Our Own Private Universe. Robin Talley

did flirting just look like talking?

      And if Christa was flirting, what made her think I wanted to flirt back? Was it something about how I looked? What I was wearing? Did she know I wanted her to flirt with me?

      Did I want her to?

      If she was really gay, she probably had a girlfriend back home. I didn’t know if I was ready to have a girlfriend. I’d never even had a boyfriend for longer than a couple of weeks.

      “Wait... Aki?” Christa cocked her head, as if she was studying me. “Aki from Silver Spring. I’ve heard about you.”

      “Yeah?”

      Oh.

      My stomach tensed. This cute girl, the first girl ever to flirt with me, knew exactly who I was.

      Of course she did.

      I was the black girl with braids. I was Pastor Benny’s daughter. Everyone in all of the Holy Life community knew who I was. I was one of a kind.

      But then she said, “You’re like a really talented musician, aren’t you?”

      And my stomach didn’t know whether to twist tighter or do flips in the air.

      “I. Um.” I didn’t know what to say.

      “I’ve definitely heard about you.” The smile spread wider across Christa’s face. “You play a bunch of instruments, right? And you write music and you sing? My friend went to a service at your church where the whole choir sang something you wrote. He said it was gorgeous and that everyone cheered and talked about how amazing you were.”

      That had been during Advent in eighth grade. The piece we performed was the same one I’d used for my audition for MHSA. Even thinking about it made me want to throw up.

      But this girl. God, this girl was so amazing.

      And she was staring at me as though she thought I was amazing, too.

      So I nodded. “Yeah, that’s me. It’s not that many instruments, though. Mainly I play guitar. And a little piano.”

      Okay. So that wasn’t totally true.

      But it wasn’t really a lie, either. It was just an inaccurate verb tense. I used to do that stuff, after all. If I’d said played instead of play it would’ve been a 100 percent accurate statement.

      Either way, it totally didn’t count as lying.

      Either way, I was glad I said it the way I did when Christa beamed at me in response.

      “Oh, wow! That’s so cool.” Christa nodded over and over again. “It’s so neat to meet someone else who’s seriously into artistic stuff. I’m not anywhere near your level, but I’m an artist, too. I do photography sometimes.”

      “You do?” I seized on the chance to talk about something that wasn’t me and music. “What kind of photography?”

      She took out her phone. “Most of it’s on my Instagram, but...” She sighed. I understood. We’d all gradually realized on our bus ride into town that our phones didn’t work here. No service. We could play games and take photos, but no internet, no texting. It was like missing an arm.

      Christa swiped through the photos on her phone. I tried to crane my neck to see them, but she held it out of my reach. “No, no don’t look at that one, that one’s awful. That one I need to crop. That one’s not—hey, actually, you can look at this one. This one’s good.”

      I leaned in until my face was only inches from hers. I had to force myself to focus on her phone screen instead of the soft, warm scent of her skin.

      I didn’t know anything about photography, but even so, I could tell it was a good photo. It was better than any pictures I’d ever taken with my phone, anyway. It showed a kid’s bare feet hovering in midair over a pool of water on a bright green lawn, as though the kid had been in the middle of jumping into the puddle when the phone was taken. You could see individual ripples and the reflection of the kid’s toes in the water.

      “I really like that,” I said. “Are those your little brother’s feet?”

      “Yeah. At least the little demon is good for something.”

      I laughed and reluctantly stepped back from her phone.

      “Do you go to King?” I asked her.

      King was the big public high school in our area. My brother had gone there, but Lori and I went to Rowell, a tiny private school. There were only twelve people in our grade.

      Christa nodded. “I do.”

      “Do you know Eric?” I asked. “He’s the president of our youth group. He goes to King, too.”

      Crap. I should’ve just stayed quiet. Things had been going great when we were looking at her phone, but now I was asking her the most boring questions ever. Why couldn’t I think of something cool to say? Christa was going to think I was boring with a capital B.

      But she didn’t look bored.

      “Sure, I know Eric. He’s okay.” She tilted her head to one side. “For a straight, privileged white guy, you know?”

      She laughed. I did, too.

      Her saying that had to mean she was gay. Or bi, at least. She must be into girls one way or another. Right?

      “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, trying to be clever and praying it was working. “I have lots of friends who are straight, privileged white guys, and I’m totally okay with them. I think they should have equal rights, just like the rest of us.”

      Christa laughed again. Her eyes crinkled up, as though she actually thought I was funny. “As long as they don’t flaunt it, right?”

      I laughed again. Christa slid her shoulder up against the wall right next to me and leaned forward until her face was only inches from mine.

      My heart thudded in my chest. I was too nervous to look back at her.

      I did it anyway.

      Maybe this qualified as doing something.

      I could barely remember what we’d been talking about, so I was halfway relieved when a smiling black guy I didn’t know came up to us. “Christa, are you bothering this nice young girl?”

      I wished he hadn’t called me young. Or nice. Those two words added up to the opposite of sexy.

      “I don’t know.” Christa turned toward the guy, then looked back at me. Her light brown eyes glimmered in the dim light. “Am I bothering you, Aki?”

      “No,” I breathed.

      The guy and Christa both laughed, and she introduced us. His name was Rodney. He went to the same church as Christa, and they were both going into their junior year at King. I was surprised Christa was only one year older than me.

      The three of us sat down on the tile patio and Rodney grabbed a pile of chips for us to share. I took an inventory of the courtyard while Rodney and Christa talked about their friends from school. I counted only five black people, including Rodney, my brother, Drew, and me.

      I wondered if that was why Rodney had come over to talk to us. There were plenty of black people in our part of Maryland, but most of them went to all-black churches. Only a handful of black and Hispanic families went to our church, and I figured the same was probably true at Christa and Rodney’s, too. The other church who’d sent their youth group on this trip was in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. I didn’t know much about West Virginia, but from what I did know, I had a feeling that church was all white, all the time.

      Rodney wasn’t bad-looking. I probably should’ve been excited that he wanted to talk to me. But all I wanted was to be alone with Christa again.

      Other people came over to sit with us. Christa kept saying stuff that made everyone laugh, me especially. Then the group got so big that a bunch of different