy-blue dress, making those same stiff-backed poses I’d once sighed at. And I could feel it again: the excitement about every cliché slow dance heading my way. It felt like finding a childhood teddy bear I’d thought was lost forever.

  We met our friends at Arpeggio’s, the would-be site of our first date two months ago now. At a long banquet table near the back, we switched between intent conversation—Morgan’s take on a young congresswoman! Ryan opining on his still undecided major—and obnoxious-to-other-diners laughter. Kayleigh caught a ride with Tessa to Chicago, off to visit her niece again, which left Morgan and Ryan as happily platonic dates.

  By the time we paid the bill, the sky had gone fully dark. My heels clacked against the parking lot, a quick pace that betrayed my eagerness.

  “Well,” Malcolm said, “seems we’ll be fashionably late.”

  “We could ditch the actual dance at this point.” Max glanced at his watch. “Go over to my place.”

  Morgan snorted, motioning to her gold dress. “You think I look this good and I don’t want the whole school to see?”

  “She wants the whole school to see, Max,” Ryan said flatly.

  The homecoming dance took place in the gym, on the high-sheen wood floors of the basketball court. A DJ table sat under one of the hoops; black and white tiles of the dance floor barely visible beneath the pulsing crowd.

  I stood at the mouth of the beast with Max, staring. It still looked and smelled like the gym—the place I once tripped running laps, with a splat that echoed into every corner of the room. Now the space was dimly lit and my classmates were milling around, dancing, or strewn across bleachers. Some teetering in high heels, unpracticed; some tugging at ties. Muggy air and sweat, piney cologne from every direction.

  Leading Max into the fray, I turned. “Woo! High school!”

  “High sch
ool,” Max echoed.

  We settled into the second row of the bleachers. The very definition of wallflowers, maybe, but I didn’t mind. I liked being the one he leaned over to, speaking close to my ear. At one point, I looked up to find Clark Driscoll—Aaron’s longtime best friend—walking past.

  “Clark!” I said. “Hey!”

  The greeting flew out of my mouth as soon as I registered Clark’s presence. My brain had temporarily blacked out that when Max was bullied as a kid, Clark was one of the perpetrators. I rested a hand on Max’s leg.

  “Hey,” Clark said, brightening. His date, a smiley junior, waved to us. “You look awesome.”

  Then, smiling between Max and me, he added, “And you look nice, too, Paige.”

  It was a bad dad joke—right up Max’s alley, and he smiled easily.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Good to see you. Have fun!”

  Clark held eye contact for just a second longer than I expected. In that gaze, an acknowledgment of the grief gone by and the loss that lingered, the solidarity in both of us being here tonight. “Yeah. You too.”

  “Sorry,” I whispered, once Clark and his date were gone.

  “Don’t be.” Max leaned over to kiss my cheek. Then, his eyes catching somewhere beyond us, he laughed. “God, they’re goofs.”

  I followed his line of sight to Morgan and Ryan, hamming it up on the dance floor with zero inhibition. “I truly love them.”

  Before I could ask if he wanted to join them, he said, “Photo-booth line’s dying down. Wanna do it?”

  I absolutely did, and we made our way to that corner of the gym. “Should we plan our poses? Or keep it spontaneous?”

  “Are you offering,” he asked slowly, “to not plan? For me?”

  I batted his chest. “I can be extemporaneous!”

  After our photos were snapped, Max chatted with some friends from the robotics team. I was nodding along to phrases like “sensory feedback” and “end effector” when a pop song pumped out of the speakers, the recognizable handclap percussion getting a cheer from the crowd. “Say Yes.”