Maya's leaning against the next bleacher up the row, getting the elbows of her jean jacket wet. Her eyes are full of trouble and peace- trouble in herself, and peace in the universe. I imagine I look the same.
It's the last day of high school. We both snuck out, she from Riley's apartment, to meet at the field to watch the sun rise on this, this momentous day. Or maybe it's not. It is just the last day of high school. Maya turns to me and looks at me expectantly, waiting for whatever I might have to say. It was the look that replaced our keyword months ago (it was my way to get Maya to talk, before she turned it around on me). I shake my head no, and she returns to staring up at the sky. My eyes follow hers in trying to find the horizon. It was hard, with skyscrapers and trees blocking our way. I laugh to myself, realizing that my thought sounded like a perfect metaphor for our lives. But it wasn't. We were just trying to find where the sun rose from.
I want to tell her my joke, but I don't. I might not even need to-the look on her face, with her eyes closed and head titled up to the sky, tells me that she's already captured my mood and feels the same. After so many mornings like this (117- but who's counting?), I don't need to articulate my thoughts for her to catch them.
It's not that we don't talk. We've definitely had our fair share of conversations. But it seems we only talk about the really important things, and for some reason, we can only do it here. I remember the first time we ever hugged was one morning a few months after Shawn and Katy got married, and she thought they were on the edge of a divorce (they weren't). She gave me some stability when I was working myself into a wreck about college applications. There was another time when she beat her own record for long detention sentences because she slept all through our first few periods in school. That was the morning she pitched my softball to me and ran after it for almost two hours to help me release some of my anger. There was one really hard morning after Riley and I broke up when we arrived at the field at the same time and left without saying anything to each other. And then there was our best morning ever, a month or so ago. We were tossing around my softball when it started to rain. Maya insisted that we stay and continue playing in the rain, and we watched the sun rise afterwards wet, smelly, and totally happy.
Yes, she had Riley and I had Farkle- the people we really looked to for help to solve our problems. Maybe we weren't meant to fix each other's lives. I think it was just enough to know that we had a place where we could talk without worrying about framing our words- and a place where we didn't have to talk at all.
I suddenly feel her pinky grabbing my mine, sitting on my knee. We look over at each other and grin, squeezing our pinkies in the old trust gesture elementary school kids used. It was the signal we'd used since our first morning out here, when I headed to the field for an early morning workout and found her sitting in the middle of the baseball diamond, looking like she'd just cried. I promised her I wouldn't say anything about finding her. We've found each other again and again, sometimes in anger or sadness, sometimes in happiness and peace. Sometimes planned and sometimes serendipitously.
I held her pinky, building an elementary kind of trust; and as I did, I realized I knew where the sun rose from.