I decide to hold out for now. Catch him by surprise, maybe.
I can’t believe I’m being so playful.
“How’d you get so good at this, anyway?” he asks. “Doing . . . you know. Trampoline flips, or whatever.”
There’s a beat where we both realize the significance of this. Not the question itself, but the fact that he’s asking it. It’s this new trying to know me, with the promise that it’s for him alone.
I flex my feet against the tightly woven, plastic-y surface beneath me. It’s strange, how hard it is to answer. Didn’t I just tell Adam things about my life—the big, scary, lonely things about my life—that I don’t share with anyone? Shouldn’t it be so much easier to say something small?
“I had this friend,” I finally say, just when I think he’s about to tell me not to worry about answering. “We met in our third-grade class. She had one of these at her house.”
“Nice,” he says, as though that was a really interesting piece of information, as though the small things matter just as much as the big ones.
“I wanted to be a gymnast,” I blurt, before he gives up on me. “Like . . . an Olympic one. Obviously I get now that I would’ve had to start long before third grade. And also that doing flips on a trampoline isn’t . . . you know. What gymnasts do. But at the time . . . I thought that would be so amazing, to be able to be one of those girls. Those sparkly uniforms they wore, the way they did their hair. The way they could justfly, you know?”
He smiles. Crooked and lovely and flattered.
“It’s hard to picture.” His eyes track over my black T-shirt and jeans. “You in sparkles.”
I smile back, but cross my arms as if I’m offended. “It’s hard to picture you hulking out over a little leather ball while wearing shiny leggings.”
He snorts. “That’s fair enough.”
The silence stretches, as taut as the mat beneath me. It’s an odd feeling, to stand on a trampoline and not jump. It’s not built for standing still.
“I used to love sparkles. On everything. My school supplies, my clothes. My face, when my mom would let me put them there. Bright pinks and greens and blues.”
Ask me, I’m thinking, the same way I was last night. Now that we’ve done this—had this conversation, made this new deal with each other—I could answer so many things.
“How come it’s ‘used to’? How come”—he tips his chin up at me, a gesture to what I’m wearing now—“it’s this?”
I drop my arms back to my sides, tip my head up toward the still-darkening sky. The color I like to cloak myself in.
“At first, it was kind of afuck you, I guess. To my mom, when she came back after the first time she left.”
I close my eyes briefly, remembering those surreal first days after her return. She didn’t tell me right away, about being pregnant with Tegan, but I thought something looked different about her all the same. Her face somehow a different shape, her lips and nose always slightly puffy. Late at night, I used to lie awake and think:Maybe it’s not really her. Maybe my real mom is still somewhere else.
“I didn’t want her to know me anymore.” I look back at him, offer a slightly embarrassed smile. “I went a little Goth, I guess, at first. And then later—” I break off, aware that I’m approaching the part of this story that comes closer to what brought me and Adam together in the first place.
“Later, I wanted to keep things simple. Easy to buy clothes, easy to figure out what to wear. Easy to be . . . nondescript. I wanted to blend in.”
“You don’t blend in. Not to me, you don’t.”
He’s said it so forcefully, but it lands like a caress. Soft and so disarming. It makes the steady posture I have to keep on this unsteady surface almost impossible to maintain. I should be lying down when I hear Adam Hawkins say something like this.
The images that accompany this thought—they’re too intimate to contemplate.
So I bend my knees and jump.
Adam barks out a laugh as he flails to steady himself, and then he joins me, jumping back. Obviously, I’ve made a grave mistake, because once Adam commits to it, I’m the one flailing and laughing and caught completely off guard. I gasp and yell his name, forcing myself into a bouncing rhythm of my own, and that’s how we stay for the next couple of minutes—two overgrown kids, jumping and laughing as though we haven’t just had the heaviest, most personal conversation of our entire acquaintance. I think of third-grade me, making a study out of someone’s backyard playground, imagining myself covered in sparkles on a grand Olympic stage. I’m so different now, but then again . . .
Then again, this laughter and play and silliness . . . it’s still familiar to me, even if it’s been years and years since I embracedit.
When Adam and I accidentally knock into each other, my shoulder catching him lightly in the sternum, we both reach out, an automatic instinct to keep from falling, and that’s how it happens—my hands clutching his thick, corded forearms, his palms settling on my hips, both of us staring at each other as our goofy smiles fade. Another thing I haven’t had in years and years—being touched this way by a man, byanyone—but it’s not familiar. It’s brand-new, its own thing, sparkles beneath my skin, at the backs of my knees, between my legs.
Up close Adam’s throat is a column of temptation; his mouth the most crossable line in the sand.
His eyes drop to my lips.
