And okay. Ben could see what Jasmyn was saying. Their paint was faded and chipped, clearly worn down by time. But—
“Come on, man.” Because faded paint or not, they werehuge. Someone had decided they were going to build these things, and by God, they did. Human beings were the weirdest, and Ben loved everything about this. “This is amazing.”
Alexei gave a skeptical tilt of his head.
“They’re kind of…depressing?”
“Oh my God.” Ben threw his hands up in despair. “The fact that the federal minimum wage hasn’t changed in over ten years is depressing. Not having a cure for cancer is depressing. This is…”More hand waving. “Charming vintage Americana!”
Alexei added a dose of dubious squinting to his head tilt. “Charming?”
“Okay, just Americana then. Bigass dinosaurs in the middle of the desert, just for the hell of it. Yes.”
Alexei squinted some more. Until the left side of his mouth shifted, and—yes,victory, it hid a bit under all his scruff, but that was most definitely a smile. A smile that was poking fun at Ben, not necessarily a pure product of the dinosaurs themselves, but like the Burger King, Ben would take it.
A moment of silence passed as they stared. And then—
“God bless America?” Alexei hedged, and it was the closest Ben had witnessed Alexei come to a sense of humor. He could have cheered.
“Exactly,” he said.
“So do we sing the national anthem now, or…?”
Jokes! Alexei Lebedev was attempting to make jokes!
“No, even more American than that,” Ben answered, grabbing his phone from his pocket. “We take selfies. Come on,” he added when Alexei simply stood on the sidewalk, unmoving, as Ben backed toward the dinosaurs.
“Oh.” Alexei’s smile faltered. “You wantmein them?”
“Of course I want you in them, Lex! Or else the moment won’t be properly documented!”
“Oh,” Alexei said again. But after a moment, he stepped forward, and leaned his shoulder toward Ben, and Ben angled his phone in twenty different directions in an attempt to get both their faces and the dinosaurs in the same frame. Which was difficult because, again, these dinos were huge.
To Alexei’s credit, he did smile through every attempt. And maybe Ben couldn’t exactly tell if it was forced or not, but damn, it was still cute, and it was nice, Alexei’s shoulder brushing against his, and—friends! Ben would definitely post this photo on Instagram of his new good friend he wasn’t attracted to at all.
“I’ll email these to you?” he asked once he thought he’d finally gotten a few decent ones. He stepped away, typing on his phone. “I have a bar or two of service here to send them through before I forget.”
“Oh. Um. Sure.” Alexei, again, seemed almost surprised by this request, but gave Ben his email address nonetheless. Even though Ben could have guessed it. It was obviously [email protected].
“All right.” Ben stuck his phone in his pocket and clapped his hands. “Let’s do this.”
They entered through a door set in the brontosaurus’s tail, walking up a set of stairs to a dusty gift shop. It was super weird and perfect and Ben sent Julie a postcard that looked like it’d been printed in 1989.
He made Alexei send one to Alina, too.
Ben waited until they were outside again, walking across the cracked pavement to the Burger King.
“Tell me something more about her,” he said. “Alina.”
Ben still enjoyed Alexei’s silences. Felt more at home on the trail, somehow, inside them. But he’d discovered that, sometimes, simply asking Alexei to talk produced the loveliest results.
Alexei, as he often did, took a moment before he answered.
“We spent a lot of time outside when we were kids. There was this patch of woods behind our house. She would…”They paused outside the door of the Burger King. Alexei adjusted the strap of his pack, trekking poles dangling from his wrist. Another small smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “She would always pretend to be these outlandish things. A llama was one of her favorites. Or a sloth, or a butterfly. Or sometimes”—Alexei’s voice grew more animated—“she’d insist on being like…a dandelion. Or a jellyfish.”
“What about you? Did you ever pretend to be a favorite creature?”
“Yeah. I was always a fox.”
