When I wake up, the sun’s up and I’m stiff from leaning against the car door. Kevin brushes crumbs off his jeans. “You’re awake.”
“Almost.” A sign along the highway says we’re in Santa Barbara.
“You weren’t lying when you said you could sleep in the car.”
I freeze for a sec before I remember our conversation. “Ugh. Was I snoring?”
“I wouldn’t say snoring. More like snorting.”
I bury my face in my hands. “Embarrassing.”
“Nah. I’m just jerking your chain. You don’t really snort—it’s more like a snuffle.” He imitates me, snuffling delicately like a cartoon character.
“You tease your sisters a lot, don’t you?”
“All the time. And that’s why I’m their favorite brother.”
“Aren’t you their only brother?”
Kevin smiles, and I harrumph and reach into the crumpled paper bag between us. It’s almost empty, but a few prune pastries are left. “I guess you liked the kolaches.”
“Especially the poppy-seed ones. I haven’t had any that good since I was in Poland.”
“Of course you were in Poland.” I lick jam off my fingers and the last exit in Santa Barbara sails by. “We’re not stopping in Santa Barbara?”
“No, but we are minutes from our destination. Be patient.”
“I’m not patient.”
“Clearly.”
Kevin turns up the music. It’s guitars and mandolins, folky and contemporary at the same time. The sky is clear and hills rise up on the right, dry and yellow, aching for rain. I crack the window and cool air blows across my face.
In a few miles, Kevin turns off the highway and I glimpse the ocean as we turn onto an access road. We pass a few scattered houses before Kevin pulls into a gravel parking lot. “We’re here.”
We get out of the car by a grassy lot. There’s not much to see. A group of trees a little way off. An elementary school across the road. “O-kay.”
“It’s worth it, I promise.” Kevin pulls a backpack out of the trunk. “This way,” he says, and heads for the end of the parking lot.
We follow a dirt path into a grove of eucalyptus. The path dips up and down, and our footsteps are muffled by dust. Seagulls cry overhead, and I smell the ocean even though I can’t see it.
We walk for about a mile before Kevin slows and holds up a finger. Sun filters through the trees, striping the yellow-gray bark. Bright blue sky fills the gaps between the trunks. Everything is hushed and even the gulls are silent.
As beautiful as this place is, I wonder why we drove two hours to get to it. Then an orange butterfly wobbles into the sunlight. I follow the monarch with my eyes as another flutters into the clearing, then another.
Kevin taps my arm and points to a nearby branch, and I gasp and walk forward. This branch, and every branch nearby, is weighed down with butterflies—hundreds, maybe thousands of butterflies.
Their wings are folded, exposing tan undersides veined with black. Still and silent, the butterflies look like leaves, until one stretches, and then ten more pop orange.
“Do they live here?” I whisper.
“Just for the winter. They come down from Canada.”
A dozen paths wind through the grove, and we explore them silently. My heart slows, matching the rhythm of the place.
Mom would have loved this. I picture her, sitting cross-legged on a fallen log, humming a melody under her breath, her fingers picking out chords on an invisible guitar. I glance at Kevin, grateful he feels no need to speak.
We stay until we hear the squeals of excited children, then we walk out of the grove, not speaking until we reach the cliff’s edge and see the ocean below. The water is gray-blue striped with green. White foam swirls and sloshes below the cliff.
“My mom would have loved this place,” I say.
Kevin’s quiet, as if he’s waiting for me to tell him more about her, but instead I ask, “Why did you bring me here?”
He blows out a breath, and I’m surprised by how different, how much older he looks from two months ago. How did I not notice?
He’s smiling, but not happily. “Caltech messes with my head, and sometimes I need to get out of there before I lose it.”
“But you’re so smart.”
“Everyone in my class was valedictorian of their high school. One of my roommates interns at the Jet Propulsion Lab and the other won the Intel Science Fair.”
“I don’t know what either of those is, but they sound really impressive.”
