Page 26 of Leaving the Station

We made it back to the train but just barely. The conductor gave us an admonishing look before closing the doors.

Now we’re having a Spit tournament with everyone in the observation car who wants to participate. So far, it’s just me, Oakley,

Aya, and Jeff, one of the people who’s been sleeping on the floor like a dead man.

Aya is putting us all to shame.

“My grandma taught me how to play Spit,” she says as she wins yet another round. “Who wants to play me next?”

No one does, but we all want to keep her entertained, so Oakley tries her luck again. Nanami hasn’t emerged from the sleeper

car, but I saw Mike sneak in that direction when he thought no one was looking.

“I’m not going to let you win this time,” Oakley tells her.

“You weren’t letting me win,” Aya says. “You made a mistake early in the game and it cost you.”

Jeff and I ooooh at that from seats opposite the two of them.

Oakley puts on her game face, squaring up against a nine-year-old. “Let’s do this.”

Aya’s and Oakley’s hands move too fast for any of us to keep track of who’s ahead, but they’re both in the zone. Aya even

stands at one point for a better view.

“SPIT!” Aya calls.

Oakley throws the cards she was holding down on to the tray between them. “You don’t have to rub it in my face,” she grumbles.

I stand to create a barrier between them, ready to intervene if Oakley tries to fight this small child.

“Why don’t we go down to the snack car?” I ask Aya. “I’ll get you whatever you want.”

“I’m allergic to red dye,” she informs me.

“Okay, I’ll get you anything you want that doesn’t have red dye in it.”

“Deal.”

Aya turns around to stick her tongue out at Oakley, who’s cleaning the cards and sulking.

“Snack Conductor Edward!” Aya calls when we get down to the snack car.

She’s the only person I’ve heard use his “official” title, and he seems deeply pleased.

“Snack Assistant Aya!” Edward calls back. “The conductor is at your service. What snacks would you like?”

“Nothing with—” Aya starts.

“Red dye. I know,” Edward tells her.

I want to hug him for the way he’s treating her, until it hits me that this is how he treats everyone: like they’re the only person who has ever needed snacks in the history of the world.

“Hey, Edward,” I say, waving.

“You know Edward too?” Aya asks, amazed.

“Yeah, Zoe’s cool,” Edward says, and Aya nods in agreement.

I’m honored.

I buy Aya a banana, chips, apple juice, and a box of nachos that Edward reheats in the microwave. She insists on carrying

all of it upstairs by herself.

“We should have a party in here tonight,” Aya says as we sit back down in the observation car and she opens the nachos. “And

there should be balloons.”

“That’s a fun idea!” I say, humoring her.

“We can invite everyone on the train!” Aya says excitedly. “And it could also partially be my birthday party! Since I didn’t

get to have one this year because my mom had to work on planning our trip.”

Oakley meets my eyes then and I suspect we’re thinking the same thing: we need to give this kid the best fucking birthday

party in the entire world. Especially if it’s going to be the last one she has before her world is changed forever.

“Let’s do it,” I tell Aya. “What do you want the theme to be?”

She crosses her arms. “Trains, duh.”

“I thought you said that you like other things.”

“I do,” she says, stomping her foot. “But it’s easier to have a train birthday party on a train than a Percy Jackson birthday

party. And if we can’t have a train theme then we can do dogs because I want a pug one day, like for my tenth birthday.”

“Come on, Zoe,” Oakley says, holding back laughter. “Get your head in the game.”

Oakley and I go back to her room after that to strategize.

“What’s Nanami going to think about this?” I ask.

“I honestly don’t care,” Oakley says. “She’s the one who asked us to keep a secret from Aya.”

I know more about Oakley than I did when she fought with Nanami, even if it’s only been a short while. I know how much the

truth means to her—how much this means to her.

“So,” Oakley continues, clearing her throat. “What should we do for the party?”

“No idea,” I tell her. “But at least we already know the guest list.”

“That’s true,” she says. “Makes it easy, no family politics.”

“Not like when I had my bat mitzvah and my mom forgot to invite her second cousin,” I tell her.

“Same for my baptism,” Oakley says.

“Mormons get baptized?” I ask.

“They—we do,” she says, and I have to fight to ignore her correction. “Basically you meet with your bishop, say that you believe

in all the teachings of the Church, and are told that you’re now responsible for your sins, and then your dad dunks you while

you wear a see-through white jumpsuit.”

“How old were you?”

“Eight,” she says. “And I barely remember it, even though I committed to an everlasting covenant.”

