Crossroads

Audrey Nguyen

You. Me. A rusty school bus packed with band kids. Heading towards what seems like nowhere. Testosterone and sweat drip like crystals on a falling chandelier, and music pulsates in such a way that your bones tremble with every beat. The burning headlights flash, stars on a cosmic highway. It seems as if they could reveal all the dirty secrets blanketed by the twilight roads. Supernova. Everything flowering in flames.

But soon enough the exit ramp gives way to the backroads. Most people have fallen asleep or are staring vacantly out of their respective windows. With no motivation to be comprehensive nor comprehended, words slur to a sputtering halt. Yet you and I are wide awake. I’m all too aware of how the seat creaks with each of our hesitant, syncopated breaths. How, despite the urge to rest my head in the crevice of your shoulder, you wouldn’t want to run the risk of anyone knowing about our situation. I hate to use that word, but what are we really, other than a series of business transactions? Of exchanging relics of romance as currency.

I lean on you anyway because it’s dark and there are knots in my neck. Your heart beats at its consistently irregular pace and your muscles shift beneath your loose sweatshirt. But you never move away, in spite of every signal your body’s giving to do the opposite. For the last couple miles, your hardened fears melt into physical exhaustion, and you lean your head on mine. We sit there in the dark together, staring vacantly out the window with too little and too much on our minds. It seems we always find ourselves here. At the crossroads. Wondering whether we should push our limits or retreat back into the cradle of just friends.

The bus driver grumbles over the intercom that we’ll be arriving in 5 minutes, and everyone rouses with strained limbs. Then someone makes a whistled remark and suddenly 10 pairs of eyes are blazing through us. You jolt up and pretend like nothing happened, embarrassment glazing over your eyes and over your cheeks like a sunburn. And suddenly everything we put together has fallen apart once again. I’ve grown accustomed to this back and forth, your inability to decide. But it hurts the same. Because every time, I think it’s different from the last.

And I can keep reassuring myself that if there’s something to be guilty about, then there’s something you’re afraid of wanting. Right? I can draw it into something metaphorical because how else do I believe you’re worth all the overthinking and assuming? Even if your memory plagues me with nightmares and phantom aches, your shoulder fitting perfectly with my weary head, at least there were a few moments such as these, that justify my distorted fantasies. At least I can point to the moment when everything was bound to either blossom or collapse, you turning around in fear and me still wandering blindly in the dark.

A Study on Butterflies and Other Insects

Ava Bruni

We met each other for the first time at the hibiscus tree in the park near my house. You were crying, something your father said. I tried to comfort you, pointing out the colors of the flowers around us and the birds that owned the sky. You just sat there with bloodshot eyes and a blank expression. You talked in whispers, your sentences short and purposeful, pointing out things I’d never thought to see.

I asked you mundane questions - what your name is, where you’re from - the polite things I was taught to ask strangers. You asked me about the universe, the trees, the bugs, the stars. You pointed out spider webs on branches and ants carrying crumbs twice their size.

Your family came to town during spring break every year to visit your rich great aunt. When you described her, I lied to you, saying I knew who she was, but she sounded the same as every older woman in this town. You told me she was one of those beetles that pretended to be a ladybug. I didn’t understand what you meant yet.

Every year after that, I met you at the hibiscus tree in the park during spring break. We’d sit on the grass until the blue in the sky turned into stars every day during your visit. Your family never noticed you were gone, or maybe they didn’t care. But we’d spend our week in the shade, avoiding the rest of the world.

I didn’t ask you questions anymore. Anytime I did your face would tense and you would struggle to get the words out. I never asked if you looked forward to meeting me under the tree all year long, waiting for something real to come along and distract you. I knew you enough to know you were.

I knew how you would take your bracelet off and twirl it in your hand when you got anxious,and how you’d blush and look down as you talked. I knew you with braces and I knew you without. I knew you when your hair was short, then long, then short again. I saw how your smile changed and faded and broke until it was gone.

You used to point at the people who passed us and tell me who they were, naming them all after insects. Wasps and bees were the people in suits, but bees’ job was to make honey and wasps were just there to hurt people. Fireflies were the children who were happy and played, and flies were the ones who sat silently as their parents taught them to. You’d give them stories. Some dreamed of flying and others didn’t know how to dream so they stayed stuck in place.

You told their stories with such confidence, it made me really believe you. As if any word you spoke was the genuine truth, and who the stranger thought they were was a lie. You put the world under a magnifying glass, grasping at any information you could get about the organisms around us.

You never treated me like one of your observations, but I knew you made a version of me up in your mind. Probably a better version, the one I wished I was. I could tell by the way you looked at me and how you tried not to smile when you saw me. How you listened, really listened, when I had something completely ordinary to say. In your mind, the mind that decides who strangers truly are, I was someone you loved. And if you loved me, then I was probably okay.

I remember the necklace you gave me with a butterfly pendant and how you said it reminded you of me. My eyes filled with tears when I saw who I was to you. By the end of the week I gave you a bracelet like the one you fidgeted with. In the center was a butterfly bead, so we could be butterflies together.

One spring you stopped observing the world and stayed silent. I didn’t ask what was wrong because I knew you and I knew you wouldn’t want to talk about it. I filled the silence with everything you used to say. I pointed at the fireflies that played together nearby and the bees that rushed to work. My words weren’t as soft as yours; they didn’t sound believable. You noticed. Halfway through the week you reminded me of something I forgot when I was with you. I was a part of the organisms I seemed to hate so much. There were only ever wasps and flies and beetles, and I was pretending just like them. You spoke in your same whispers as the day I met you. The whispers that meant truth. And I remember telling you that you are just the same as me. You’re the one who hates the world that raised you and the way it shaped everything you are. You pretend to be different, special, but every year you come back to this town you hate so much. Just like your father and your father’s father and every father before him. You are stuck, just like me. Yes, I’m pretending, but at least I know it.

You didn’t come back to the hibiscus tree after that. I’d see you with your family when you’d come for spring break, but you’d never look in my eyes. It took everything in me not to run up to you and wrap my arms around you and keep every promise I’d ever ever made under our tree.

A part of us would always belong to the hibiscus tree and the time we spent together. But we didn’t belong to the town with its wasps pretending to be bees and flies pretending to be fireflies and beetles pretending to be ladybugs. They’re always going to want to be more than they are. My life was rooted in this town and so was yours. And as much as we wanted to be butterflies and escape the world we were born into, we’ll always just be moths. Drawn to the light of the promise of becoming more.