Wanderlove

by Kirsten Hubbard

  I’m still trying to figure out why.

  Refresh, refresh, refresh. “What about that fat man you drew?” I teased back. “He looked like he had tires around his thighs.”

  “The foreshortening was excellent, I’ll have you know.” Refresh, refresh, refresh. Then, suddenly, he sat up. “There they are!”

  I peered over his shoulder as he curled around the laptop. In bold black letters, a list of names and locations. One jumped out instantly.

  Bria Sandoval, Los Angeles, CA

  “Oh my God!” I exclaimed. “I made it! And …”

  I trailed off. Because none of the eleven other names was Toby’s.

  In silence, we stared, and we stared, and then, finally, Toby slammed my laptop shut hard enough to make me flinch. “They must have mixed up our portfolios or something.”

  He was joking—he had to be—but his voice was absent of humor. The thrill I’d felt on seeing my name started to congeal in my stomach. “Are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay.”

  I put my arms around him. “It won’t change anything, you know? Like we promised. Who cares if I’m on fast track! You’re the better artist, you know that.”

  Toby didn’t confirm or deny it. He shrugged off my arms and stood. “I’ve got some stuff to take care of at home. We’ll hang out later, okay?”

  “Don’t go,” I begged, but he was already pounding down the stairs.

  In the days and weeks that followed, Toby withdrew even more. He wasn’t mad, but he needed space. Nothing had changed; he just needed a breather. That’s what he said, anyway.

  But here’s the other thing about the fast-track competition: Toby’s hurt was real.

  He might have dealt with it wrong. It might have been overblown, his actions overreactive, but it killed me to see him hurting like that. It took months before I understood Toby wasn’t envious—he was jealous. He’d treated fast-track admissions like a contest. And it wasn’t his loss that angered him so much.

  It was his loss to me.

  A few weeks after that, I sat in front of my sketchpad. The blank pages had never looked so glaringly white. White enough to make me squint. Or maybe that was the tears in my eyes. I shut my sketchbook, shoved it under my bed so I wouldn’t have to look at it, and grabbed the phone to call Toby, to try to fix something art had inexplicably broken.

  *Once, after we’d had a fight, I drew Toby’s head in the top fourth. Reese and I laughed so hard we cried.

  11

  Day 8, Morning

  Geography

  I huddle with the other hikers under the overhang of a café, watching the rain fall in the Livingston graveyard. The tombs look like candy-stained teeth. Our hike began with a tour of the village, and that’s as far as we’ve gotten. We haven’t even reached the forest, let alone the waterfalls.

  “Sorry,” Rowan says, coming up beside me.

  I glance at him. He’s wearing a pair of patterned drawstring pants, the kind I saw for sale all over Panajachel. On anyone else they’d look stupid, but not on Rowan. He wears them low on his hips, under a dark blue shirt with the sleeves torn off. A silver stone with some kind of Mayan symbol on it hangs on a black leather cord. Altogether the look is disastrously attractive, but its appeal is mostly lost, since I’m still upset about last night. Rowan has to suspect Liat told me the truth—some of it, at least. But he hasn’t asked, and for now I’m fine with letting him wonder.

  “You don’t control the weather,” I say.

  “The hike was my idea, though.”

  “Only because I never have any of my own.” Wait a second. “I mean, I don’t know Guatemala like you do.”

  “I wouldn’t say I know it, exactly. Just parts. And almost everything I know is on the Internet.”

  “I suppose I could have Googled it.”

  Rowan winces. “Look—all I meant was as long as travelers have visited a place, there’s information about it available. How to get there, what to do, where to stay. It’s not like some big secret. How do you think all these people heard about Livingston?”

  I glance around. There are seven hikers total, including the couple from the riverboat, their terminally humiliated preteen daughter, and an older woman from Belgium with a walking stick. Sandu is attempting to entertain his wet, miserable flock with a Garifuna fable about a monkey and a stolen loaf of cassava bread. Because his accent’s so heavy, I don’t understand much more than that.

  “But I’ll still bet you’ve been some places other people haven’t been,” I say. “You’ve traveled more than anyone.”

