Bryce wondered about that look that came to Lina’s face every once in a while. It happened at least once any time they were together. They’d be in the middle of a conversation and suddenly a flicker of some emotion that Bryce couldn’t quite name would flash over Lina’s face. It would happen so fast, Bryce would doubt he even saw anything. Like the time it happened when he invited Lina over for lunch one weekend.
It was two months after they first met and Bryce had invited Lina over on a whim. His dad worked was out of town and his mother had a migraine and had shut herself in her room to take a nap. Bryce was bored and lonely and just called Lina up to see if she was free. Luckily for him, she was. So he and Lina set about slicing vegetables and sautéing them in a pan. They boiled water for pasta.
“So what do you want to do after high school, Bryce?” Lina asked, bending over to look into the refrigerator. “You like basketball, but sports are out of the question. You’re good at math, right? So maybe you could be a mathematician or something.”
“Are you trying to plan my future?” Bryce said with a teasing tone.
Lina laughed, her head still in the refrigerator. “Sorry, sorry. Just thinking out loud. You’ve got a jar of pesto in here. Do you want to put that on our pasta?” Bryce said that sounded good.
“I was actually thinking about physics,” he continued. “It’s fascinating, especially to a guy who apparently lives outside the normal laws. But that makes it difficult, too. My life experience is so different from everyone else’s.”
Lina nodded, scooping dark-speckled pesto from the jar and stirring it into the pasta. “It must be hard.” For a few minutes, they were quiet, focused on the circular motion of the spoon. Bryce watched her, her face bent over the bowl. An emotion flashed over her face and as soon as it was there, it was gone. It went too fast for him to fully recognize it and he didn’t think to ask Lina about it. Most of the time, he didn’t pay any attention to it at all. It was just a part of her. “We should eat this outside, while the weather is still good,” Lina said, finally looking up at him. “It’s supposed to rain any day now.”
“I’ll grab a blanket.”
They laid a fleece blanket in the backyard and ate their lunch. The last weak rays of sunshine from the abnormally long summer warmed them in the otherwise crisp afternoon. Trees were already dropping their leaves, trying to adjust to seasons at high speed. Basil- and garlic-scented steam curled around their heads. When they finished, they stacked their bowls and stretched out their legs, watching the clouds skid across the sky.
“Why haven’t I heard of you before?” Lina asked in the middle of a long spell of silence. “Why haven’t I heard of a boy who could fly?”
“I can’t fly,” Bryce reminded her. “I just can’t fall.”
Lina leveled a look on him that said, “You know what I mean.”
Bryce sighed and looked to the clouds. They were full and round, as if they had been rolled along by the wind. “I didn’t want anyone to know. It’s dangerous. I’m dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Lina said, cocking her head. She looked like she didn’t quite believe him but at least she didn’t laugh at him.
“When I was young, I climbed up on the roof. I wanted to be someplace high. It was a weekend and both my parents were home. This was before they knew I couldn’t fall so of course they freaked out when they saw me on the roof. Dad climbed up on the roof after me, thinking I was in danger. I mean, if I had been a normal kid, I would have been.” The images from his memory came sharp and clear and it was like he was reliving that childhood day. They blotted out the sky and the yard and Lina. Cold was clawing over his skin, despite the sun.
“Dad was maybe three feet away from me when he slipped. Fell right off the roof and broke his arm. It was a bad break too, bone poking through the skin, blood. Dad was on the ground, curled up and groaning. Mom was alternately screaming at me to get down and asking if my dad was alright. It scared me so much. I was only seven then. I vowed right there I’d never do something like that again, not with others around. No one would know about my power.” He felt like a small boy again, full of terror and guilt so much that it threatened to drown him. It was hard to keep his breathing deep and steady.
Lina’s gentle touch on his arm finally brought Bryce from his memory. The look on her face was a mix of sympathy and concern. Bryce realized he had tears in his eyes, tears of sadness but also tears of fear. He quickly brushed them away. Hot shame rolled over him and made his face flush. But when Lina wrapped her arms around him, he forgot to be ashamed.
They didn’t talk about that afternoon again but neither of them forgot it. It seemed that afterwards, they were physically more comfortable with one another. Lina, like most other girls at the high school, doled out
hugs like hellos.
