Field Notes on Love

by Jennifer E. Smith

  “I thought you knew I had a big mouth,” Alfie says with a shrug. “Besides, it was George’s idea.”

  George smiles ruefully. “Listen, if this family were a cake—”

  “Seriously?” Poppy says, rolling her eyes.

  “Do I get to be the sugar in this metaphor?” asks Alfie.

  “Well, now I’m feeling a bit peckish,” says Oscar.

  “All I’m saying,” George continues, “is that I like it when we’re all together. But I also want you to be happy. And I can see that you are. So we want to help.”

  Hugo blinks a few times, dangerously close to tears. “That’s…” He shakes his head. “That’s incredibly generous. But I can’t let you do it.”

  “It’s okay,” Oscar says. “We’ll only be bluffing.”

  “Yeah, if they say no, we’ll back off,” Isla tells him. “It’s not like we have any other options at this point, and the rest of us still want to go. But we figured a show of solidarity might help with your situation.”

  Hugo shakes his head. “What if they call your bluff?”

  “We’ll sort it out,” says Alfie. “It’s worth a shot, though, yeah?”

  Hugo tries to picture it, the five of them trooping into the university council’s office, laying out their demands, arguing on his behalf. They’re all looking at him with different expressions—Poppy is determined, and George is protective; Isla is concerned, and Oscar is interested, which for Oscar is a massive compliment. Alfie, of course, is just puffed up with pride at the good deed he’s currently doing. Hugo has always been able to read them better than anyone, and with each of them, he knows this is a show of love. But he also knows he can’t let them do it.

  “You’re all amazing,” he says, his voice filled with sincerity. The truth is, he feels a bit undone by all this. “And it means the world to me. But it’s not your job to sort this out.”

  “It’s no trouble,” Isla says. “Honestly.”

  Poppy nods. “We just want you to be happy.”

  “I will be,” Hugo says. “I don’t mind coming home. Not really. I’ll travel next summer instead. Or on holidays. It’ll be fine.”

  “That’s rubbish,” Alfie says. “You want to go. I know you do. So why not let us try?”

  “No,” Hugo says a bit more firmly. “Just—please don’t do anything. I love you guys for offering, but it’s fine.”

  Isla looks at him skeptically. “I think that must be a record for the most times anyone has ever said fine in a conversation.”

  The connection wavers, their faces going frozen on the screen. Then, just as quickly, they’re back.

  “Hugo?” Poppy says. “I think we’re losing you.”

  He manages a grin. “Never.”

  “I think she meant the connection, mate,” Alfie says, and both Poppy and George reach over to punch him.

  “I know,” Hugo says as the image flickers again. “Look, I should go. The service is a bit dodgy between stops. But thank you again. Really. You’re the best.”

  “Who, me?” Alfie says.

  Hugo laughs. “All of you. I’ll see you in a few days.”

  “It won’t be so bad, Hugo,” says Poppy, but before he has a chance to find out which part she’s talking about—the apology to Mae or the end of the trip, the return home or the start of uni—the video cuts out.

  There’s a speck of dirt on the window, and Hugo watches it move up and down as they pass fields of horses and cattle, sheep and goats. At a crossing, a rancher leans out of his pickup truck to watch them rumble by, and beyond him a field of wildflowers ripples in the wind.

  After a few minutes, he slips his phone into his pocket and stands up.

  Mae is in the observation car, sitting alone at one of the tables. Her head is bent over her camera as he slides into the booth across from her.

  “That’s Mr. Bernstein’s seat.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Bernstein,” she says. “We’re in the middle of an interview. He was just telling me about proposing to his wife before he went off to Vietnam.”

  “For the war?”

  “No, for vacation.” She looks up at him. “I’m kidding.”

  “Listen,” he says, “I’m sorry about before.”

  She gives him a steady look. “Which part?”

  “All of it,” he says.

  “You don’t have to be sorry about Margaret, you know,” she says, fiddling with the lens of her camera. “You have every right to see her. There’s a lot of history there, and—”

  “I know,” he says. “But I am sorry about the film. I shouldn’t have watched it. Full stop. I betrayed your trust, which was an awful thing to do. And I’m also sorry about—”

  “Hugo.”

  “Look, I know I probably shouldn’t have said it like that. But I want you to know it wasn’t a mistake. That’s how I feel. I like you, Mae. A lot. This week has been incredible because of you, and I swear—” He stops abruptly, looking up at the old man in too-high trousers who is suddenly hovering over him.

  “You must be the assistant director,” Mr. Bernstein says, shaking his hand. “Are you going to ask some questions too?”

  Hugo finds himself nodding.

  Mr. Bernstein looks pleased. “Well, what would you like to know?”

  “I’d like to know,” Hugo says, then turns back to Mae, “if you feel the same way.”

  “About what?” Mr. Bernstein asks, clearly confused.

  But they both ignore this. Mae is staring at Hugo, whose heart has lodged itself somewhere in the vicinity of his throat. He digs his fingernails into his palm as he waits for her to say something. But her expression is impossible to read.

