Through a blooming blush, you watched her closely, something in her wry grin suggesting her attendance at the meteor shower must have been some kind of a joke. Or, more likely, she had only accepted your father’s invitation to be kind.
But then a wondrous thing happened when Pa drove you home. “Shotgun!” Charlie yelled in the parking lot, and climbed into the front seat. And as one of the backseats was piled with Pa’s collection of paper coffee cups and fast food refuse, Rebekkah and you had to sit right next to each other, your denim-clad thighs touching snugly, your leg registering each jostle with ecstatic friction.
“A couple hours till nightfall yet,” Pa said when you arrived at Zion’s Pastures. “Why don’t you take Rebekkah for a little show-around, and we’ll get the picnic ready?” He winked at you, not very subtly.
Most of the land of Zion’s Pastures was just parched country, like photographs you’d seen of the islands of Greece, if someone had vacuumed away the Aegean. But you wanted to show Rebekkah your land’s rare swatch of lushness, guiding her down to the fertile earth along Loving Creek. As you led Rebekkah through the machete-cut trails, your anxiety turned you into some kind of historian. “My great-great-grandfather and his family came from Wales, that’s near England, and they had this crazy idea that Texas wouldn’t be so different from Wales but with enough land for everyone—” You begged your mouth to silence, but it refused to quit its lectures. “This is called a century plant. Its stem supposedly shoots just once in a hundred years.” You awkwardly added, “To reproduce.” Rebekkah silently trailed your elbow. You elected for the most arduous paths, where many times you had to lift a branch for her to duck the tunnel of your arm. At last you came to your destination, the little creekside cave where you spent many evenings and weekends, doing your homework and writing your rhymy poems at the old poker table you had taken from the storage shed.
“Here it is,” you said. “My secret lair.”
“Secret lair? What are you, Superman?”
“That’s the Fortress of Solitude.”
“So no solitude for you, huh?” she asked. “You bring a lot of people here? It’s very cool.”
“You’re the first. The first non-Loving, I mean.”
“I’m honored.”
“You should be. It’s very exclusive.”
Rebekkah emitted a faint “ha” and looked up to observe the fleshy knobs of the mini-stalactites that hung from the ceiling. There had been a time when your boyish imagination could make this pocket of rock seem deep with mystery, a potential burial place for the sort of lost Mexican treasure that your late granny liked to tell stories about. Now it looked to you only like a dim hollow, shallow and gray.
“Oh my God!” Rebekkah shouted, doing a frantic little skip. “A snake!”
You laughed, more loudly than you intended. “That’s just snakeskin. Some rattler must have molted here.” You both knelt to examine the diaphanous material, the translucent scales making miniature rainbows in the early evening light.
“Wow. It’s sort of beautiful,” Rebekkah said.
You poked at the iridescent rattler sheath, and the frail substance crumbled under your fingertip. Rebekkah put a hand to her face. “You ruined it,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“Why did you do that?”
“It’s no big deal. Snakeskin is everywhere around here. Really. We can find some more, if you want.”
Rebekkah stood away, made a frustrated little snort. You couldn’t quite understand what you’d done wrong, but you did understand that you were already failing your first conversation with her.
“Listen,” you said. “You really don’t have to stay all the way to tonight if you don’t want. My pa could drive you home.”
“Your pa. So Texan.”
You shrugged. “Ma and Pa. That’s just what we’ve always called them. I guess it was my grandmother’s doing. Always made us do things the old-fashioned way.”
“Anyway,” Rebekkah said, “thanks for the advice. But when I want to go, you’ll be the first to know.”
“It’s just that I know it’s kind of weird that you’re here. And now you’re looking like you are feeling weird.”
“Weird is how I’m looking?”
“I didn’t mean—maybe not.”
“If anything,” she said, “all this is just making me a little jealous. This place. Your family. You get to live like this every day.”
But you were the jealous one just then, jealous of other boys better suited for a girl like Rebekkah, with her sad, thousand-yard stare. “My dad drinks alone in his shed most nights,” you told her, trying to match your tone to hers, that whispery subdued register. “My mother looks at me like I’m three years old.”
Rebekkah glanced up at you, smiled sadly. “Well, I guess we have a few things in common, then.” And then Rebekkah reached for you and mussed your hair like a child’s. Like a child’s, maybe, but on the hike back to the house, your legs throwing long shadows, you could still feel the warmth of her hand on your head, a kind of imaginary crown.
*
“And have you heard about how scientists have been measuring the universe?” Pa asked, two hours later, on that hilltop. The remnants of the picnic your mother had packed were strewn about. In honor of the guest, Pa had limited himself to wine, the emptied bottle of Merlot now tipped on its side. “They’ve found this way to take the whole thing’s weight. They can weigh the universe now! Incredible!”
“Incredible,” you said, but you had much more interesting measurements in mind. Your fingertips had at last forged the great divide, and they fell with exhaustion on the polyester shore of Rebekkah’s blanket. You must have been less than six inches from her now; you felt the warmth that her skin radiated. Your fingers took the land’s measure, stood, and began the final march. A sudden streak of brightness cut the deep purple above. “Oh! Look look look!” Charlie shouted.
“So, Rebekkah, tell us about you,” your mother said, her voice at the edge of that tone she used with strangers, the one she called skeptical and your brother called mean. “You’re new here, right?”
“We’ve been here for a little more than a year now. My father works for an oil company. Fracking. Never in one place long.”
“Poor girl,” Ma said. “I know how that goes. We moved around so much when I was a kid, I’d gone to eight schools before I was fifteen.”
“It’s hard,” Rebekkah said.
“I have to admit,” Pa said, “I saw a little thing about your father in the paper, something about the surveys his company’s been doing around Alpine. Fingers crossed they strike it rich, Lord knows we could use the business.”
Rebekkah shrugged. “He never tells me much about it,” she said. “Just lets me know when it’s time to move again.”
“Our family has lived here for about a million years!” Charlie piped. “We never go anywhere! It’s not always such a picnic, let me tell you.”
“Charlie.”