“Yeah. They are. The competition is…” He shrugs. There are no words.
I wrap an arm around his waist and he leans into me. “I didn’t know it was that bad at Caltech. When you’re at CALINVA you act like everything’s cool.”
“Everything is cool at CALINVA. But if I don’t get my engineering grades up, you’re not going to see me around next semester.”
“No! Why not?”
“The only way I could get my dad to agree to let me enroll part-time at CALINVA was to promise I’d get A’s in my classes at Caltech.”
“And?”
“It’s not looking good.”
“Oh, Kev, I’m so sorry.” I look into his face, and our eyes connect, and what I see is an opening, an opening to more.
I drop my arm from his waist and grope for something to say. I knew Kev liked me, and I should have been more careful not to give him the wrong idea. “Maybe you’ll surprise yourself and ace the finals.”
Kevin’s eyes flicker as he registers that I’ve pulled back, but he acts like what just happened didn’t happen. “Yeah, it’s not impossible if I put in the hours.”
The tone of his voice has changed. He could be talking to anyone.
A sadness I didn’t expect washes through me, and it takes a moment before I grasp what it’s telling me: I care about Kevin more than I realized.
I’ve been so caught up with Adam, I’ve been blind to what I have or could have with Kevin. And now I’ve hurt him even though I didn’t mean to.
Kev’s silence feels endless. “You want to head back?” I ask.
“Sure,” he says, patting his stomach. “I could use something to eat.”
We walk back to the car. I hate to imagine CALINVA without Kevin making me laugh and keeping me from flying out of orbit.
But what if my future is with Adam, the two of us taking LA’s art world by storm?
We’re not even through Santa Barbara when Kevin pulls off so we can eat at a legendary taco stand. Either Kevin’s a really good actor, or he’s not as wounded as I thought, because he’s his usual famished self.
The place is tiny, whitewashed, with turquoise trim around the door and windows and zigzag roof, and the line of customers is out the door.
“Look, they make their tortillas fresh.” Kevin points through the window at the woman working the tortilla press.
“Do you eat tacos every day?” I ask.
“Almost. I have to make up for the eighteen years I lived in a place where guacamole comes in a squeeze bottle.”
“No, that’s just wrong.”
“Hence my quest to eat as many tacos as I can before I go back to Kansas, land of the squeeze bottle.”
I clamp my hands over my ears. “Stop saying ‘squeeze bottle.’ Don’t make me picture it.”
Kevin mouths the words in front of my face. Squeeze. Bottle.
I jab him with my elbow.
Our eyes connect, and we gaze at each other for an inexplicably long moment until Kev says, “Okay, okay, I’m done,” and we flip back to the menu board.
We order chorizo tacos for me and posole extra spicy for Kevin. A table opens right as our order comes up and I dive for it. Kevin digs into his posole while I assemble my tacos. When I look up, his face is red and he’s wiping his nose on a napkin.
“Hot enough for you?”
He nods, eyes closed, and I’m not sure if he’s happy or hurting.
“Real sexy,” I say. �
��The snot. It’s a big turn-on.”
Kevin mumbles something.
“Save it,” I tell him. “You should consider performance art. Watching you eat has changed my experience of Mexican food forever.”
He takes a last mouthful and drags his wrist over his sweaty forehead. “Man, that was good.”
The sleeve of his tee rides up, revealing the tattoo on his bicep. “Aw, you’ve got a tattoo of the BFG?”
Kevin hooks his sleeve with a finger and pulls it back. “Yeah, my sister Toby used to call me the Big Friendly Giant because I’d read her to sleep when we were little. Not gonna repeat what she calls me now.”
“How old is she?”
“Fifteen. Toby’s ‘testing boundaries.’”
I laugh. “Yeah, fifteen’s not pretty.”
“What about you? What’s the story behind your tattoos?”
“No tattoos,” I say. “My mom always joked that the wrong tattoo was like a bad relationship: easy to get into, and impossible to get out of. She made me promise I’d wait until I found a design that had real meaning for me, and now…”
I pick a slice of jalapeño off the table and drop it on my plate, not sure how the sentence ends.