  A year seems to go by.

  Then another.

  Oh god, Hugo thinks. What have I done?

  Mr. Bernstein is still watching them, and Hugo can feel his face heating up. Beneath them the train sways as they move deeper into the red, jagged mountains, which rise on either side of them like the landscape of some strange and distant dream.

  And maybe that’s all this is, anyway: a dream.

  Maybe arriving will be no different from waking up.

  With each second that passes, he becomes more and more certain this was a terrible mistake, a colossal disaster, an absolute bollocks of an idea.

  But then her foot finds his beneath the table, and when he looks up at her, she’s smiling.

  His heart loosens itself again, a cork coming free from a bottle, and he’s so overcome with relief that it’s all he can do to stay upright. He raises his eyebrows at her, and she nods, a movement so slight that it would be hard to catch if you weren’t looking for it.

  Hugo grins back at her from across the table.

  “So are we doing this or what?” Mr. Bernstein says, looking from one to the other, and Mae laughs, still looking right at Hugo.

  “I guess we’re doing this,” she says.

  “Your turn,” she says when they get back to their compartment after dinner. They’re in Utah now, and the sky is soft and pale, the mountains turning to silhouettes all around them. Hugo’s forehead is pressed to the window, where below them a narrow river runs placidly alongside the tracks.

  He turns around in surprise. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “But I thought you didn’t want me to be part of it.”

  She studies him for a moment, the brown eyes and the dark hair, the way his mouth is twisted so that only one dimple shows. The collar of his shirt is messed up, and for some reason this makes her heart swell. She leans across to fix it, their faces close, her fingers brushing his neck, and then—unable to help herself—she gives him a quick kiss before sitting back again.

  “I changed my mind,” she tells him.

  His mouth twists in the other di
rection. “But why?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I want to hear your answers.”

  This isn’t exactly true, but it’s not exactly untrue either. And it makes him smile. “Well, Mr. Bernstein will be a tough act to follow,” he says. “Same with that teacher—June? She nearly had me in tears.”

  “Nearly?” Mae asks, and Hugo reaches out to grab her around the waist, laughing as he pulls her down onto the seat with him. She’s balanced awkwardly, half on his lap and half wedged beside him, but it doesn’t matter because he’s already kissing her, this time with a kind of desperate intensity. When—after a few minutes—they break apart, both breathing heavily, he leans forward and kisses her one last time on the tip of her nose.

  “So,” he says, shifting over so she can sit beside him, the two of them shoulder to shoulder on a seat meant for one. “Twenty-one hours to San Francisco.”

  Mae feels the air go whistling right out of her. Suddenly that doesn’t seem like very much at all. “And then another sixteen till I leave for LA,” she says.

  “And then another twenty-four till I go back to England.”

  She puts her head on his shoulder, and he rests his chin on the top of her head. “It’s not enough.”

  “No,” he says, his voice heavy, “it isn’t.”

  She looks past him to where the last few wispy clouds are laced with gold. Utah and then Nevada and then California. She’s hardly thought about the fact that she’ll be starting college next week, that all she has to do is cross a few more states and head south along the coast and then she’s there, in the place where she’ll be spending the next four years.

  “Your world is going to get so big,” Nana told her before she left, and Mae marvels at how much it already has, with Hugo here beside her and the enormous western sky rolled out ahead of them. They spent the whole day doing interviews, and now her head is filled with stories, all of them buzzing madly. She can’t wait to piece them together, all these lives that have intersected as they wind their way across the country for different reasons.

  She was lying about Hugo, though.

  It’s not that she’s changed her mind about interviewing him. She still doesn’t think he belongs in the film. It’s something else. Something more important than that.

  It came to her earlier, when he was sitting on the other side of the table in the café car, his face nervous as he waited for the answer to a question he hadn’t even really been able to formulate. Mae realized that no matter what happens over the course of these next twenty-one hours on a train and then sixteen hours in San Francisco, they’ll have to say goodbye at the end of it.

  And she’s going to miss him.

  It doesn’t seem like a big enough word, but it’s all there is: she’ll miss him. Already, and improbably, it feels like a hole has started to open in her chest. So she decided she wants to take something with her. If she can’t keep all of him, she at least wants to try capturing a tiny piece.

  “How does this work, then?” Hugo asks, noticing her eyes are on the camera, which is sitting on the shelf beside the opposite seat. “Do I get the same questions as everyone else? Or do I get special ones because I’m so—”

  “Annoying?” she asks with a grin.

  He bumps his shoulder against hers. “I was going to say charming. But sure.”

  “You get the same ones as everyone else.”

  “You know,” he says, “if I were interviewing you—”

  “Which you’re not.”

  “—I’d never ask you the standard questions.”

  “What would you ask?”

  He thinks about this. “I’d ask you the best advice your nana ever gave you.”

  “She said I should try to meet a cute boy on the train,” she says, and Hugo lets out a laugh.

  “Did she really?” he asks, incredulous.

  Mae nods.

