Kephart - The Heart is Not a Size

What I remember now is the bunch of them running: from the tins, which were their houses. Up the white streets, which were the color of bone. All the way to the top of Anapra, to where we were standing in our secondhand scrubs and where Riley said, They might as well be flowers, blown right off their stalks, and Sophie said, This is so completely wild , and the Third said nothing at all. The Third: He wasnt talking yet. He was all size and silence.

I should tell Mack, I said, but I didnt budge, didnt even turn and glance back toward where Mack and the others were digging in, hanging tarp, toting two-by-fours from one angle of sun fizzle to another. Because the kids of Anapra might have been chunks of blown-off petals, like Riley said, but they mostly looked like wings to me, flying and flying in their bright, defiant best; their yellow cotton shirts, red fringy skirts, blue trousers. They looked like something no one should lose to a single instant of forgetting.

It was only our second day.

Wed pinned everything on nothing.

Wed flown south through the swill of a storm, ready for service. On the runway the rain against the plane had been the sound of slash, and then there was the high kick of altitude, and then the stitch of lightning through the chunking gray-green clouds. Finally we were through all that and into nothing but blue, the clouds a horrifying plunge below. I was window-seated beside a kid named Corey, who was friends with Sam and Jazzy but not with me; I was thinking about how, up so high, there was nothing to measure distance with. The sky was blue, just that one colorblue. You could fly forever and never get one inch closer to the sun.

Riley was back in seat 15B, accessorized with her hot-pink iPod, her twenty-two beaded bracelets. Shed snatched the tortoiseshell claw from the back of her head before wed boarded, letting her yellow-streaked-with-orange hair go messy around her shoulders, and she was swamped by this olive T-shirt with these fuchsia letters that would have won any prize, she boasted, for ugly. Riley had one of those freckle mists over the bridge of her nose and eyes the guys called sapphire. She had thirteen hoops that hung like minitambourine jingles from her left ear. She was smarter than shed let most people believe; but she was private about that, just as she was with most things. Going to Anapra was the pact wed made. If you go, Ill go: That was our mantra.

Of course, Rileys parents thought that Id be looking out for her, that Id make sure that nothing lousy happened. Thats the problem with the way I ambig boned, brown haired, straight-backed, steady, and therefore (anyone can do the calculation) revoltingly responsible. When youre seventeen years old and youve never kissed a boy and youre in all the honors classes, when you cant stand the thought of sticking fingers into your eyes so you still wear glasses and not contact lenses, when youre the middle child of three, you have what comes down to no choice. All the neighbors choose you for their cat sitting. All the summer camps want you as their aide. All the parents suggest to their kids: You should be friends with Georgia . I was what passed for safe in a hapless world.

Or, at least, to most people I was.

I t was a sign thumbtacked high on the corkboard of the local Acme. A flyer, reallyquick-copy-shop mauve and nothing fancy. The headline read TWO WEEKS THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE another famous preposterous promise, and so I stopped to read it. I find it humorous, what claims get made in the interest of stirring up business. I find it relaxing, reading the things they stick to the cork at the local grocery store.

So it wasnt the headline that suckered me in; it was the smaller-type info. The stuff about traveling south of the border, to the great Mexican nation. The promises about building community. Participants will come together for a shared purpose, the flyer said. Theyll live and work with the people of Jurez on behalf of those with nothing. Twelve people my age were being solicited for the summer trip, plus two adult chaperones. If you wanted to know more, you could ring up GoodWorks or visit the web. I read the thing through twice, and after that all the other nearby flyers and tabs and desperate pleas for house sitters and dog sitters and nannies. Then I called Riley.

Hey, I said.

Whats up? It was Christmas break of our junior year, four days past the presents. She was downloading songs to her iPod.

Im at the Acme, I told her.

Riley groaned. Reading the corkboard again?

Precisely, I said. Reading the corkboard.

Dont you have a Lit thing due?

I do. But this is better.

And?

And Ive made a discovery.

Cant wait. She big-yawned. Whats that?

You ever heard of Jurez?

Thats a battleship, right? Or, like, the name of a painter?

Wrong again.

What do you expect?

Your best every time, Riley. Always.

Okay, so whats Jurez? she said, after she remembered I was still waiting.

A place, I said. In Mexico. Do you mind if I come over?

From the Acme to Rileys took thirty minutes walking. By bike I could get there in ten. There was a small stretch of ugliness before you got to the perfect prettiness of Rileys neighborhood, where every mini-mansion sat on a hill and was connected to the street by a cobbled drive. Theyd chewed up a farm to make room for the homes, and then theyd gone and rooted in new treeslittle spindles that gave off no shade and hardly dirtied the emerald-colored lawns with fallen leaves. In the winter those trees looked like shiver, all lit with Christmas doodads.

At Rileys, which was the biggest house on the tallest hill, there must have been two dozen of those minuscule birchestwelve on one side of the cobbled drive, twelve on the otherall of them done up with blinking reds, greens, whites. I had to walk my bike to the top of that hill. I parked it around back and out of sightrule number 37,854 of Rileys more-perfect-than-most-perfect mother. I called Riley after I parked. She let me in through the back door and I went up the set of back stairs. It was easier than going the front-door route and drinking ginger tea with Rileys mom.

Riley was sprawled out as usual when I found her, looking tinier than ever in her pink-frilled, queen-sized bed. She had a bunch of pillows at her head and the buds of her iPod plugged in. She was doing a squiggle dance on her back like a flipped-over turtle, but when she saw me she yanked at her ear buds, slapped the edge of the mattress, and invited me to sit down.

Do you have an encyclopedia in this room? I asked, looking past her now to the wall of shelves where she kept every scrap of collected thing. Used water bottles, lacrosse medals, People magazines, the little dolls that her parents used to bring her from their around-the-world trips excursions , they called them. There were sketches shed never developed for art and sculptures that had gone screwy and buckled watercolor portraits; there was a bunch of books lying sideways, like propslittle stages on which sat the fuzzy elephants and neon monkeys from the Devon Horse Show, where wed gone every year since we were kids and where Riley inevitably won at the water pistol booth.

Maybe, Riley said. Somewhere. Why?

Jurez? I said. Remember?

I tilted my head sideways to read the names of the books, pushed my glasses up on the bridge of my nose. Finally I found something that said World Atlas . Probably some gift from some aunt somewhere. Clearly not a book Rileyd ever opened. You mind? I asked, starting to shift things aroundmoving a stuffed turkey to the ledge of another book, shifting a squeaky mouse to a shelf below. When Riley didnt answer, I turned around. She had her ear buds back in. She was dancing.