  Rowan laughs. “More than anyone? No way. I met this guy last time I was in Belize, this novelist, who’d been traveling nonstop for almost a decade. Africa, Asia, the Middle East. Living in Bedouin tents. Laughingbird Caye was like Cancún for him.”

  Rowan’s fourth travel rule:

  No matter how well traveled you are, you’ll always meet someone who’s traveled more than you.

  “The rain’s slowing,” Sandu says after he finishes his story. “Are we ready to go?”

  Rowan and I glance at each other.

  “I said, are we ready?”

  “But the storm might come back,” the preteen girl whines. Behind her, the Belgian woman sits sipping a mug of coffee. Sandu’s John Lennon glasses droop. He probably sees his livelihood washing away in the rainwater.

  “You and I can still go,” Rowan says. “It’s your decision.”

  My decision. I glance at the muddy trail, the saggy-diaper sky. The mud doesn’t sound like fun, but neither does staying in town, where I might run into Liat and Tom.

  Maybe I understand why Rowan didn’t tell me they’d known each other way back when. The idea of Rowan meeting a gossip like Jessa Hanny and hearing a condensed, probably misshapen version of my past makes me shaky. At least Rowan didn’t flat out lie, like I did about Toby.

  So I’ll forgive him, I decide. The past’s in the past. But that doesn’t mean I’ll trust him.

  “Screw the rain,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  As expected, the going’s slow. In a number of places, the trail’s grown so sloppy with mud our feet stick. Once I even lose a shoe, and Sandu has to pry it from the muck.

  The trail narrows as it squeezes between the trees. I hike ahead of Rowan and Sandu, the backs of my calves tightening, a stitch pinching my side. Their voices fade behind me until all I can hear is the chain saw noise of bugs and quaking leaves. When the trail ends at a shallow stream, I tie my sneakers to the drawstring of my shorts and step into the water barefoot, biting my lip as the gravel gnaws my heels. The first waterfall’s a baby one, less than three feet tall. I dip my hands into it before I trek onward.

  I hop over tree roots bigger than my waist, with skittering, vicious-looking ants. Once, I startle a gigantic iguana, which crashes off into the brush. My scream brings Rowan and Sandu running. “Are you all right?” Rowan asks. “What was it?”

  I’m still trying to catch my breath. “It’s gone now.”

  “What’s gone?”

  “A hyena,” I reply, widening my eyes.

  Sandu looks around wildly. “What’s this hyena?”

  Instead of hurrying ahead again, now I stay beside Sandu and Rowan. We pass waterfalls two through six, each larger than the last. We have to climb over the tops of a couple, the water tugging at our ankles like an angry naiad.

  Even though I hear the roar of the seventh long before we reach it, the sight of it makes my jaw drop. Fifteen feet tall and thirty feet wide, the waterfall tumbles into a pool colored blue by minerals, dancing with fractured light. The air in the clearing somersaults with mist and noise.

  “The seventh altar,” Sandu says proudly.

  I turn to Rowan. “It’s …,” I begin, but stop as he strips off his shirt.

  “It’s what?” he asks as he tosses it on a rock.

  “Never mind.”

  “Let me guess. You’re not getting in? Come on, it’s just a pond—a perfect p
rimer for the ocean.”

  I shake my head. Before I left the country, Reese warned me jungle streams can contain amoebas, flesh-eating bacteria, and these evil little fish that swim inside your urethra when you pee in the water and become lodged there forevermore. I don’t know if this is true, but I really, really don’t want to risk it.

  “It could be polluted,” I say. “And there might be … water snakes.” I decide not to bring up the pee-hole fish.

  He sighs. “That means I’ll have to make up for it. To balance out the universe.”

  “What the hell’s he doing?” I ask Sandu as Rowan starts scaling the rocks beside the waterfall. Sandu just chuckles and shakes his head, like, sorry, he can’t control the crazy. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I call to Rowan.

  “Sandu told me he’s done it a bunch of times!”

  “When?”

  “Back on the trail, when you were speeding off ahead.”

  “How do you know he’s not lying?”

