“I didn’t know you were a reporter.”
Andi laughs, glancing over at me like we’re sharing a joke. I wonder what would happen if I just kissed her right now, whether the moment has passed, whether she’s decided it was a bad idea or what. I don’t know what the rules are here, and I’m adrift.
“Oh, I’m not,” she says. “I’m a grant writer, but that means I can string sentences together decently and they were desperate, so I went.” Andi pauses, clearing her throat, not looking at me. “Your dad and brother were there. Actually, I thought it was Elliott, but I guess not if he lives in Boston.”
“Matt, probably,” I say, and carefully place a tortilla on the hot cast iron pan. “He and my father still… agree on a lot of things.”
“Ah.”
“This was the meeting where they wanted to ban books?” I ask. The tortilla is puffing up in a few spots, so I grab it with my fingers and quickly flip it.
“There are tongs,” Andi says, frowning at me. “Don’t—”
“Quit fussing, I’m fine,” I tell her.
“I’m not fussing.”
“That was textbook fussing,” I say, and I can see her roll her eyes on the edge of my vision.
“Was not,” she says. “Anyway, yeah, they were trying to get a bunch of books taken out of the school library for immorality. And it’s not like Sprucevale Public Schools are a bastion of progressive thought, it was like, the book about the penguin chick with two dads.”
“Sadie say anything?” I ask, taking the hot tortilla out and plopping it onto a plate, then handing it over to Andi.
“No, she was just there. I saw her talking to Matt later and it looked… tense. I didn’t say hi, I didn’t think she’d remember me and wasn’t in the mood to talk to Matt just then.”
“Understandable,” I mutter. I’m also not often in the mood to talk to Matt, who’s only a year younger than me but seems to have had a completely different childhood.
“They didn’t get the books taken out, but it was close,” Andi says, loading beans and cheese onto the tortilla as I heat another one and pointedly don’t watch her try to roll the one she just overfilled. “Shit, I’m terrible at this.”
“I’m sure they’ll try again. My father doesn’t enjoy being told no,” I say, and lean toward her. A few stray hairs stick in my beard, and the spot where I kissed her neck in the snow earlier is right there, so close, and I have no idea what the fuck I was doing in the first place.
“Yes, I fucked up the burrito,” she says. Right. “Take some of the filling so I can—thanks.”
“My father is,” I start, rolling my own much neater burrito, but I’m not quite sure where to go from there. “I don’t agree with him on most things.”
Andi finally finishes wrangling her mess into a burrito, then licks refried beans off her thumb. It shouldn’t be as enticing as it is.
“Me either,” she says, and we head to the kitchen table.
That night, she doesn’t even try to convince me to sleep in the bedroom with her. She says goodnight after she brushes her teeth, and then there’s a long moment where we look at each other—her in the threshold to the bedroom, me on the couch reading a book—and then she smiles like a flash of sunlight, says goodnight, and turns away.
I feel a little like I’m being asked to make small talk in a language I don’t speak, and instead of saying yes, isn’t this lovely weather I’m telling her that some animals eat their young when they feel threatened because their instinctual calculation is if someone’s gonna get the energy from consuming these, it may as well be me.
When I was eighteen, I started feeling bad for what I’d done to Andi and her parents. I know it’s too old. I know I should have felt bad right away, but it took joining the Army and getting sent halfway around the world for me to finally understand just how wrong I’d been and how small a world my parents had made for us.
All kinds of people join the military, is the thing, and it turns out most people aren’t evil. People are mostly people. They do some good shit and some fucked up shit, and people who thought the same way as my parents sure didn’t have a monopoly on doing good shit. Once I realized that, everything else started to crumble.
I should have reached out to her. I found her Facebook profile and her LinkedIn; I could have contacted her, but I didn’t think I’d ever see her again, so why dredge up the past? I imagined her furious at me, and I imagined her sobbing, or screaming, or being frostily polite if we had to interact, but I never imagined her kissing me in the snow until my brain felt fuzzy.
I’m not expecting to fall asleep easily, but I do, and sleep like the dead.
“So, it’s like grice volleyball,” she says, looking up at the net, breath puffing in front of her. There’s so much wrong with that sentence I barely know where to start.
“Grouse,” is the first thing I say.
“Sure. Grice,” Andi says, grinning at me.
“The plural of grouse is also grouse,” I say, even though I know she knows this and furthermore, I know she’s only saying grice because she thinks it’s funny, or something, and correcting her is completely useless.
“So, it’s volleyball with grouses,” she says, and I close my eyes and sigh, and she laughs. To be honest, I’m mostly closing my eyes because I know if I look at the way she sparkles when she teases me or the way she turns a little pink when she laughs, I’ll also start smiling and I can’t have that. Not when she’s out here incorrectly pluralizing birds.
“It’s nothing like volleyball,” I say, another thing that I know she knows. “They fly into the net, drop into the pocket, and we get them out and tag them. No one is spiking a bird over the net.”
“Maybe you’re not,” she says, and I ignore that because I have no constructive response, just grab the pack I brought and hoist it onto my back.
“Now’s the boring part,” I say. “We sit a hundred feet away and check back every ten minutes to see what we get. You brought a book, right?”
“Two,” she says, and follows me as I trudge uphill toward a cluster of boulders that should be far enough away not to scare the wildlife.
The net—which does look a little like a volleyball net, fine—is stretched between two trees maybe ten feet apart, basically invisible in the forest. We’re about a mile and a half from the cabin, relatively near a spring and also a stand of fir trees that the grouse seem to particularly enjoy.
Five minutes later, we’re sitting on an old quilt we brought from the cabin and leaning against a gray granite boulder. I didn’t tell Andi, but in addition to all the net setup, lunch, and a thermos of coffee, I stuffed an extra blanket into the bottom of this pack in case she gets cold. It’s mid-twenties today, so not terrible, and we’re both dressed warmly, but it’s not like we’re getting our body temperatures up by hiking.
The first hour goes by uneventfully. For a long time nothing gets caught in the trap, and I start to wonder if there’s something wrong with it, but then we catch a blue jay, and soon after that, a very indignant titmouse.