Page 73 of Leaving the Station

“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 muchthismeans 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 Oakleywalking 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 knowanything.

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 whywouldshe 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 tooimmensely long, and why is this country so wide and why is this planet so small?