  “Hey, Sandu,” Rowan calls, crouching atop the highest rocks. “Did you hear that? She called you a liar!” And then, without even glancing down, he leaps.

  I can’t believe he did it. With my heart thudding in my throat, I crawl to the edge of the pool and stare into the water until he surfaces. Unless he’s bleeding internally, he’s survived the plunge intact. He paddles over to me and leans over the stone surface where I’m sitting.

  “Told you there are water snakes.” I point to his tattoo. “Actually, it looks more like the Loch Ness monster. You know—Nessie.”

  “I’ll ignore that statement if you jump next.”

  “There’s no way.”

  “Won’t you get in, at least? You can hold on to me.”

  “Not happening.”

  He touches the top of my foot. It’s the farthest place from my head, but I still feel the jolt. “Come on, Bria. What’s it going to take to get you to jump in?”

  The water looks cool and blue, like an electric-raspberry Popsicle. I want in. And Rowan knows it. Dive instructor, my ass. He’s a psychic. He can see right inside my brain—how much I want to give up, slip in. I just hope that’s all he can see. Because I swear to God, his brain’s impenetrable, and it’s starting to drive me insane.

  “I don’t know, all right?” I snap, pulling back my foot. “It’d happen a lot more quickly if you’d stop pressuring me.”

  I brace myself for a stinging comeback. But instead, as Rowan backpaddles away, his dark blue eyes have gone all wounded puppy on me, and I feel like an asshole all over again.

  On our way back, we pass a slope overlooking the yard of a primary school. The rains have turned it to mud, but that doesn’t stop a group of boys from scampering around with a soccer ball. They’re barefoot, their school uniforms streaked and dirty. A nun watches the mayhem alongside a cluster of little girls. The feminist inside me is turning purple.

  “I remember that,” Rowan says. “Back when sports were fun. Before high school, when you couldn’t play unless you were on a team. Took all the joy out of it.”

  I look at him, glad he finally broke the silence we brought back from the jungle pool. “I take it you’re not an athlete?”

  “Actually, I swam.”

  I shouldn’t be surprised. I open my mouth to reply, but with comic timing, an errant kick sends the muddy soccer ball right into my hip. “Son of a—”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I stick my tongue out at the boys, who are laughing hysterically.

  Sandu scoops up the ball, and they all clamor to receive his throw, shouting, “Aqui! Páseme!” Instead, he tosses it to me, resulting in a second muddy splotch on my clothes.

  The boys change their tactic. “Lady! Pretty lady, give it here.” I pick out the most uncoordinated-looking kid of the bunch and hurl it his way. Too bad I can’t throw. A bigger boy kicks it away with a happy yell, sending the other kids scrambling.

  “Hey,” Rowan begins. He’s got that maniacal Peter Pan gleam in his eyes, the one that danced there all through yesterday. In this context, it makes me nervous.

  “What?” I ask warily.

  “Do you think they’d let us play?”

  Sandu grins. “I know these kids. They go crazy for it.”

  Without another word, Rowan hops over the low concrete wall and skids down the slope to the field. The kids shout and swarm around him. “He’s batshit insane,” I tell Sandu.

  “Bria?” Rowan calls. “Come on!”

  Make that hyenashit insane. For a split second, I imagine the feeling of the mud between my fingers, gooey and grainy, like chocolate frosting. But I don’t know how to play soccer. And I don’t want to look any clumsier than I already do.

  So I invent an excuse. “I’ve got a sore ankle!”

  “I don’t”—Rowan stops to kick the ball—“believe it for a second!” The boys run after it, shoving each other and skidding in the mud, while he looks up at me even more wounded puppy–like and guilt-trippy.

  “It’s true.”

  He shrugs and turns back to the game, but I still catch his expression: disappointment. But not surprise.

  I don’t know why it’s so important to me: proving to Rowan I’m worthy of being his travel companion, a stand-in for Starling and Liat and those other girls—the autonomous, nonconformist, life-experienced girls who stood at his side in other places. It’s almost like if I’m accepted by Rowan—the pinnacle of pickiness, the travel ideal—Toby Kelsey and art school won’t matter anymore.

  I’ll have won. This time, for always.