  “Well, she sounds extremely clever. I’d definitely want to hear more about her. And your parents too.”

  “What about them?”

  “What they’re like, how they met, what it was like growing up with two dads.”

  She’s about to say what she always says to this question: It was lucky. The luckiest thing in the world. Because my dads are the greatest.

  In the hallway, a door opens and voices call out to each other. But in here it’s quiet, just the sound of their breathing and the roar of the train underneath it all. They could be anywhere and nowhere, but they’ve somehow found themselves here, and she’s suddenly grateful for it, all of it, for the extra ticket and the way it brought them together despite everything, the bigness of the world and the unlikeliness of a moment like this.

  Hugo is watching her with a look of such warmth that she’s reminded of Priyanka’s words. It’s like the sun, she said, in that it makes everything brighter and happier.

  Mae knows her line too: You can get burnt by it.

  But right now it doesn’t feel that way to her. Not at all.

  She gives Hugo a rueful smile. “It was hard sometimes.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Not because of them. They’re the best. But it’s a small town, and I was the only kid with gay parents.” She shrugs. “People can be jerks, you know?”

  “I do, actually,” Hugo says, his face serious. “Though you seem pretty well equipped to handle that sort of thing.”

  “Maybe,” she says. “But it can still sting. I remember one time my dad came to pick me up at school, and the new secretary wouldn’t let me leave with him because we don’t have the same last name. It was awful. It didn’t matter that it’s my middle name, or that we look exactly alike, or that he’d picked me up a million times before. She wouldn’t budge, so we just had to sit there in her office, both of us stewing, until Pop came to get us.” She shakes her head. “Another time, I was at the playground with Pop and some kid came up and said he heard he’s not my ‘real’ dad. As if biology is the only thing that counts.”

  “What did you do?” Hugo asks, his eyes big.

  “I punched him in the stomach,” she says with a grin. “I was only six. But still. Not always as calm, cool, and collected as I probably should’ve been.”

  “It can be hard to ignore that stuff.”

  She nods. “Did you guys get teased a lot at school?”

  “Not so much there. It helped that there were six of us. But you should see the comments section on my mum’s blog.” He whistles and shakes his head. “If you’ve ever wondered where the racist, sexist, antigrammar crowd likes to spend their time, look no further.”

  “That’s horrible,” Mae says, alarmed, but he only shrugs.

  “Mum’s not too fussed about them anymore, and neither are we. Not that I wouldn’t mind punching some of them in the stomach. But it’s easier to ignore than in real life.”

  “Yeah, but they’re still out there.”

  “They’re still out there,” he agrees, burying his nose in her shoulder. She takes one of his hands and begins to trace the lines of his palm, and she feels a rush of pleasure when he flips it over, capturing her hand inside his own.

  “What about the blog?” she asks. “Do you read it?”

  He laughs. “Not if I can help it.”

  “I liked the one about how you and Alfie—”

  “What,” he says with a groan, “you read it?”

  “I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m a regular or anything, but I had to do my homework on you.”

  He shakes his head, but one of his dimples has appeared, so she can tell he’s amused. “Which one was it? Alfie and I got up to a lot of trouble when we were little.”

  “The story about you guys running away to London.”

  “Right,” Hugo says, folding his arms across his chest. “That was Alfie’s idea.”

  She was expecting him to laugh,
but instead he looks somber.

  “What?” she says, and he sighs.

  “They rang me earlier, when you were doing interviews. Alfie told the others about the email from the university, and they were all planning to go plead my case tomorrow. Even George.”

  “Wow,” she says, smiling at this. “That’s really cool of them.”

  “I told them not to do it.”

  She nods. “I figured.”

  “I don’t want them to risk their own scholarships,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “And honestly, I can’t have them fight my battles. Not anymore.”

  “I agree,” Mae says, looking at him carefully. “That’s why I think you should fight your own.”

  “A letter won’t do anything,” he says in a tone impatient enough to signal he doesn’t want to argue with her. “I know you think this is a hangover, but it’s not. The truth is, I was drunk before. And now I’ve sobered up.”

  “Right, but—”

  “It wouldn’t have worked.” He stands abruptly, leaving Mae alone in the seat. “I haven’t talked to my parents or done any research or even checked my bank account. And now the council thinks I don’t want to be there, and I’m worried Alfie and the others will still go and talk to them and screw up their own scholarships, and the whole thing is just—”

  “Hugo.”

  He presses his lips together, his eyes darting. “It was a stupid idea.”

  “Sometimes those can be good for you,” Mae says, smiling as she thinks of Nana. But Hugo’s mouth is still a straight line. “So, what…you’re just gonna go home at the end of this?”

  “Yes,” he says, sitting down again in the opposite chair. “I’m just going home at the end of this.”

  They stare at each other, neither quite satisfied. A tense silence hangs between them until, finally, Hugo points to the camera.

  “We’ve lost the plot a bit with this interview, haven’t we?” he asks, his voice full of effort. When she doesn’t say anything, he leans forward, drumming his hands on the little table. “Shall I ask you about something less controversial?”