n i n e

*

When we drag ourselves back into the van, Sam elects Arjun to take over the role of DJ and Brannan returns to his favourite seat in the first row. Young-mi clambers into the back to take Arjun’s usual place. She greets me with a bright smile, deep dimples in her round cheeks, as she trips into her seat.

“Hi, March,” she says.

“Hey, Young-mi.”

“Can I talk to you?” she asks, lowering her voice and leaning in closer, almost trapping her finger when she tries to buckle up her seat belt while looking at me.

“Of course.” I’m not sure what the intensity is for. Maybe she’s just like that. I can’t imagine there’s much we’d need to have a serious talk about when so far, our conversations have revolved around our families – she’s the only child of strict parents; I have the opposite story – our lack of sporty inclination, and the beach.

“This morning, I heard you,” she says, and my stomach sinks. This morning I said an awful lot of stuff that I haven’t said to anyone before, stuff that I’ve kept to myself – and George – for years.

“Oh.” I can’t judge the situation. I don’t have a clue what she’s going to say. “Sorry. When I was talking with Arjun?”

She nods and brushes her hair out of her face, swooping it into a ponytail that looks too loose to stay put for long. “I was awake. Carrie sleeps loudly.” She whispers that, shooting a look at Carrie, who is obliviously engrossed in a conversation with Adedayo. Then she shakes her head, as if to reprimand herself for going off topic, and I wait for her to veer back to whatever it was she was going to say.

“I wanted to say ... your ex sounds like bad person.” She puts her hand on my knee and squeezes it, and her dark eyes seem to pierce my soul. They’re magnified by her thick, wire-rimmed glasses, all the more intense. “You are good person, March.”

I wasn’t expecting that, and I have to dig my thumbnails into my palms and press my tongue to the roof of my mouth to stop myself welling up. “Thanks, Young-mi,” I say. She doesn’t have much to go off, but her sincerity is touching. “That’s really nice,” I murmur. “So are you.”

Resting back against her seat, she folds her arms across her chest and lets out a heavy sigh, then rolls her cheek against her head rest and holds my gaze. She presses her lips together and lets out another long, slow sigh. “You like girls and boys?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do,” I say. That’s one of few things I’ve always known.

She nods again, to herself. “You have been with both?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Is it same for you?” she asks. “You like boys and girls in same way?”

That’s a trickier question, and not one I’ve ever dwelt on much when I don’t know the answer. It’s all just feelings, not hard fact. I shrug. “Not really, no. I don’t know how to explain it though. I think, when I like girls, it’s kind of a physical thing. Like, I’ll think, wow, she is absolutely beautiful and it’s exciting. When I like guys, it’s ... it’s all my senses, I think. It’s big and overwhelming and just, kind of, more.”

She sighs again and I can’t tell if she’s judging me or trying to figure me out, and I wonder if I’ve already said too much until she says, “I like boys and girls too. But not boys so much. Like you say, they cute and it’s exciting, like the butterflies” She flutters her hand over her chest and smiles, but the smile doesn’t last. “Girls ... I like girls a lot. My whole body, whole heart.”

A flower blossoms and unfurls in my chest, some stray sprig of hope and relief. “You do?” My heart lifts a little, and I feel a strange sense of validation wash over me, as though I’ve found an ally as well as an oasis. In that moment, I just want to gather Young-mi in my arms because she knows what it feels like, but I settle for squeezing her hand when it inches over to me.

She puts a finger to her lips, and I zip mine. Judging by her smile, it’s a universal gesture. A moment of silence ensues before she says, “I never told anyone before.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody. My parents would not be happy. I don’t want them to know,” she says.

I feel bad for worrying about mine knowing when I’m sure nothing bad will come of it. I’m hoping, anyway. I have yet to turn off airplane mode since I texted Dad and it doesn't matter how close we are, how open my parents are, I can't help that niggling thought that maybe they won't react in the way I need them to.

“If they know, they cut me off,” Young-mi says. “They don’t love me if I love girls. So don’t tell.”

Her words shatter the shards of my heart. My chest feels tight, my stomach churning at the thought alone of the position she's in.

“I won’t tell,” I promise her, as though there’s any chance that I’ll ever go to Chongqing, let alone track down her parents for the sole purpose of outing her. But I know how much a promise like that means, and I know how heavy it can be. When I hold up my little finger, she loops hers around it and beams.