Kevin smooths his sleeve back down. “Back at the grove, you said your mom would have loved it. Does that mean she…”
He leaves his question unfinished, but I nod, and my eyes fill. “Last February.”
“Jeez. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks, it’s been rough.”
He reaches over and squeezes my hand. My fingers wrap around his.
“Can I ask…?”
“How? Hit-and-run.”
I know Kevin’s thinking it’s horrifying what happened to her, to me. It’s all over his face and the way he’s taking me in, so I’m surprised when all he says is, “And your dad?”
“Not in the picture. Not now. Not ever.”
He pauses, weighing what I said. “I’ve never heard you mention any brothers or sisters.”
I shrug and give him a half smile, because I can’t say it aloud. I’m alone.
His eyes pinch as if he’s in pain. “How did you…did someone take you in?”
“Hayley, my best friend; her parents let me stay with them.” I stop there. Kevin doesn’t need to know what happened next.
He squeezes my hand one last time before he lets go. Then he takes a long drink of his soda, giving us both space to recover. The truth is heavy and now he’s carrying some of its weight.
When he’s done, he looks at me over his cup and his brown eyes are soft. “Tell me something about your mom.”
It’s an invitation I didn’t know I wanted. I dab the last traces of hot sauce off my mouth. “Her name was Crystal, but she went by Crys, and before she had me, she was a singer-songwriter. If she’d been at the grove with us today, I think she would’ve been inspired to write a song about it.”
“Yeah? What about?”
I mull over this for a moment before I answer. “About butterflies traveling thousands of miles to go home. About having the faith to start an impossible journey.”
“You really love her.”
My heart squeezes hearing him say “love” instead of “loved.” My love for Mom will never be past tense.
“Yeah, I do,” I manage to say, but I’m not sure he can hear me.
A helpless look comes over Kevin’s face. He doesn’t know how to make this better.
I have to turn things around, so I say, “I’m picking up her guitar tomorrow! This bachelorette party left me an outrageous tip last night, so I can finally ransom it.”
“Is it an acoustic?”
“Yeah, custom made.”
“Who do you have to ransom it from?”
I could kick myself for saying that. It’s embarrassing, being so desperate for money I had to pawn it. “A guy who does repairs. It was a small—The neck got chipped and I didn’t want it to get worse.”
“I’d love to see it once you get it back.”
Once again, I sense I’ve missed something. “Do you play guitar?”
“Guitar, mandolin, banjo, but I doubt I’m anywhere near as good as your mom.”
“Probably not,” I say, and toss him a grin, “but I’d like to hear you anyway.”
People crowd against our table, waiting for their orders. I sweep our crumpled napkins into a pile. “We should probably let someone else have the table.”
Kevin stacks our plates. “Yeah, I should get back. Physics test tomorrow.”
On the drive, wind whips through the car. Kevin listens to music, and I watch the ocean fly by the open window. The highway follows the rocky coastline, and my breath catches.
We’re not far from where I waded in to sprinkle Mom’s ashes, and I see it again, the trail of white ribboning away from me on the water.
My anger flares. Why did it have to be her, God? Why not somebody else?
“What are you thinking about?”
It’s the first thing Kev’s said in a half hour, so it’s a real question. “How angry I am at God.”
He looks from me to the road, before he says, “For what happened to your mom?”
“It isn’t fair. She’d made up for every bad thing she’d ever done. She lived clean, ate right, and never crossed a line…and a guy mowed her down with his car like a stray dog. He didn’t even stop.”
Everything I need Kevin to say is in the look on his face and the hand that reaches for mine. What happened is horrible, and unfair, and completely indefensible, and what he has to offer me is this: that I am not alone.
We stay like that for a few miles, and I squeeze his hand before I let go.