That’s what gets me: the thought of eight-year-old Oakley walking into some giant bath and coming out capable of sinning. Like a mikvah but instead of emerging cleansed, she emerged with the entire weight of the Church and all the rules she had to follow in perpetuity.

When I think of her childhood, I can’t help but imagine all the other things I don’t know about her life. I barely know anything.

It’s not like she knows much about me either. She doesn’t know that my bat mitzvah party theme was dogs (Aya’s second-choice).

She doesn’t know about the scar on my wrist from when I fell down the stairs as a kid to try to show my parents that I could

“cartwheel downhill.”

And why would she know any of this? We’ve known each other for three days, and we’re only going to know each other for one more.

“Maybe things will go back to how they were then,” Oakley says after a moment, pulling me out of my thoughts. “When I get

back to Ritzville.”

“Yeah,” I say, nodding. “Maybe.”

I try to stave off the dread that fills my body. Oakley is going back to the Church. The girl who spooned me all last night

is going to re-devote her life to a religion that doesn’t think she should be allowed to marry someone she loves.

Even if we wanted to keep talking after this trip, nothing could happen. She can’t date girls, or girl-adjacent people, or

anyone who’s not a Mormon man. She couldn’t act on her sexuality.

The room feels too small, and the trip feels too short and too immensely long, and why is this country so wide and why is this planet so small?

“Are you okay?” Oakley asks.

“I need some water,” I say, running out of her room.

Because running is always my first instinct.

Three Months into College

Alden and I didn’t talk about what happened the night of the party. Maybe he didn’t notice that anything changed.

I, however, did.

It was harder to be around him. I felt ashamed, like I had used him, had been a different person when we made out and I grabbed

his waist and told him what to do.

I absolutely could not tell him that that version of me was more real than the person he’d been dating for months.

“Do you want to come home with me?” Alden asked on the Friday before a three-day weekend. “Just for a couple of days?”

I was sure I’d misheard him, so I kept scrolling mindlessly through Instagram on my computer, a habit that had formed early

in the semester and was proving hard to break.

“Zoe,” he said, tilting my laptop screen down so I was forced to look at him.

“I have a lot of work to do,” I said. It was a lie and he knew it; in the months we’d been dating, he’d almost never seen

me do schoolwork. “I think I’d rather stay on campus.”

“Of course,” he said. “Just thought I’d offer.”

The last thing on earth I wanted to do was meet Alden’s parents. He almost never talked about them—all I knew was that his mom was obsessed with dental hygiene.

“I’ll miss you,” Alden told me.

“Same,” I said automatically. “I’ll miss you too.”

On the first day of the short break, campus was emptier than I’d ever seen it.

I wandered into the library for the first time since I had gone there with Alden at the beginning of the semester, which felt

like it had happened in another lifetime. There were some grad students writing papers and librarians tiredly stacking books,

but other than that it was blissfully quiet.

I climbed to the sixth floor, the designated silent area, and the stillness rang in my ears. Each step I took reverberated

off the walls.

It was the first time I had felt peaceful in a part of campus that wasn’t the greenhouse.

I didn’t want to go back to my dorm so I stayed there for a while, wandering the stacks and pulling books off the shelves

just to look at the illustrations.

When I checked my phone, it was nearly evening, and I had an email from Randall asking if I was still on campus.

Yes , I told him. I am.

He asked if I wanted to come to the greenhouse and help him with a project.

Yes , I told him. I did.

When I got there, his face was covered in sweat and soil. “Thank goodness you’re here,” he told me. “I’m trying to repot this palm.”

He was in the main conservatory, standing over a tarp, a small palm tree sitting naked on the ground. Outside of the pot,

there was only a clump of soil around its roots to protect the plant from the outside world.

I had an overwhelming urge to hug the palm, even though I knew that logically that was a bad idea because of its desert adaptations:

spikes that wouldn’t hesitate to poke me and drought-resistant leaves that would block my path.

Randall and I worked in silence for a while. I helped him create a soil mix for the palm tree’s new pot, one that was larger,

that would allow it to grow unobstructed.

“Three, two, one,” he counted down, and we heaved the tree into its new home and covered it with soil. I watered it in, and

we were done.

He lifted the collar of his T-shirt to wipe his face. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” I told him, walking over to check on the corpse plant.

“You know,” Randall said, “you have a knack for this.”

I turned to him. He was sweeping the mess we’d made from repotting the tree.

“Yeah?”