Trip Through Your Wires. Sarah Layden

was no movie on pause, no remote control. Ben never stuck in one place, and Mike moved behind the scenes in ways she could not see.

      Still. She’d made a choice. The green backpack dangled from Ben’s shoulder, and Carey reached to unzip the front pouch. He let her. She put the half-drunk bottle back into his bag and zipped it closed.

      “Now I’m unstealing it,” Carey said.

      Ben smiled widely. A dimple pierced each cheek. Mike reached out a hand as if to ask, Where’s mine? Ben ignored him and patted the pocket where he’d stashed the flashlight. He stretched and yawned, bored, and the mood quickly changed. Carey’s damp shirt chilled her.

      They could hear but not see the throng of people on the other side of the bus. Ben waved dismissively in the direction of the noise. “A host family, that’s good for your first year,” he said. “After that, you need freedom. Me and Mike live in the dorms.”

      He spoke as casually as if it were summer camp. She’d rarely heard his voice before—Thanks, can I get change—and never directed to her. She studied up close the clarity and darkness of his green eyes, a half-smile underneath a slightly crooked nose, muscle and sinew visible beneath a white cotton T-shirt. A couple blackheads on the side of his nose. His expression bordered on a smirk. He wasn’t mocking her. She thrilled at the possibility that he might recognize her. Still. She wanted to be new.

      She’d ordered pizza slices from Prisanti’s before, and he was always in the back, behind the glass, tossing. Showing off. His hands twisting a beige blob of flour and yeast into long ropes. Flattening a ball of dough into a circle and flinging it into the air. He had behind-the-back moves like a basketball player, though he only played soccer (“A cardinal sin in Indiana,” he told her later, “especially if you’re six-two.”) Despite his skills, at times he stretched the pizza dough so thin that a hole would tear. He might wad the circle into a ball and start over, but usually, he’d launch the torn dough upwards to the ceiling, where it stuck for a few minutes, then fell. Without looking up, he’d catch the sticky mess in one hand. Crowds gathered to watch the Pizza Guy at Prisanti’s. He grinned at their applause, always looking over their heads into the distance. She’d stood there, too, wrestling with the competing desires of wanting to be noticed and wanting to be obscured. The longer he went without seeing her, the longer she could look.

      Andrea Cunningham still called out names. Ben placed a palm on the side of the bus for balance and adjusted his sneaker’s crinkled tongue. He glanced at her mouth, licked his lips. “I bet your family’s looking for you,” he said.

      The bus blocked the school, its fluorescent lights, her host family, the start of her exchange program. She would rather have stayed in the dark with Ben. But she had been dismissed.

      “Right,” she said.

      He waggled his fingers at her, walking backwards. One of the Mexican teachers approached Mike with a stack of envelopes, and Mike drifted off without saying goodbye. He watched her from the corner of one eye, the way he would for the next seven months. Longer.

      She took a deep breath, waiting a beat. When she followed Ben’s path, he’d disappeared, swallowed by the crowd.

      Andrea Cunningham consulted her roster, wiping her pink face with her polo sleeve. Her khaki pants looked permanently wrinkled.

      “Halpern, Carey? There you are.”

      The whole Alarcón family waited inside to greet her. Tall, thin Lupe and her husband, the shorter, muscular Hector. Their teenage daughter, Alicia, with her skinny arms and legs, her puppy gaze. And Bartolo. Lupe’s son from her first marriage, four years older than Carey, pockmarked and moody.

      Carey’s face felt dirty from traveling. Her mother told her constantly, “You could use some lipstick,” but it had been hours since Carey had applied makeup. Her cheeks ached from smiling at the Alarcón family. But she continued to grin, nod, and shake her head. She tried to answer their questions, her stilted Spanish childlike.

      Hector drove. Carey was wedged in back between Lupe on the right and Bartolo on the left. Fifteen-year-old Alicia sat up front and contorted her skinny body to better see Carey. She peppered her with questions. How many brothers and sisters did she have? What about a boyfriend? What’s Nueva York like?

      Carey answered her new teenage sister in Spanish, increasing in pitch and volume to convey meaning she couldn’t find in words. She was an only child. No boyfriend. She’d never been to New York. Her life, to her own ears, sounded dull as cardboard. She wanted to tell them, ‘I used to have a boyfriend—just not right now,’ which was true. Or, ‘I’ve been thinking about going to New York,’ when in reality Chicago unmoored her. But her mind swam with the unanticipated difficulty of speaking Spanish, a language she’d studied throughout high school and college.

      “Mija, calmate,” Hector warned Alicia. He’d barely said hello back at the school; Lupe had hugged her. Spiky black hairs poked from the back of his neck, which was thick as a wrestler’s. He was younger than his wife by a decade. His forearm muscles flexed when he gripped the steering wheel.

      “Why not?” Alicia asked Carey.

      “I don’t know,” Carey said. “New York’s far from where I live.”

      “No,” Alicia said, impatient. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?”

      Hector cleared his throat. His eyes found Lupe’s in the rearview mirror. He drove quickly and moved the little white sedan from lane to lane without looking, as if the cars would know to get out of the way, and they did. A rosary of black plastic beads dangled from the rearview mirror, constantly swaying.

      Lupe brushed her daughter’s shoulder with her long fingers. On her left hand she wore a thin gold band and diamond ring, and on her right, another diamond, pear-shaped.

      “What?” Alicia protested. “It’s a compliment. Es guapa.”

      Carey smiled at Lupe to assure her it was fine, then tried to catch Bartolo’s eye. But his eyes were fixed on his lap, where his hands rested. Long, nimble fingers. He turned away. Yes, she was pretty, Alicia. No one challenged that point.

      They passed through yellow-lit streets, a mix of brick and pavement, the park in the center of town with its Indian laurels and wrought-iron benches and cobblestone paths. Clustered groups wandered the plaza, ice cream in hand. The faces were brown, the clothes bright, the laughter loud. Someone strummed a guitar. Beyond the plaza were a few illuminated alleyways, wide-slab stone steps curving up a hill. Two blocks from a sixteenth-century church, an electronics store advertised a sale.

      “Is this a good place to go running?” Carey asked Hector, and immediately his thick neck swiveled back and forth.

      “Nunca por la noche.” Never at night.

      “Claro,” she said, miffed. She knew to avoid certain potential physical threats—a dark alley or park, going home with a stranger after last call—the security system of being female. She had not yet discovered how closely Mexico guarded its women. And her host father could not provide the protection Carey really needed: a shield for her vulnerable heart and mind. At twenty-one, she wore little emotional armor.

      The flashing neon of the bodegas and cafés dizzied her as they drove. In the car windows their faces reflected, half-lit and glowing: Bartolo’s cola-colored skin pocked with acne scars made deeper by the dark, Carey’s face white and pink with blank thoughts of tomorrow and the day after that. Possibility, the unknown, the wide expanse of who she might be in a place that did not know her. But she knew Ben, and he appeared in her versions of the coming year. She remembered seeing him once in the mall, wearing a Nirvana T-shirt. She’d gone to MusicTown and bought a CD, the one with the baby swimming underwater, even though she wasn’t a fan and failed to become one. Looking for clues, filling in the blanks of Ben’s life.

      At the house, Lupe apologized again for keeping Carey up—You must be tired, but we’re so excited you’re here. Tall, elegant Lupe wore a yellow shift dress and flat sandals and a patterned scarf tied around her neck, like a timeless movie star. Her face was