Everything Leads to You(50)

“What do you mean?”

“Tracey told me all the time that she wished I would leave but I didn’t believe that she meant it. So when I finally did leave, I didn’t turn on my phone for almost a month, because I thought that if I did someone could track it. I moved my car all the time because I was afraid the police would be looking for me, but I wouldn’t drive it long distances. Jamal and I took the bus to Home Depot every night. It took us an hour to get there and back.”

“Two hours on the bus every day?”

She nods. “It’s okay, though. That’s how we became such close friends. At first I thought we wouldn’t really hang out even though we worked together. He had this kind of hardness to him at first, and I didn’t think he’d be interested in getting to know me, this boring white girl from the desert. But we had a lot of time to get to know each other on those bus rides.”

I’m about to tell her that she is anything but boring, but she doesn’t give me the chance.

“Anyway, even after I moved into the shelter I was so afraid that Tracey would track me down and make me go home. I missed Jonah but I waited to call him until my eighteenth birthday, because then I’d be free.”

“Is that when he gave you our number?”

“Yeah. I called you guys right after.”

“It was your birthday?”

She nods. “When Jonah answered, he yelled at me. He was, like, ‘Why haven’t you called me? Why has your phone been off?’ I told him I had to keep it off because I was afraid they’d trace it. I asked him about the car, if Tracey filed anything, a missing person’s report, if they were looking for me. He was quiet for a long time. Then he told me no. He said she hadn’t done anything like that. So then I knew that I hadn’t run away, not really. She wanted me gone. She was through with me.”

“Ava, that’s terrible,” I say.

Then Ava sits up and points.

“The first person I ever loved lives in that house,” she says.

“Really?”

She bites a cherry off its stem and nods.

I sit up.

Below us, a ranch house stretches out in a long L, its windows bright in the dusk.

And before she says it, I feel it coming. Through the energy that is passing from her to me. From the tremor in her voice and the way I can still feel the place on my palm that her fingers touched when she handed me cherries. The way she’s been blushing and the way she looks right now, her brow furrowed, her eyes bright.

The person she loved is a girl.

“Her name is Lisa,” Ava says. “All summer we hung out at the aqueduct. Got drunk. Talked about running away.”

“What happened?”

“She was afraid people would find out about us,” she says, after a long pause. “So she confessed to her parents.”

“Confessed? This isn’t the fifties.”

“Yeah, well, it isn’t Los Angeles, either. The reverend of her church blames gay people for everything. Like every storm and national tragedy is a manifestation of God’s wrath. That kind of thing.”

“That’s insane.”

“Tracey’s a congregant there, too.”

With that sentence, Ava’s life with Tracey snaps into focus. It’s like the final touches to a set, when random pieces of furniture and arranged objects suddenly become a room in a home where people could live.

“And Tracey found out about you guys, too?”

Ava nods.

“There was a lot of yelling. Things were broken.” She pauses. “I broke some things,” she says. “I packed some clothes and a few books and then I waited for the house to get quiet, and when it did I climbed out of the window and drove away.”

“And you didn’t go back?”

“Not until today,” she says. She turns to face me. “Not until with you.”

If this were a different moment, I would go with this feeling and kiss her. Sitting shoulder to shoulder, her mouth is so impossibly perfect and so impossibly close. But even I know enough not to kiss a girl while she’s telling me these things. It’s not that kind of intimacy she’s after, no matter how warm and close and inviting Ava is right now, no matter how much she makes me wonder how I could ever have been a mess over someone else.

So instead I ask her to tell me more about Lisa.

“The short version is this,” she says, “I fell in love with one of my best friends. I’m almost sure she fell in love with me. There were a few weeks that felt like magic, but I think I knew all along that it would end.”