Bryce had never really understood that aspect of the female gender. A girl would see a friend in the hallway and she would greet that friend with a hello and a hug. Conversation was exchanged in rapid fire because there were only so many minutes in a passing period, usually accompanied with at least one to two hugs. Then it was goodbye, see you later, another hug. Bryce couldn’t really complain, since he liked the contact.
Fall passed into a bitterly cold winter. Lina was busy with a winter Associated Student Body fundraiser and Bryce was focused on his mid-terms, so they hung out less than their usual two or three times a week. Bryce thought they would have time to hang out once Winter Break started but Lina was going out of town to spend break with her mother’s family. Bryce found himself missing her. He didn’t hear from her again until the last couple of days of break.
“Let’s go into downtown,” she said. “We can make up for not seeing each other for two weeks. And I’ve got something to show you.”
They met in the downtown area and Lina took him to the Spire, a thin triangular skyscraper, architecturally decorated with protruding windows and a large public viewing deck at the top. It was a popular tourist destination and you had to pay to go to the top. Bryce had always heard that the view was great.
“You like high places, right?” Lina said, grinning at him as she handed him a ticket.
The view was fantastic and they generally had the deck to themselves. Apparently tourists didn’t like the biting cold but Bryce and Lina just wrapped their scarves a little tighter around themselves. Most of the taller skyscrapers were to their backs and the city sprawled right down to the waterfront where the waves rolled in and out. The large city park that sat to the north was brown and grey now under the dredges of snow. In the spring it looked like a large green wave, swelling up to contend with the sea. The cliff on its east end that butted up to the ocean gave the park the look that the green wave was always perpetually climbing and crumbling but never actually crashing. Below them, people looked no bigger than pin heads and cars like little colored beetles.
Bryce couldn’t help himself from grinning. This height made him feel euphoric. The air was calling for him to jump. He wondered how that would feel, to fall so far. He looked at Lina, who was also looking down at the ground far below. He really had missed her.
“Do you ever get nervous, being so high off the ground?” Lina asked, still staring down.
“Never,” Bryce said. He dropped his voice so only Lina could hear. “I really want to jump. I’ve never tried it from so high before.”
“I don’t think I could watch,” Lina said. After a moment she pulled away from the railing and said, “It must be nice. I want to fall without the fear of getting hurt in the end.” She leaned back, her head tilting towards the sky, only her hold on the railing keeping her from falling straight back.
That flicker of something passed along her face again, the one that Bryce couldn’t name yet, even after five months. The wind twisted her hair around her face. The grey of the sky was reflected in her eyes.
“Dreamer,” he said.
“What?”
“You’re a dreamer,” he said, resting his chin in his gloved hand.
Lina smiled. “More than you know.” She went back to looking over the cityscape.
Bryce continued to watch her. He stared a long time at her hand. He desperately wanted to reach out and take hold of it. Bryce wondered how it would fit in his own. His fingers twitched at the thought. Then his started to wonder about other things. Like how warm the air would get between them when they stood close together. Or how she would taste. Or how she would react if he told her he loved her.
“Lina.” She turned to him, still smiling. The wind pushed her hair into her face and she had to hold it back with one hand. Lina waited. “Do you want to go back inside? It’s getting pretty cold.”
“Okay.”
They made their way back inside and shivered as they were greeted by warm air again.
It was shortly after that trip that Bryce caught Lina after school. She was pulling down posters from high school pride week. She was by herself, reaching for the corner of one of the posters on tip toe but it was still out of her reach. Bryce walked up behind her and yanked the corner down.
“Thanks, Bryce,” she said, taking the paper from him. She smiled but her face looked drawn. Even her eyes looked different, wide and confused, searching. She looked at him as if he were a stranger.
“Are you okay?” he asked, a little concerned. He’d never seen such a look on her face before.
Lina blinked a few times and then shook her head. “I had a dream last night and it kind of disturbed me. It woke me up and I couldn’t sleep afterwards.” Bryce nodded sympathetically. “I’ll see you later, okay?” Bryce watched Lina wander off, lacking the directness of her usual footsteps.
The next day Lina looked much better. She hugged him like usual and laughed easy with him. The way she had looked at him that afternoon had bothered Bryce. For the first time ever, he had felt like a freak under Lina’s gaze. She never looked at him like that again, however, and Bryce eventually forgot about it. By spring time, they were as close as they had ever been.
