Our Own Private Universe. Robin Talley

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       CHAPTER 2

      “I can’t believe we have to sleep in there.” My paintbrush glided down the back wall of the church, leaving a thick wet trail of primer. “For a whole month.”

      “I know,” Lori said. “I feel stiff all over.”

      “The adults totally get to sleep in beds. And take showers. In houses, even.”

      “My aunt said we’re staying in the church because we’re young and our backs still function. I told her my back wasn’t going to be functioning after this, but all she did was laugh.”

      The night before, we’d slept on the floor of the town’s old church. The pews had been stacked along the walls to make room for the mats and sleeping bags we’d brought from home. My suitcase full of clothes was still somewhere in the Dallas airport, so I was stranded in Mexico with nothing but my duffel with my sleeping bag, a toothbrush, and some underwear, plus the clothes I’d worn on the plane. Lori had lent me an old pair of track pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt to wear today, but I was a lot taller than Lori, so my ankles, wrists and part of my stomach were bare.

      Plus, we had to shower outside in these camp shower things the chaperones had brought. They were basically really small tents with a bag of tepid water at the top that sprinkled on you if you pulled a cord. That morning I’d showered for about sixty seconds while a line of girls huffed and waited for me to finish. The experience had left me feeling decidedly unfresh.

      Not that it mattered, given that our agenda for the day consisted of manual labor in an un-air-conditioned cement building. We were painting the town’s new Holy Life church. When it was done, this one would replace the old building where we were camping out.

      “Is this how we’re supposed to do it?” I lowered my brush and frowned. The church walls were tall, probably twenty feet high, so we were only painting what we could reach. Our little patch of white primer looked kind of pathetic.

      “Who knows?” Lori dabbed her brush in the paint tray. “Just keep going.”

      I’d tried to pay attention during that morning’s painting lesson, but I’d been standing toward the back of the group, and Christa was at the front. I kept craning my neck to get a better look at her.

      I hadn’t seen her after the party. By the time we got back to the old church someone had hung up a tarp to separate the boys’ half of the floor from the girls’, but the single lightbulb that lit the whole room was on the boys’ side. Our side was a strange dark cave, quiet except for a few people whispering and swarms of mosquitoes buzzing past the windows. There was no way to spot Christa in the dark. Plus, every time I saw a shadow move I was positive it was a snake. (I had a thing about snakes.)

      “So, question.” Lori painted another slow, uneven line. “Regarding your new paramour.”

      “She’s not my paramour.” I smiled.

      “Only a matter of time, babe.” Lori glanced at me with her eyebrows raised. “But what’s your dad going to say about you being gay? I mean, bi?”

      I’d carefully avoided thinking about that. I returned my focus to my paintbrush. “I don’t know.”

      “What about your mom? And your brother?”

      “Come on, they don’t all have to know everything. Mom isn’t even here.”

      “Ooh, so you and that chick are going to sneak around Mexico having secret liaisons under preacher daddy’s nose? Gnarly.”

      “Liaisons?” I laughed. “Gnarly? What is this, 1980?”

      Lori laughed, too. “For real, though. If you’re not having secret liaisons, what are you going to do, lesbian it up right in front of everyone?”

      I shifted again. “I met this girl five seconds ago. Nobody’s lesbianing anything yet. Besides, I still like guys.”

      Lori tried to arch one eyebrow, but she couldn’t do that very well, so her face just wound up amusingly strange and contorted.

      “You know what I really want to do this summer?” she said. “Have a fling.”

      I laughed. “What kind of fling?”

      “You know, where you have a boyfriend, or a girlfriend or whatever, but only for the summer. You hang out, you hook up, and at the end of the summer you go back to your regular life. Short, meaningless, but fun.”

      “What’s the point of that?” I said. “Don’t you want a regular boyfriend?”

      “Yeah, sure. But this summer is our perfect fling opportunity. Most of the guys here go to other schools, so we’ll basically never see them again. The girls, too.”

      Hmm. “I sort of see what you mean.”

      “I know what we should do.” Lori put down her paintbrush and grinned at me. “We should both have a fling. Let’s make a pact.”

      I laughed again. Lori and I used to be really into pacts. When we were younger we’d make pacts to eat the exact same number of conversation hearts at the Valentine’s Day party, or to include the word hickey somewhere in our fifth-grade Life Science reports. In middle school, Lori was obsessed with having her first kiss, and she got me to make a pact that we’d each kiss someone before the end of the school year. But when I kissed Tim Mayhew at the school Chrismukkah party that December, she’d been furious. I’d actually forgotten about the pact by that point—I only kissed Tim because he came up to me at the party wearing one of those mistletoe headbands all the guys had that year and I liked the way his green eyes locked on mine when he smiled—but Lori remembered everything. She said I’d violated the pact because we were supposed to have our first kiss at the same time, even though I didn’t remember agreeing to that part at all. It turned out to be fine because Lori kissed Barry Tuckerton at his New Year’s Eve party the next week, but I still felt kind of bad. Barry Tuckerton’s breath smelled like cheese.

      “We should do it,” she said. “For real. Come on, it’ll be fun.”

      I thought about Christa’s face again. Her voice. I especially have a thing for preacher’s daughters...

      “Yeah. Let’s do it.” I was getting excited now. “Okay, rules. We’ll each hook up with someone—um, how about three times? Three’s a good number.”

      “Okay,” Lori said. “And it doesn’t СКАЧАТЬ