Jenna shifts her eyes back to the road, her hand slipping down my arm. “Oh. I’m sorry. Did she do that a lot? Favor your sister over you?”
“She didn’t know how to handle me. It was difficult for her.”
“You don’t have to make excuses for her, William. And that statement makes it seem like you blame yourself for her shortcomings.”
“I do. And how is stating the truth making excuses for her?”
“Because the way you state it shapes how you think—about her and about yourself. When the voice inside your head is saying negative things about you, then you have to find a way to change it.”
“There are no voices in my head, Jenna. Just pictures. Lots of pictures.”
“You have feelings.”
I signal a right turn at the stop sign and follow through. “Yes, I have feelings too.”
“You also have the power to rewrite your history, you know.”
Her words run over me like a rushing river. I picture stacks of history books and an ancient parchment with an old-fashioned quill and ink. “I have no idea what that means,” I say as I pull into the parking lot at the Yorba Regional Park—a beautiful, natural space situated along the bank of the wetlands of the Santa Ana River.
“It means you can change those negative associations and your attitude toward past events. You can change your perspective. Like…you can reprogram and frame those memories in the context where you’re not blaming yourself, because you weren’t to blame.”
I turn to her, and for a split second our eyes meet. Her gaze stabs through me like a pointed lance. “Do you do that? If you did, maybe you wouldn’t have to run away to a new place.”
Her mouth drops open and then snaps shut, her blue eyes wide. I don’t move a muscle while I wait for her answer. Her face flushes dark and she turns to gather her bag before climbing out of the cab of my truck then slamming the door—too hard. I slip out of my seat and go to the back of the truck. She faces me there, her arms stiff, her fists balled up, her face still flushed. She’s just as beautiful as ever, and every time I notice, it makes it hard to swallow and sometimes hard to breathe.
“That wasn’t nice of you,” she says between her teeth.
“What?”
“What you just said.”
“About how you run away? Why does the truth make you mad?”
“Because I’m not running away.”
“So you’re…walking away?”
She blows out a breath and her eyes roll up to the sky. “You make me crazy.”
“I get told that a lot.”
She licks her bottom lip with her small, pink tongue, and I immediately think about how it felt to have that tongue in my mouth. I’ve kissed exactly three women in my lifetime. One was a girl who said I was her boyfriend in high school, even though we never went on dates. Another was my roommate for a few years when I first moved out. She tried kissing me on different occasions and had made a similar offer to Jenna’s last night. I’d told her no, too.
And now the third—Jenna.
But her kisses were different. It felt like I was drowning and waking up and suffocating and winning an impossible victory, all at the same time. It was overwhelming but also calming. My body felt like it was on fire and shivering in ice, standing perfectly still and also speeding incredibly fast down a racetrack.
I want that feeling again. I want her. And not just her kisses. I want everything. Everything she offered me…and more.
But I don’t want it once. I don’t want it for a week or a month, or even a few months. And that’s what will happen, too. I’ll be left here alone, burning for more of her.
I don’t like that I feel like this already—that she has this much power over my thoughts and feelings. It makes me feel vulnerable. I don’t like that feeling.
“I’m sorry you’re angry,” I say. And I really am. “I just speak the truth. I say what’s on my mind, and I have no idea when it’s appropriate or not.”
She’s looking down now, fiddling with something in her bag. I know she’s brought her Tarot cards to do fortune readings for people who pay her. I wonder if she believes they are true. Maybe she follows what the cards tell her. Maybe they are what make her move on. “Is it the cards?”
She looks up at me. “What?”
“Do the cards tell you to move along? You’ve attended two different colleges, and you just dropped out of your Physics program without finishing. According to Alex, you’ve never spent longer than three or four years in one place. And you are leaving again soon. So if you aren’t running away, then why do you move on?”
She shrugs and I start pulling items out of the back of my truck. Everything is meticulously labeled so that it’s easier to deliver the goods. Shovels here, buckles there, gardening implements for Anita, our herbalist. She loves to use period-authentic gardening tools.
Jenna has her head turned, looking out over the park, when she begins speaking to me between clenched teeth. “I’m not running away. Maybe I’ve made it my life’s goal to continue challenging myself to experience new things.”
“Maybe? So you aren’t sure?”
Her eyes close and she’s muttering under her breath. It sounds like she’s counting. Her face blotchy, she spins around and walks away, calling over her shoulder that she’ll see me later when she doesn’t feel like hitting me.
I doubt she could hit me very hard, or even that she really wants to. But I frown at the thought that I’ve angered her. As usual, I have no idea how I did it.
Once I’ve gathered all my items, I make my rounds, finding my friends from RMRA at various booths where they’ve spread out their wares. Among others, there’s a spinner, a weaver, a seamstress, a woman who makes authentic woolen stockings and a silversmith who designs jewelry. Ann, an international student from Somalia, has ordered some new buckles for the leather belts she makes and sells. I’m still a beginner so it took me a few tries to get them right, but I’m pleased with the final results.
We’ve gotten permission from the city to spread our items out on tables in one corner of the park. The public wanders by to look at the booths, as do members of other RMRA clans in the area, who bring their own wares to sell or barter. I don’t sell my items, since I don’t need the money. I do it for the fun of learning how to craft things in an authentic manner. It makes my fellow clan members happy, and I don’t have many friends so I take this seriously. They are friends I don’t want to lose, so I try not to think about the possibility that if I lose this duel, I will lose them.