“Thank you. See, good person.” She rests her hand palm up on her thigh and when my fingers meet hers, our palms touching, she clasps me tightly. I feel like we’ve just made an important bond, and I realise that in less than two full days, there are already two people on this trek I’d happily call my friends.

“How old are you?” I ask when another silence looms.

“Twenty-one,” she says.

“Have you ever dated anyone?”

She shakes her head. “No. I had friend, back home. A girl. Wang Min. Very close friend,” she says, linking her index fingers. "Very close. But not to date. Too dangerous.”

“Are you still friends?”

Another head shake; another heavy sigh. I want to cradle her heart and ease away the sadness from her soul, but I still need to figure out how to do that for myself.

“Her parents send her away to church,” Young-mi says, the corners of her mouth succumbing to gravity. “Now she is with a boy. She won’t talk to me. I love her very much, before. Now I can't.”

My heart aches for her and my chest tightens as it pushes a painful lump into my throat that I can’t swallow down. I don’t want to brush over the agony of her situation but there’s not much I can say except, “I’m so sorry. That’s awful.”

“Mmm.”

“You’re coming to study here, right? In California?”

Her smile returns and she nods, dimples popping back into her cheeks. “Four whole years,” she says, holding up four fingers. “More, if I can stay.”

“You can love whoever you want here. You won’t have to hide so much,” I say.

When I was in L.A., my heart fluttered every time I saw a queer couple holding hands or kissing in the street, and every time I wanted to run over and cry out, “Look at me! I’m here and I’m queer too! Let’s be friends!”

“I know,” Young-mi says, pulling her feet onto the seat to wrap her arms around her knees. “I don’t want to ever leave.”

*

Young-mi falls asleep with her head on my shoulder. She’s absolutely silent, so quiet that at one point I stare at her chest only to make sure it’s still moving, she’s still breathing; even the jolt of bouncing into a pothole doesn’t stir her.

Eventually, her sleepiness wears off on me and I drift off with my cheek pressed against her silky hair, inhaling the sweet fragrance of her perfume. I only wake up when the van comes to a stop and I open my eyes to see that we’re at a petrol station in the middle of nowhere. Young-mi rises, yawning as she cleans her glasses and blinks out of the window.

The entire drive from the oasis so far has existed in the middle of nowhere, the side of America that I’ve never seen before, or even really thought about. When I think of this country, I think of the big cities – New York, Chicago, L.A. – and the beaches from California to Florida. I don’t think of the endless expanse of nothingness, hundreds of miles of desert that stretches out to the horizon, hot and unforgiving. I don’t think about endless flat land without a soul to be seen in any direction, but according to one of Sam’s facts, only five percent of the country is developed.

That blows my mind. But the longer we drive without seeing another car on the road, the easier it is to believe. The petrol station, with its one employee behind the till, is the first sign of life I’ve seen since before we reached the Joshua trees. It must be lonely, working here. I haven’t seen anything that even slightly resembles a house in hours. Maybe she lives here, in an apartment above the little convenience store, serving lost souls and tired trekkers.

“Lunch stop!” Sam calls, waking us all up. Young-mi and I aren’t the only ones to have fallen asleep. Kristin and Klara look up blearily, rubbing their eyes, and Adedayo is practically snoring, his head bobbing against the window.

“Right, guys,” Sam says. “I need to fill up, and we’ve got a long way to go with not much by the way of food ahead of us. I recommend getting stuff here to eat in the van, and we’ll stop at a grocery store closer to the campsite. Tonight we’re going to do a cookout – everyone’s going to contribute to the food we buy, and we’ll cook it all together by the river.”

That, I think, sounds like heaven.

Armed with a twenty dollar bill, I head into the poky little store that sells the most random assortment of stuff, from sandwiches and ice creams to spatulas and batteries. I grab the least dubious-looking of the sandwiches and a couple of big bags of crisps, and my snacky lizard brain takes over as I fill my basket with chocolate. Stuff I’ve never seen back home, which may well be disgusting, but I’m willing to take the risk.

Arjun laughs when he looks down at my basket and says, “Someone’s hungry.”

