The Astonishing Color of After(21)

“Are we lost?” I said.

Axel didn’t answer. He hopped off his bike and threw himself flat on the grass. A fat bumblebee zigzagged over him.

“Everything looks different from this angle,” he said.

I lay down next to him. The white streaks in the sky were like lines of foam across a restless sea. Birds crawled past. Something small buzzed in my ear, then took off again.

“We’re not lost,” Axel said finally. “We’re just headed somewhere different.”

We ended up in an apple orchard, and by then my mood had improved. The air was thick and sticky, faintly sweet. The trees rippled against the touch of a high breeze. I didn’t yet know how much I needed to worry about my mother, and so I let myself be distracted enough to celebrate a birthday.

“This is a good one,” I said through a full mouth, gripping a half-eaten apple, sitting in the wedge between two thick branches. Wind tugged at the bit of color in my hair—back then it was a streak of electric blue. “What’s it called again?” I asked.

“Honeycrisp, I think?” Axel called from across the orchard. I ducked to look at him between branches. He was in another tree, his violet plaid peeking through the twists of leaves and fruit.

“Sounds like a breakfast cereal,” I said.

“If you keep eating, you’re gonna make yourself sick,” he told me.

“Nope. I could eat a hundred more of these.”

He wriggled out from between two tricky branches and settled into a new spot against the trunk, sighing contentedly. His already tan skin was extra dark from the summer sun. “Why do people never climb trees anymore? This is glorious. I feel so alive up here.”

“I love this,” I told him, dangling my leg experimentally. “It is glorious. That’s the perfect word for it. Glorious in a goldenrod sort of way.”

“We should bring some back for your mom,” said Axel.

Mom. That one syllable triggered a wave of sadness and worry. All I could think of was how my mother looked that morning, slumped over the kitchen table, her frame small and compressed, as though her darkness took up so much space in the house there was barely any room left for her body.

I couldn’t help but feel a little angry that he had brought her up. Without her strange bleakness, it would’ve been an almost perfect day.

“What?” he said. “Don’t you think she’d love these?”

I rolled my eyes. “Why do you have to be such a suck-up? She’s not your mother.”

He looked taken aback. The harshness of the words surprised even myself, but already it was too late for me to pivot, to try for a joke that might save the conversation.

Axel was just considerate like that. And so what if he was sucking up? His own mother had walked out on his family when he was seven. In the course of our friendship, my mom had become something of a surrogate parent to him.

My feelings peaked and then deflated just as quickly, and then I felt ashamed. Here he was, wanting to do something nice for my mother. And here I was, moping about the fact that she was in a bad mood on my birthday.

I took my half-eaten apple and lobbed it into the sky. The Honeycrisp arched high and fell noisily into the branches of another tree.

We paid for the apples, minus the ones in our stomachs, and tucked them into our backpacks before unlocking our bikes, which we’d left side by side against the fence separating the orchard from the road. My bike leaned into his, both of them held in the embrace of heavy-duty locks that we’d threaded through the wheels and frames.

It occurred to me—sadly, pathetically—that those bikes looked romantic. They touched and bumped without hesitation, without thought. They’d shared in so many adventures; they had history. They belonged together.

I had to be losing my mind. I was personifying bikes, for crying out loud. Things of metal and rubber, without hearts or brains.

The road ahead was smooth and empty. The sun was fading; its glow cut across the horizon at a flat angle, springing loose these long, fuzzy shadows that followed us wherever we went. My bike was on too high a gear for going up the hill, but I gritted my teeth and didn’t change it. My legs worked, pumping hard, calves burning. I kept my eyes fixed on the back of Axel’s helmet.

“What color?” I shouted to him.

He didn’t respond, but his bike gained speed. I pedaled harder to keep up.

“Axel,” I tried again. “What color?”

The hill flattened out and he must have cranked up to a higher gear. I saw his legs working, saw the way his bike lurched forward and rolled like it’d gotten picked up by a wave. He sped to the end of the road and turned right. I followed, winding down a path into a park. Axel braked hard and jumped off, throwing his bike to the ground, not bothering with the kickstand.

“What are you doing?” I stopped beside him, straddling my bike and panting.

“Burnt orange,” he said. “The color of being mad at you.”

Sometimes Axel completely defeated the purpose of our color system by stating the obvious.

“I’m sorry,” I said immediately. I hated that I’d been an asshole, that he was right to be upset. “I’m really, really sorry.”

He threw off one strap of his backpack and swung it around. I watched him pull out a blanket and a Tupperware container.

“Well, it’s still your birthday,” he said grudgingly, and I knew I was mostly forgiven. “This is the second part.”