09
"Adele, are you Christian?" Olivia asks with earnest eyes. She realizes she's always earnest. Olivia has no shoes on, neither does Adele, they left them at the door. Her feet are poised and raw, like she's stepping on dirt.
Though she has been helping out at the small farm Adele's mother set up after knocking down the backyard fence.
There's nothing really decorative about her bedroom except it used to be her brother's up until he left. Olivia has taken the dark grunge color palette in stride. It's not much of a palette, more of black, grey and white. Her mother's been telling her that it's no good wearing ripped jeans in front of your friends but Adele takes Olivia's side on the matter.
"No," she answers slowly, plays with the sheets. The pastor has long abandoned them for greener pastures. Don't really need a church for faith, or something like that. Or maybe she's just disillusioned from turning fourteen last Saturday, high school must've hit a little differently. "Why?"
"My dad says some black people are Christians." She says it with conviction, glances at her while hanging up her clothes while they're still inside out.
"Do you think I'm one?" Adele asks not because she really wants to know, not particularly, but because it's the natural progression of conversation.
Olivia thinks about this, clicks her hanger into her wardrobe. The laundry doesn't smell the most refreshing. "I don't think so," she says. Then adds, "They won't like you."
That wasn't a dig on her character. "We have black churches for that."
"Just not here," Olivia registers.
"Just not here," she echoes thoughtfully.
—
Now the sun is like a yolk that broke
into the corridor.
Sleepwalk through its gold
and you will see the original glitter
that lit our move to the lounge.
It's getting late and they had to stop to camp out underneath the night. It's to find any patches of dirt amongst the lush but they do come across a substantial flat space. They unroll their sleeping bags and leave their bikes circling where the fire would go, trudges into the woods.
Her shorts may be good for the road, in the wind. But here the blades graze against the skin of her thighs, it's itchy. Adele resists the urge to scratch it for her dignity, even if it's only Olivia out here and she's even facing away, taking the lead.
They pick up sticks and twigs and loose parts of low branches, Adele doesn't know what species of tree this is. She would probably guess oak every single time. She's been to her state's national parks and there they had tall, menacing redwoods.
One of her kindergarten classmates had offered to climb it.
Olivia tells that one joke with stick as the punchline. Adele chases it before Olivia could stomp on the delivery. They mime a sword fight with the long sturdier specimens, but the hits are soft and they're all too carefree or rather, uninterested in the outcome before continuing their search.
"What do you wanna do when you turn 18?" Adele asks out of the blue.
Olivia glances back just enough for her ear to come into view. "Hm?"
"When you're an adult," she clarifies, a little uselessly.
"I don't know," Olivia answers, awfully sober for such an abstract and corny question. Her stocking is caught on an offshoot, she doesn't seem to mind. "Does it matter?"
There's a woodpecker in the distance, it starts to drill relentlessly, echoing through the gaps between the trees. Sometimes she only brings stuff up when she wants to say something about it, not for the benefit of the other person. So she hesitates before she makes her confession.
"I wanna leave."
"Leave Lake Jade?"
They each pick up some sticks. She sounds interested, just mildly.
"Yeah."
Olivia ducks underneath a low branch then ditches her staff because she can't pick up sticks while holding it. "Is your mom gonna let you?"
She sighs dismissively, imagines the stress of even asking her mother for any such permission. "Probably not."
"You could leave now, if you really wanted to." She turns to look at her, for the first time all conversation. "You don't have to be 18 for that."
Adele feels like she's only allowed to when people think she's grown up. That it wasn't some irrational decision to get away from Lake Jade. But clearly what they're missing is that she'd still feel like a lost teenager regardless of how many years she waits before she goes.
The woodpecker is getting slightly annoying now. Olivia looks into the canopy, frowns. "Shut up bird," she chirps, and maybe it'll listen if she tells it sweetly.
Adele props up her grip on the sticks. "I mean-"
"I could go with you," Olivia suggests. Then follows up with the cheesier line, "I'll like, run away with you."
Adele would laugh, usually. But it's hard to find humor here for some reason. Olivia's eye contact is holding her still so she looks at the ground instead, ominously damp. This is a pretty bad place for dry wood.
"But, you have the bathhouse," she says dumbly. "Your parents."
"I don't know. We could go missing, for a little while," Olivia justifies as if it's the most rational thing she's ever said. "We'd come back, obviously."
And Adele realizes how mean and inconsiderate this is, how she's willing to abandon her family at just a moment's notice. She scolds herself for the swelling pride and water in her chest, the way it's just the two of them and the forest for a little while. Where they could only hear each other.
But reading the sun in Olivia's eyes, Adele couldn't bring herself to scold her too. Because there's a line to draw and Olivia has the chalk, or she supposes, the aerosol.
She laughs for real this time. "Seriously?"
"Yes?" Olivia laughs too. "I'm serious."
She doesn't know how to respond to this. Sentimental somewhat. "Eh, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it."
"I thought we established you're already standing in front of the bridge. You're just stalling." She picks a stick from the pile in her arms and points it at her, almost accusingly.
"Yeah, yeah," Adele rolls her eyes, changes the subject. "How big are we gonna make this campfire?"
Olivia studies the amount of wood they have between each other, hugging bundles of sticks like babies.
"Pretty big," she says and drops the smaller variety without much care.
"We should go back."
The sky is pink and sweet, nightfall would be a while more. A part of her wishes she borrowed a thicker book to fill the inbetweens because there's not much to do on the road, waiting for dark.
"Or we could leave the sticks outside and look for berries."
They don't find anything particularly edible between the evergreen shrubbery. Olivia goes off the path for a hollyleaf cherry, which they considered not eating because of the toxic pits. Adele is trying to keep the compass in her head aligned so she knows at least, the way back out to the clearing. Marks notches on their path, directionally breaks some tiny branches into the soil.
"Don't you ever want to get lost in the woods?" Olivia at one point proposes, gestures around. Rays of tinted sunlight sifts through the leaves, a light dusting phases in and out of existence. "Look for fairies or something."
"That sounds scary."
"I don't know," she says, "I dig it."
—
"What about you?" she asks. Adele fixes her slouch, it doesn't work. Decides that the only way she could get her back to stay straight is to lie down, so she does, slumping into the flat sheets.
Olivia stares at the pile she has left to clean up, then pulls herself out of her trance. "Hm?"
"Do you have a religion of some sort?" Curious, on the fringe of caution. She thinks most Asians are Buddhists but she'll probably be proven wrong here. She stares at the ceiling, wonders if the sky is also listening, then dismisses it. They're probably not that special.
"We..." She sits down and starts separating her underwear. "We don't really have a religion. I don't think." A bundle thrown haphazardly into a drawer. "My parents don't practice anything."
"Oh."
"But there's reincarnation," Olivia says that like it's a bonus. Adele doesn't blame her, she also thinks it's cool.
She bounces on the bed, curls up to face her. The world's axis is sideways. "Do you believe in it?"
Olivia stares at her, squints like she's lightyears away. "Yeah, a little bit."
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