Page 36 of Leaving the Station
“Those flowers are beautiful,” I told him finally.
He turned to me. “You are too.”
I shivered. “That’s not what we were talking about.”
I was deflecting, but the thought that he saw me as someone whocouldbe beautiful made my cheeks warm.
We received a school-wide message the next day that there had been a break-in in the rare-manuscript library. That a page of a herbaria had fallen to the floor.
Alden sent me a screenshot of the email.
ALDEN:worth it
Tuesday, 4 p.m., near Milwaukee, WI
“So,” Oakley claps her hands together, “what should we do to pass the time?”
We’re already behind schedule, which is a small miracle.
“I was thinking about singing that song that’s like ‘Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall’ until you wanted to murder me in cold blood.”
“You wouldn’t even be able to get to ‘ninety-eight bottles’ before I threw you out the train window.”
“Violence is never the answer,” I tell her, placing a hand to my chest, mock-offended.
She snorts. “I was thinking something moreactive, you know, to get the blood pumping.”
“I’m not doing push-ups.”
She looks me up and down. “Of course you’re not.”
“Excuse you,” I say. “I might be scrawny, but I can do at least ten push-ups.”
Oakley raises her hands in surrender, and some part of myself needs to prove to her that I can, in fact, do this. So I roll the sleeves of my flannel up to my elbows and find a spot on the ground of her sleeper car.
“It’s so gross down there,” she says, but I’m not listening.
“Count for me.”
I can’t see her as I’m staring at my scrawny arms and the stained carpet, but I can practically hear her eyes rolling as she says, “One,” and I do my first push-up.
Which is also my last, because, as it turns out, I am extremely weak.
Oakley laughs, quietly at first before it turns into hysterics.
“Okay, okay,” I say, but I can’t help but smile too. At least if I’m making a fool of myself, it’s for Oakley’s entertainment.
Once she calms down, she says, “So obviously not push-ups. I was thinking a mini scavenger hunt.” She’s sitting with one of her legs up on the seat in a half-butterfly, holding on to her ankle, lovely and sun-drenched in the afternoon light.
“What kind of scavenger hunt?” I ask, knocking myself out of that thought.
She pulls out her backpack, rips a piece of paper out of a notebook, and quickly scribbles a note.
“There,” she says after a few seconds of writing.
OAKLEY AND ZOE’S TRAIN SCAVENGER HUNT:
FIND SOMEONE WHO’S FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY
