The Geography of You and Me(38)

She rolled her eyes, as he’d known she would. “You can’t just go to all the tourist traps. There’s this great vintage place in the Haight.…”

When they reached the diner, Owen leaned in to kiss her again. “Happy Thanksgiving,” he said, but she pulled away with a dizzying smile.

“Can we please stop celebrating a day where we slaughter innocent turkeys?”

“If it makes you feel any better, my dad and I had a chicken instead.”

She shook her head. “Still awful.”

“Still delicious,” Owen said, kissing her for real this time.

When they broke apart, she turned and headed up to the back door of the diner. “Have a good trip,” she called out, her voice trailing behind her, and Owen waved, though she couldn’t see him. “But not too good…”

“I’ll bring you back an Alcatraz snow globe.”

“Very funny,” she said, just before the door slammed shut behind her.

As he walked home, the snow crunching beneath his boots, Owen tried to imagine San Francisco. But the only thing he knew, the only thing he managed to call to mind, was the Golden Gate Bridge, the familiar red arches surrounded by fog. It was hard to know where the image came from, but even now, in the darkness of the mountains—the air so cold it stung his face, the snow so white it practically glowed—that was all he could see: the great red bridge against a square patch of bluish sky.

It wasn’t until he was home in bed, halfway to sleep, that he realized why he couldn’t see anything beyond the edges.

He was imagining a postcard.





12


December was already six days old, and this was the first time that Lucy had seen it in daylight. Every morning she rode the bus in the dark, the sun rising around half past eight, when she was already inside the brick school building, and then setting again around three thirty, just as she burst out the doors and into the early dusk.

But today was Saturday, and though the light only broke through the clouds in thin patches, and though she was wearing a hooded sweatshirt underneath her coat, compared to the past few weeks, it still felt a bit like being at the beach, and she closed her eyes and tipped her head back to soak it in.

When the crowd around her began to cheer, her eyes flickered open again, and she squinted at the figures on the pitch, trying to make sense of it all. A girl from school named Imogen, who had an uncle that lived in Chicago, kept leaning over to explain the rules of rugby by way of football terminology: a try was like a touchdown, a fly-half was like a quarterback, a ruck was like a tackle. Lucy didn’t have the heart to explain to her that she didn’t know much about football, either.

The boys on the pitch were all wearing shorts, though it was the middle of winter, and their legs were pink blurs as they sprinted up and down the field, pausing to kick the ball at mystifying moments, hoisting each other in the air to try to catch a wild throw, forming knot-like scrums that were all kicking and shoving and never seemed to accomplish anything. The girls from school—friends of hers, she supposed, if you were using the term fairly broadly—sat on either side of her, their eyes darting back and forth, riveted by the game and apparently immune to the cold. Lucy did her best to keep her eyes pinned to Liam, but she kept losing him amid all the other boys in striped jerseys.

When the game ended, he came jogging over, and Lucy could feel the girls around her practically vibrating with the excitement of it all. He was a year older than them, a sixth year, and the rumor was that he had a good shot of making the Scotland Under-18 rugby squad, which was a training ground for the national team. When Lucy had asked him about this early on, he’d only shrugged.

“Sounds like a long shot to me,” he said, but she could see the way he glowed, and she knew it must be true.

Now she walked over to the edge of the pitch to meet him. His cheeks were ruddy and he was covered in mud, from his knees to his shirt to his face, which was positively freckled with it. He jokingly held out his arms for a bear hug, and Lucy laughed and ducked away.

“It’s hard to tell from your shirt that you guys won,” she said.

“Those other lads came off a lot worse,” he said, jabbing a finger over his shoulder. “So what did you think?”

“It’s kind of confusing,” she said. “And pretty rough.”

“That’s why the Americans leave it to us,” he said, thumping his chest with a grin. Around them, the bleachers were emptying, and players from both teams were heading back toward the clubhouse. Liam looked over his shoulder. “I’m gonna go change out of my kit. Wait for me?”

Lucy nodded, watching him jog off to catch up with his teammates, all of them tackling each other sideways and kicking at the mud. She sat down on the grass and opened her new book—Trainspotting, because it seemed about time she traded in Holden Caulfield for something a bit more Scottish—and read until Liam returned, smelling like soap, with a gym bag slung over his shoulder. The rest of the crowd was long gone, and the sky was deepening, already purple at the edges.

“How do you get used to this?” she asked him, as he slung an arm around her shoulders. She shivered. “It’s so gloomy.”

“We Scots thrive on a little gloom,” he said. “But really, you should see it in the summer. The sun comes up at like half-four and doesn’t set again till nearly midnight. It’s brilliant, the summers here. You’ll see.”