Kevin turns off the freeway, heading east on a two-lane highway through orange groves and fields of cabbage and brussels sprouts. I steal glances at him. CALINVA would be so different if I didn’t have Kevin to talk to.
I try to picture Adam and me talking about Mom, but I can’t. We talk about our work and Krell and the LA art scene, but now that I think about it, Adam never asks about my life outside of school.
“You’d better nail that physics exam,” I say, only half joking.
Kev gives me an easy smile. “I’ll do my best.”
It’s midafternoon by the time he drops me off outside Mrs. Mednikov’s. I say thanks and good-bye, but before I can cross the street, Kev calls me back. I grin and shake my head as I saunter over to the driver’s-side window. “What now?”
He hooks a finger on the strap of my bag. “I’m good at keeping secrets, just so you know.”
“Yeah, I figured that out.” I’d never have told him a tenth of what I did otherwise.
He drives away and I wander back inside the house. Kevin thinks I’m like him, that my secrets are merely things I want to keep private, not things I’m scared to let out. I doubt he’s ever had to hide who he is, and I’m sure he’s never had to hide what he’s done.
People say sharing secrets makes you closer, but not mine.
Pawning Mom’s guitar was like cutting out my heart, but I’d sold everything I could to make it through the spring and summer, and I needed my first month’s rent for Mrs. Mednikov. Today, I get that piece of my heart returned.
After Color & Theory, I have just enough time to run over to the pawnshop, liberate Mom’s guitar, stow it in my car, and make it to Artsy before my shift.
The pawnshop is two blocks west of CALINVA, and a continent away from the boutiques on Colorado Boulevard. The black-painted steel bars over the front door are peeling, and a thick coat of dust blurs the jewelry in the windows. Inside, the walls are lined with abandoned guitars, and the glass counters are full of cast-off wedding rings. If you’re shopping for broken dreams, this is the place.
I tug my tee down in front, exposing the lacy trim on my purple bra. Steve, the guy working the counter, was very helpful to me last August, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t because he loved the red roses on Mom’s guitar.
The man behind the counter buzzes me in, bu
t it turns out he isn’t Steve. His bulbous nose is shot with red capillaries, and his graying hair is tied back in a stringy ponytail. His faded short-sleeve shirt is almost transparent from being washed so many times.
“Can I help you?” he says as he focuses his watery gray eyes on me.
“Is Steve here?”
“Not today. You sure I can’t help you?”
I set my pawn ticket on the counter. Gold watches on faded green velvet gleam dully through the glass below. “I’m here to pick up my guitar.”
“Name.”
My hand tightens around the thick wad of cash in my jacket pocket, and I give him my name.
“The loan was due on the first,” he says.
“Yeah, I know I’m a few weeks late, but I have the money.” I pull it out. “There’s four hundred I borrowed and the hundred and fifteen in interest.”
He counts out the money twice, turning the bills so they face the same way. He tests the twenties with a special pen, looking for fakes, and shuts the cash in the register.
“So can I have my guitar?”
“Absolutely. As soon as you pay the rest of what you owe. One-month interest, late fee, storage fee. Total’s seventy dollars.”
“Seventy?” The twenty in my wallet’s got to last until my next waitress shift on Friday. “I don’t have that.”
The man flips over my pawn ticket. “Reread the terms of our agreement. On the first of December you’ll owe the seventy plus five dollars interest on it, and another thirty-five dollars late fee and storage fee.”
“Okay.” I stuff the pawn ticket back in my pocket. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to go. “Can I see it?”
The man’s mustache sags over his mouth. “Promise you won’t try to run out with it.”
“Yeah, no, I won’t. I just—”
“Wait here.”
There are cameras in the corners, and if I had to guess I bet there’s a loaded gun hidden by the register.
The man returns with the battered black guitar case. He lays it ever so gently on the counter, then steps back like he’s trying to give me privacy.
My eyes smart as soon as I see the white line of words that run clumsily down the case. THE SMALLEST BIRD SINGS THE PRETTIEST SONGS. My heart opens and is submerged.
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