never looked where they were going and I knew that if I didn’t do the same there would be a horrible crunch under my sock, and in our condition that was the last thing we needed.
With its theatrical lighting, the kitchen was the hottest room yet, but we got a pitcher of icewater from the fridge dispenser and spent five silent minutes just drinking, leaning on the cool granite counters. My shirt was soaked and stuck unpleasantly to my body, and even the waistband of my boxers was wet through. I put my head under the sink faucet as Johnny got out a laptop and started turning lights off. The sun had gone down, and I watched from under my curtain of dripping hair as all the windows opened, letting in a gorgeous whiff of breeze.
She ran her hands through her wet hair, spiking it up. Sweat collected in the hollows under her eyes, trembling and jiggling like the water glass in Jurassic Park. I dug in one of the drawers and found her a kitchen towel.
“Did you eat?”
“Since when?”
“Since you landed, dummy,” I said. “Since then.”
“Does coffee count?”
“Some genius.” I refilled my glass, emptied it again, listened to my stomach grumble in protest. “Even a dog knows to eat when it’s hungry.”
“I know.” She was shaking all over, not just her hands, not just the water under her eyes. “I h-h-have to start the paper to-nuh-n-night, do the writeup... patent... test protocol... if I c-c-call in all my favours, I could maybe get it patented in f-five, six months, published in...”
“Tonight? You are good for nothing tonight except looking cute and drinking water. No offense.”
“I’m offended!”
“I know you are, but you are also in pieces. A bunch of very small, tiny pieces.”
She burst into tears and pressed the wet towel to her face, but that was okay; I’d seen her at various levels of this kind of utter, strung-out collapse before. It wasn’t real crying, it was her body trying to get rid of stress hormones or something. Nothing could be done till she was all cried out, so I just moved her water glass away so she wouldn’t bump it with her elbow, and politely looked away, down to the backyard, a lake of fragrant grass lit here and there with the starey, luminescent eyes of rabbits.
Look at us, hitting escape velocity away from each other. Look at her, in pieces, letting me watch her be in pieces, as if we were grownups. How old were we when the unspoken agreement came that we couldn’t do kid stuff any more? No more Marco Polo in the ravine, no more play wars with imaginary soldiers, memorizing tactics from her old Roman manuals. No more water-balloon fights. No more self-authored plays fighting over who played the boy and who played the girl, ending up with two armadillos of indeterminate gender flying away on their dragon to be emperors of their far-away planet. No more one-legged races or pretending to be dinosaurs or scuffling over colouring books. No more skating on their family pond—although to be fair, that was kind of a mutual decision after she fell through that one time. Maybe that was when we decided it. We hadn’t had a referendum or anything.
“Let me make you some supper,” I said when she had tailed off to just snuffles and hiccups.
She laughed. “There you go again, trying to take care of everyone.”
“Just people who can’t take care of themselves,” I said.
She put her head on her side, looking at me. I stared back, steadily, waiting for her to smile again. Would I know if I were falling in love with her, I wondered. A different, a grown-up love. Would something tell me, like a bolt from above? Or would it be something as small as that I wanted her so desperately, so uncontrollably, to smile at me and she wouldn’t? That I wanted her to look at me the way she looked at that shoebox?
“Yeah, okay,” she said, tossing the towel on the counter. “Food. Sleep. Yeah.”
“Deal?”
“Yes, deal. What do you get out of it though?”
“Same thing as you.”
BACK HOME, I parked and sat on the Geo’s warm hood listening to the engine tick down. The streetlights were out on our side—typical—and the night sky was startlingly clear and bright. The stars, that would be the only thing that Johnny’s discovery wouldn’t change. You’d have to look that far to find something she hadn’t touched.