“Apparently pastries at eight in the morning isn’t enough to sustain me. I’m a growing boy,” I say.

That’s a lie. I haven’t grown at all in two years, when I hit five foot six and then stopped. They say that boys always outgrow their mothers, and I’d have been sorted if Mum was my biological mother, because she’s nearly six feet. Unfortunately, the woman whose genes I share is a whole foot shorter.

“All that’s gonna make you a thirsty boy, too,” Arjun says. He adds a four-pack of water bottles to his basket and I take the hint. This place isn’t cheap – I’m assuming, at least, though I have no idea what the currency conversion rate is and the extra tax always sneaks up on me like a monetary assassin – but I’m running low on water and I feel like the desert isn’t the best place to run out.

According to my receipt, we’re in Arizona. I didn’t realise we’d already left California. I must have slept through the crossing of the state border, else it would’ve been cool to get a picture. Though maybe this deep in the desert, they don’t bother with the Welcome to ... signs. Who even knows where state borders are when the land is so vast and empty.

Sam fills up the tank and we fill up the seats, and I take a photo of the petrol station, slap bang in the middle of nowhere. I want to upload it to my story, but I don’t want to turn off airplane mode yet. It’s eight o’clock in the evening back home, so my parents have had several hours to digest my text to Dad, and I’m sure that the moment I switch my data on, there’ll be at least one message from each of them, and probably Flo too.

Something is blocking me from pressing that button. Most of me is sure they’ll be the kindest messages, if there are any, but there’s that part that whispers doubts into my ear. Stupid niggles that maybe I don’t know my parents as well as I think I do, that maybe they’ll react badly. That maybe they won’t say anything at all.

It’s felt good to be cut off for a few hours and for now, I want to put my home life behind me to focus on my fleeting trek life. Creepy petrol stations and all.

There’s another DJ switch when Arjun claims that he only has two hours’ worth of good music and he’s used both of them, and that he’s ready to relinquish the responsibility. Young-mi gives me a warm smile and squeezes my hand when she returns to her usual seat, and Arjun climbs in next to me. He trips and our knees bash, and he grabs my headrest to stop himself from punching me in the face. I catch a waft of his deodorant and a flash of his apologetic smile, and ... there go my burning cheeks again.

“How was your nap?” he asks, a cheeky grin teasing his lips. “You two looked pretty adorable dozing back here.”

He just called me adorable. He knows I’m a bisexual mess and he called me adorable and I know it probably means nothing but that means nothing to my desperate little brain, which latches onto the slightest hint of affirmation and blows it up into a parade.

“I needed it. Emotions are exhausting,” I say. “I wish I could, like, transfer them to some kind of external storage. Just stick all my crap emotions on an SD card to free up space for the good ones.”

“I think those kinds of SD cards are call therapists. Or friends,” Arjun says. “Or family, if you’ve got a good one.”

“Mmm.”

He nods at my phone. “Anything?”

“I’m trying this new thing where I throw a bunch of new information at my parents and then disconnect from the virtual world so they have to deal with it without being able to get in touch with me, because I’m not sure I can handle their reactions,” I say. Then, at his bemusement, I add, “It’s still on airplane mode.”

“Ah. Understandable. So I take it I can’t add you as a friend just yet.”

That snags my attention. I snap my head up, trying to control my lips and the colour of my cheeks. I can’t have freaked him out too badly if he wants to add me as a friend.

“You can,” I say, “but I can’t accept yet.”

“I’ll wait until you’re ready,” he says.

I appreciate what he's saying but my glee vanishes. My smile plummets. His words thrust George back into my mind when I don’t want him there, when I can’t bear to think about him. When George said those words to me, I thought he was amazing, that he was so kind and patient with me when I wasn’t ready to sleep with him.

Little did I know then, he was already getting it somewhere else. When I found out, I spent an hour in the shower, scrubbing every inch of my body until my sensitive skin was raw and painful, and I still didn’t feel clean.

I didn’t feel clean after a week of hot showers twice a day; after I went to the clinic just in case; after my results came back fine.

When I found out what George had done to me, I felt dirty. I felt pathetic and embarrassed and stupid and dirty, and every time he rears his head in my memory, all those feelings come roaring back.

*

who's ready for the colorado river? i am! i hope you're still enjoying this story!