  But it’s never going to happen unless I close my eyes and jump.

  The element of surprise is on my side. Rowan doesn’t notice me until I come up behind him and whisper in his ear: “I’m open.”

  It sounded less suggestive in my head.

  He’s so startled he drops the ball. I grab it and hop away, the mud slurping at my bare feet. From the hilltop, Sandu cheers, waving my shoes. The boys gather around me, hollering. They haven’t yet learned to be shy around women. Luckily, they don’t seem to care that I’ve got no idea how to play soccer. Playing with grown-up foreigners shatters all the rules.

  I hold the ball over my head for just a moment before a boy slaps it from my hands. I scream and run after him, which is a bad idea, because I slip and fall flat on my back.

  Unfortunately, the mud doesn’t swallow me up. So I am not protected from the humiliation of Rowan leaning over me, the gray sky framing his concerned face.

  “Are you okay?”

  Concerned—but maybe a little amused, too.

  “Fine,” I mutter.

  “Nothing broken?”

  “Not that I can tell.”

  I hold out my hand. As soon as he grabs it, I yank hard, sending him tumbling into the mud beside me. I have to laugh at his stunned expression. “Oldest trick in the book!” I tease.

  Rowan reaches for me, but I roll away just in time. There’s something refreshing about being so caked in muck you just stop caring. Until he scoops up a glob of mud and aims.

  “You wouldn’t.…”

  He does. It hits me square in the chest, and I yelp as the mud oozes down my shirt. I try to scrape it away with my forearm, but it only flattens, forming a mud pancake in my cleavage. Which is even less hot than it sounds. I lunge at him and shove him onto his back, pinning him with my knees on either side. He’s laughing so hard he doesn’t resist, even when I paint his face with my muddy fingers. Cat whiskers. A clown nose. A unibrow.

  All of a sudden, we realize we have an audience. The boys are standing in a forlorn cluster a few yards away. They don’t find us amusing—we’ve ruined the game.

  A slight rain begins to prickle our dirty faces. And in that second, it’s like we both become self-conscious. Or maybe it’s just me. Because I’m the one who has the imaginary boyfriend, straddling a guy I barely know before an audience of children.

  Ahem.

  We both stagger to our feet, scrap
ing mud from our shirts. Sandu’s waiting for us at the top of the hill, shaking his head and grinning.

  “Don’t say anything,” I tell him.

  He holds up his hands, like, I wasn’t about to!

  On our way back to the guesthouse, we stop by the beach so Rowan can wash off in the ocean. When I refuse to join him, he makes up names for me—like Mudsicle, Frankenslime, and Mudusa—until I tell him to quit.

  “Did you know medusa is the Spanish word for ‘jellyfish’?” he asks.

  I pry a flake of dried mud from my neck. “Since I know about twenty Spanish words, no.”

  “If you’re lucky, I’ll teach you.” He pulls off his shirt and tosses it on the sand. He’s got to stop doing that. Abdominal oblique, I think, and there’s a flit of wings in my chest.

  I turn away.

  Maybe I can’t control what Rowan thinks of me, but I’ve got to control how I think of Rowan. He’s off-limits. Might as well be straitjacketed in barbed wire. And Starling made it clear he could never be interested in me, even if I let myself be interested in him.

  I think of Tom and Liat, the soupy friction between them. The way they discussed everything except what itched, until Tom devolved into a man-shell who could only mutter about bats and insects.

  I think of my parents and their relentless wars. They care enough to stay together but have paved their marriage with battles and bickering, and now they don’t know any other way to be.

  I think of Toby and me. The tension I never noticed in those joint sketching sessions, before it became so abruptly evident I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it all along—like waking to a cacophony of screechy birds, or becoming suddenly aware of an embarrassing song playing on a store’s speakers (usually “I’m Gonna Be [500 Miles]” by the Proclaimers). I should have noticed that Toby’s art lessons tapered off the moment I started to get really good. If I had, all the fallout after I made fast track and he didn’t wouldn’t have surprised me.

  Rowan and I have at least two days before we reach the island. And if anything, the tension keeps getting worse. I don’t want to travel like that.