Page 12 of Leaving the Station
It’s a completely different feeling, boarding this second train; there’s an air of excitement that wasn’t there yesterday.
The train to Chicago was one night, but this leg of the journey is two nights and three days, and we’re crossing a part of
the country that I’ve only ever flown over.
“I’m gonna drop my stuff off at my seat,” I tell Oakley. “I’ll see you around?”
“Sounds good,” she says. But she doesn’t move. “ Or you could drop your stuff off in my sleeper car. If you wanted.”
“It’s fine,” I tell her. “I can just—”
“Do you want someone to steal your stuff?”
“They can’t,” I tell her. “Train law.”
She rolls her eyes and walks away, giving me no choice but to follow. We head through coach, through the dining car, then
into a space we didn’t have on the last train: an observation car.
It’s already popular, with people claiming seats that look out onto the landscape. The windows go from the floor all the way
up to the roof of the train.
Finally, we make our way to the first of the elusive sleeper cars.
“It’s this one,” she says, as she opens the door to her bedroom.
“This is it?” The room isn’t how I expected, especially since there’s no bed. There’s a sink, a sofa, and a chair. It’s tiny,
with barely enough room for me and Oakley to stand.
“Oh, this is way nicer than the room on the last train.” She shrugs off her backpack and throws it onto the sofa. There’s
a chair facing it, where I put my own bag.
“Where’s the bed?” I ask, examining the small plastic door labeled “closet” that couldn’t fit a single jacket.
“There are two, actually,” Oakley says. “They fold down.” She points to the sofa. “That one’s a double bed, and then there’s
a single up top.”
I nod, feeling awkward now. I’m in a girl’s bedroom.
Well, a girl’s bedroom on a train, but still.
Before I can contemplate this further, the conductor comes on over the loudspeaker, a different voice than the last one. “Folks,
folks, folks, folks, folks. We’ve got a full train, so say hi to your neighbors because we’re going to be getting cozy. The
time now is approximately”—she pauses—“2:08 p.m., so we’re starting our journey out west about as on time as can be expected.
Our first stop will be Glenview, Illinois, in half an hour.”
Then, of course, Edward breaks in. “Well, no, Camila, I’d say that our first stop will be SNACKS. Folks, for those of you
who are new here, I’m your snack conductor—”
“Edward, I’m not doing this today,” the conductor—Camila—says, cutting him off.
I bark out a laugh, and Oakley looks at me.
“Did you buy a snack on the last train?” I ask her.
“Nope.”
“Then you haven’t had the absolute pleasure of meeting Edward.”
“Not yet,” she says. “I did everything I could to avoid him.”
“Smart.”
That’s all I say because I know what it’s like to do everything in your power to avoid someone.
I watch Oakley watch the shimmering gray expanse of Lake Michigan. She’s probably the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen—and
she’s certainly the smartest.
Maybe it’ll be nice spending more time with her. It’s only three days, and my plan had initially been to stare out the window
and be miserable for those seventy-two hours. This could be better.
This could be something.
One Month into College
After our kiss, I thought everything would feel easier. And it did, in that I wasn’t constantly thinking about what it would
be like if we kissed or if we should kiss or if Alden wanted to kiss me or if I wanted to kiss him.
This was a definitive answer: we were dating, and that was that. It was better than the undefined half-relationship we’d had
before.
The only issue was that Alden didn’t want to see me during the daylight hours. Or, at least, that’s what it felt like.
But after dark, he was all mine. I became nocturnal, sleeping until three or four in the afternoon, skipping classes, and dragging myself out of bed only to rendezvous with him, work a shift at the greenhouse, or occasionally eat a meal with the Tees.
I wanted the Tees to tell me to fuck off. I was being a shitty friend, and I still hadn’t told them about Alden.
But somehow, they didn’t.
“I have something to show you,” Alden said one night, grinning.
I smiled back; he was always happy to see me. “All right.”
Alden put his hand on the small of my back and pushed me forward. I could feel the heat and the sweat and the energy of it
long after he took his hand away.
When we were touching like this, I was acutely aware that we were the same height, that our bodies matched up, his shoulders
level with mine, his fingertips brushing the same spots on his thighs.
I’d never cared about his height before, but now that we were dating, it felt wrong, or at least significant.
I knew I was feeding into problematic ideals, but I couldn’t stop fixating on it.
Sometimes, looking at him was like looking in a fun house mirror.
“Where are we going?” I asked as he reached out for me.
“Have you ever been to the rare-manuscript library?”
