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.”
“What… is it?”
“Sandwiches,” he said, tossing the container over to me. “Sliced pear and Brie. Your favorite.”
“What?”
“We’re having a picnic,” he said matter-of-factly. “You were complaining that we’re too old for picnics. Well, we’re not.”
And that was why I was so grateful for Axel: because what other fifteen-year-old boy would ever plan a surprise picnic for his best friend? My throat was tight. After I’d been such a brat, how was he still so good to me?
“Pear and Brie is your favorite. My favorite is pear, Brie, and peanut butter.”
“Oh, make no mistake,” he said, “yours definitely has peanut butter on it. You big weirdo. I had to quarantine it from mine with aluminum foil.”
I helped him spread the blanket out before kicking off my shoes and investigating the sandwiches. He’d used the smooth peanut butter. Perfect. I stretched out on my back with my knees bent and bit into my sandwich.
Axel reached into his backpack for his art things. A watercolor pad, black pouch filled with brushes, small square of terry cloth. His Winsor & Newton paint set was a thing of plastic origami, unfolding out into a palette with mixing trays for wings. I watched him unscrew one of his portable watercolor brushes—they looked like futuristic pens. He carefully angled the lip of a water bottle, filling the pen barrel so that with the gentlest bit of pressure it would release fluid and gather up pigment.
He flipped open to an empty page in his pad and pressed the brush into a square of paint.
I had disappeared. When Axel reached this point, there was nothing left in the world except for him and the colors. Every time I watched it happen I couldn’t help but feel left out. When he went to that place in his head, I couldn’t follow.
My fingers were also itching to make art. But I held myself still. I wanted to take in this quiet. The sky had turned electric and the sun was cutting stripes across Axel’s face, giving him a mask made of light. I sketched him in my head first—a meditative exercise I often did before I started on a realistic portrait.
Bold brows, defined cheekbones—then, as always, my gaze lingered on the eyes. They were so dark—almost darker than mine. I wondered if he’d gotten them from his mother. Axel had so much of his father that I’d always been curious what his mom looked like. There were no photographs of her on display in their house. At least not any that I’d ever seen. I suspected that his dad had hidden them all away.
Axel and I seemed to be the only two mixed kids in the Fairbridge school district. When people saw us together, they sometimes called us the halfies, which only made me roll my eyes, but it bothered Axel way more.
There was almost nothing left of the Filipino side of his family in his life. Some days he got defensive about it. Some days he talked about his mother like she hadn’t left.
Other days he seemed to wish people would just treat him as if he were a hundred percent Puerto Rican. Or he tried even to shed those pieces of his heritage, to blend in and look and act like everyone else in our school. I totally understood; I went through a period of striving for that, too.
Those were the things swirling around in my head as I fell asleep on the picnic blanket. When I woke up, it was with Axel’s hand on my shoulder, saying it was time to go home.
Mom was already in bed, but there was a miniature Bundt cake waiting for me on the kitchen counter, with a note on a napkin that said only Happy Birthday in her slanted scrawl. She’d mustered enough energy to bake for me; the thought made me feel a little bit better. I set the apples Axel had picked out on the kitchen counter for her.
That night I went to bed thinking of how school was about to start. The previous year—eighth grade—had been a hard one. I thought—or maybe more like hoped—that it had been just as hard for Axel. Since he was a year older, he’d gone across the street without me to begin high school. We still rode the same bus, and we still spent time together outside school. But both of us felt that we’d lost an ally in the halls.
I was about to be a freshman, and Axel a sophomore, and everything would go back to normal. I’d have my best friend at school again. We would at least have art together, because Axel had skipped it his freshman year, for reasons I still didn’t understand. A small part of me wanted it to be because he knew that if we started in Art I at the same time we could guarantee that we’d have at least one class together for three years.
The next day he came over for dinner. Dad was back, and Mom made chive dumplings for a belated birthday celebration—a sign that she had climbed out of the darkness. Afterward, Axel and I sat on the couch drawing each other’s feet. When it was time to leave, he handed me a thick, folded square.
“Your birthday present,” he said.
“It’s late,” I teased, to hide my pleasure.
“I needed the extra day,” he said. “You’ll see.”
I watched him shuffle down the steps of our porch, tucking his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. The trapezoidal light poured out our open door and spilled onto the road so he had to have known I was still standing there, still watching him. He didn’t look back.
The thick square unfolded into several pieces of watercolor paper. At the center of them all was a thumb drive and a note:
MADE THESE YESTERDAY WHILE YOU SPENT YOUR PICNIC NAPPING. THINK OF THEM AS THE SHEET MUSIC.