Our Own Private Universe. Robin Talley

don’t need to yell.” Lori rubbed her ear. “I’m right here.”

      “Sorry.” I pulled off my headphones.

      “You always shout when you wear those. One day you’re going to do it in the middle of church and get kicked out.”

      “I never wear headphones in church. Mom would slaughter me.”

      “Yeah, well, I’m going to slaughter you right now if you keep acting so antisocial. What are you doing out here all by yourself?”

      “Oh, uh.” I glanced back across the darkness toward the courtyard I’d abandoned. The house where the party was being held was on the far edge of town, backing up into the empty hillside. Behind me I could hear the sounds of voices and laughter and faint faraway music floating out over the walls. “Sorry. I guess I forgot.”

      Lori laughed. “You’re lucky you’re hot, because you can be a total weirdo when you want to be. Come on, we should mingle.”

      Right. I was supposed to be trying.

      I followed Lori across the hills and through the courtyard’s tall, swinging wooden door. We passed a few people gathered along the back wall and went up to a table where some chips were set out next to flickering decorative candles.

      At least half the party was gathered around the table, talking and rubbing their eyes. We hadn’t all taken the same flights, but everyone had been on at least two planes today, and most of the group looked like they still felt dizzy.

      Someone had set up their phone to play music through its little speaker. The melodies were tiny against the open dirt and dotted sky beyond the courtyard walls.

      I said hi to the people I knew from church. Lori chattered at everyone, flirting with the guys and fiddling with the bracelet that dangled from her wrist. It was one I’d made. Our allowances were pathetic, so Lori and I made jewelry to sell at school.

      I wasn’t sure if saying hi to people and following Lori around officially counted as trying. Maybe it was something close, though. Something closer than dancing by myself under the stars.

      But, God, those stars. I had to fight not to let my gaze drift back out into the open air.

      Trying wasn’t optional, though. Not this summer.

      Because, well. I had this theory.

      Granted, all I ever had were theories. That was the whole problem. My life, all fifteen years of it, had been all about the hypothetical and never about the actual.

      I was a hypothetical musician (I hadn’t played in more than a year). I was a hypothetical Christian (it wasn’t as though I’d tried any other options). Despite the age on my birth certificate, I was essentially a hypothetical teenager, since real teenagers did way more exciting stuff than I ever did.

      But as of this summer, there was one particular theory that was taking up way more space in my brain than I had to spare.

      To be honest, my theory was mostly about sex. But it applied to life in general, too. If I wanted to have an interesting life—which I did—then there was no point sitting around debating everything in my head on a constant loop.

      If I wanted my life to change, then I had to do something. Or at least try.

      And it was now or never. This summer, the summer we’d come to Mexico, was the time to test out my hypothesis.

      The problem was, I was really good at sitting around and debating things in my head. Trying stuff? Actually doing it? That wasn’t really my jam.

      Lori was different, though. She wasn’t any better than me at doing things, but she sure loved trying.

      “We’ve got to go to the welcome party tonight,” she’d whispered to me that afternoon, seconds after the bus dropped us off at the church. “How else are we going to meet all the new guys?”

      “I am absolutely not in the mood for a party,” I whispered back as I helped her haul her stuff inside. I’d already decided that, due to jet lag, my theory could wait at least one more day for testing. “I’m all woozy. Like I’m still on that plane, the one that kept shaking around.”

      It had taken three different planes followed by a four-hour bus ride to get from home, in Maryland, to this tiny town somewhere way outside Tijuana. I’d never flown before, and now that we were on steady land all I wanted to do was put on my pajamas, go to bed and sleep until noon.

      Except it turned out we didn’t have beds. Just sleeping bags lined up on the cement floor of an old church.

      I didn’t have pajamas, either. The airline had lost my suitcase.

      So I gave up fighting it. My theory was getting tested, jet lag or no jet lag.

      “The new guys are going to be incredible,” Lori had whispered to me as we walked to the party with the others.

      “They’re going to be exactly the same as the guys we already know,” I whispered back.

      “Not true. These guys are way cooler. Much less boring.”

      “How could you possibly know that?”

      “Look, I’m an optimist, okay?”

      For the next month, the youth groups from our church and two others would be working together on a volunteer project. All Lori cared about was that we’d be spending four weeks with guys who weren’t the same seven guys we’d been hanging out with since we were kids.

      I didn’t see what was so bad about the guys at our church. Sure, most of them thought of me as a dorky, preacher’s-daughter, kid-sister type, but, well, that was pretty accurate. And I’d never been great at meeting people. I wasn’t shy or anything. It was only that sometimes, with new people, I didn’t know how exactly to start a conversation. I liked to listen first. You could learn a lot about someone that way.

      The welcome party was at one of our host families’ houses. The local minister’s, maybe. But all the adults—my dad and the other ministers and chaperones, plus our Mexican host families—spent the whole time in the living room, which meant the forty-or-so of us from the youth groups had the outdoor courtyard to ourselves. That was a good thing, since whenever the adults were around I could hardly understand what anyone was saying. I’d gotten an A in freshman year Spanish, so I thought I’d be able to get by in Mexico all right, but we hadn’t even made it out of the Tijuana airport before I’d found out the truth. The woman at customs had asked me a question and the only part I understood was por favor. So I stared at her with my head tilted helplessly until Dad whispered for me to unzip my purse so the woman could check it for bombs or whatever.

      Along the back wall of the courtyard, where the adults couldn’t see them from inside, a handful of people had started dancing. I turned back to Lori and stole a chip out of her hand. She pushed her long, curly blond hair out of her face and raised her eyebrows at me.

      “See, aren’t you glad we didn’t skip this?” Lori lowered her voice. “The guys on this trip are already way more interesting than our usual crowd.”

      She meant that they were older. Lori and I were the only two sophomores who’d been allowed to come on this trip. The others were mostly going to be juniors or seniors in the fall. Some, like my brother, Drew, were already in college. Lori and I got special permission because my dad was our church’s youth minister, and he and Lori’s aunt Miranda were both chaperones on this trip.

      “Why are you so into meeting new guys, anyway?” I asked Lori.

      “I don’t know. I just want to expand my horizons. Have something new, something that’s all mine. You know what I mean?”

      I nodded. It sounded like Lori was testing a theory of her own.

      We fell into silence. A new song had come on, one of the big songs of the summer that had been playing in every store back home for weeks. Half the group was up and dancing. One of the guys from our church and his girlfriend were swaying slowly