He liked to go places no one else went, to take advantage of everything the school had to offer. He behaved as if the world
had swung its doors wide open for him, and really, it had.
I shook my head. “Isn’t it closed?”
He pulled a key chain out of his backpack. “I know a guy.”
“You always know a guy.”
“It’s always the same guy.”
This time, to get to yet another place we weren’t meant to be, we walked through the main library and beneath an archway,
then down a dark set of stairs past foreboding signs claiming that trespassers would be caught on camera and persecuted to
the full extent of the law.
“There are no cameras,” Alden assured me. “They just say it to scare you.”
It was working; I wanted to turn back.
But I kept my feet firmly planted as Alden fumbled with the key, then pushed open the door.
“Voilà,” he said as if he had built the room just for me.
I took in the scene: the walls were lined with giant leather-bound tomes, and there was an overpowering mildewy stench.
He wandered the room, rubbing his hands against the spines of the books. “Look at this one,” he said. “It’s old herbaria pressings.”
Alden pulled it off the shelf—he wasn’t wearing gloves, which felt wrong. There had to be a fixed protocol for handling a
book that delicate. It was part of a collection labeled “Nineteenth-Century Friendship Albums.”
“I thought you’d like it,” he said. “Since you work in the greenhouse.”
I nodded as I carefully flipped through the pages, silently apologizing to the people of the past who had created these notes and ephemera, as well as the current librarians who would kill Alden if they knew.
“I do like it,” I whispered. “Thank you.”
I read the finding guide of the collection, which said that the flowers held within were pressed by a woman named Henrietta
to give to her “friend” Jane. But the letters Henrietta had written to Jane were far from “friendly.”
These were lesbian flowers, and once I figured that out, my heart was beating out of my chest.
Because, of course, I assumed that the next thing Alden would say was, “ I also thought you’d like it because you’re a lesbian. ”
I glanced up at him, but I had to look away before he could see in my eyes the lie on which our relationship was based. But
it wasn’t a lie, I reminded myself, because I did like him. So that made me something other than a lesbian.
He was too good , and I was too wrong.
After I made him try to put the pressings away exactly as he’d found them, I pulled out my phone—I had a number of texts waiting
for me in the Tees group chat.
Rex: COME THROUGH
UNDERWEAR PARTY IN DONLON
EVERYONES A LIL NAKEY
They sent a video to go along with the messages: Rex, Autumn, and Shelly were dancing in one of the auditoriums, surrounded
by people in varying states of undress.
I had vaguely remembered hearing about the party from them earlier in the week: some queer senior was having a clothing-optional dance party, which was my worst nightmare.
Me: ah i totally forgot!!
i have a ton of hw to do but have so much fun!!!!
Autumn thumbs-upped the message, and I turned back to Alden, the presumably straight boy who’d dragged me to the library to
see pressed flowers.
I almost laughed at the irony of it: a boy showing me a book with historical lesbian love notes when he didn’t even know I
was queer.
“Those flowers are beautiful,” I told him finally.
He turned to me. “You are too.”
I shivered. “That’s not what we were talking about.”
I was deflecting, but the thought that he saw me as someone who could be beautiful made my cheeks warm.
We received a school-wide message the next day that there had been a break-in in the rare-manuscript library. That a page
of a herbaria had fallen to the floor.
Alden sent me a screenshot of the email.
ALDEN: worth it
Tuesday, 4 p.m., near Milwaukee, WI
“So,” Oakley claps her hands together, “what should we do to pass the time?”
We’re already behind schedule, which is a small miracle.
“I was thinking about singing that song that’s like ‘Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall’ until you wanted to murder me
in cold blood.”
“You wouldn’t even be able to get to ‘ninety-eight bottles’ before I threw you out the train window.”
“Violence is never the answer,” I tell her, placing a hand to my chest, mock-offended.
She snorts. “I was thinking something more active , you know, to get the blood pumping.”
“I’m not doing push-ups.”
She looks me up and down. “Of course you’re not.”
“Excuse you,” I say. “I might be scrawny, but I can do at least ten push-ups.”
Oakley raises her hands in surrender, and some part of myself needs to prove to her that I can, in fact, do this. So I roll
the sleeves of my flannel up to my elbows and find a spot on the ground of her sleeper car.
“It’s so gross down there,” she says, but I’m not listening.
“Count for me.”
I can’t see her as I’m staring at my scrawny arms and the stained carpet, but I can practically hear her eyes rolling as she
says, “One,” and I do my first push-up.