Vagabond (15 page)

 
Subtle vibrations shook the ground, and I bent low to feel the beams, hot in the blossoming heat. They buzzed with energy, and I motioned to the trees.
 

“How do you do that?”

“You get used to taking in your surroundings. Hear how the birds stopped talking? You learn to pay attention to the instincts of yourself and nature out here. Sometimes it can save your life,” Xavi’s words fell out of my mouth. They made me think of him when I’d been trying to push him out of my thoughts all week. Instinct versus feeling. It was such a hard balance beam to walk. In learning to trust my instincts, I knew I’d let in too much feeling. Thinking of Xavi made me miss stoicism. It made me miss science. Those were the only two things that never failed me, and I wanted to shove feelings and instinct back into the cage I used to keep them in.
 

“Why do you do that?”

“What?”

“Get that look on your face every time you say some tidbit of Track philosophy?”
 

Xavi put his arm around my shoulder. It was gentle, and I’d grown used to it, since it’d become a habit of his while we sat. It was how he let me cry Polo out of my system. In the crook between his arm and his chest, he let me sob and soak in the sadness, but he never let me plant my feet and stop moving. Two weeks turned into four and four weeks grew into months. Time kept growing on top of itself so that my heart hardened against the memory, and Xavi pulled me out of the shell of sadness.
 

We sat on a boulder with our feet soaking in the river. The water was icy. The sun was getting its last chance to be hot, and the water soothed the burning feeling feet get from walking too much.
 

My toes, in the water, looked dirty and bulbous. They looked hardened. Tough. Amazing.
 

“I lost someone once. Not to death, but it hurt just the same,” he whispered. “When I first came to the tracks, she scooped me up like some bauble. She collected stowaways like treasures. She taught me how to be a Vagabond…” Jealousy tugged at my core, even though I knew I had no right to it. Imagining Xavi being intimate with this girl who no longer existed in his world was too much, and I closed my eyes. “When she left, it was sudden. No goodbyes. No explanations. One night, we came across another group, and this guy with a beard caught her attention. I hated him instantly, because he could sprout facial hair, and I couldn’t. She never came into the tent that night, and, in the morning, they were both gone.”

His story grew hollow, like a stomach that had been too long empty. Like sadness was hungry and wanted to bring him back in to devour his insides. I didn’t want to watch him retreat into that place, because it was a place I was still trapped in. If he followed me there, there’d be no one to pull either of us out.
 

I didn’t know how to stop his story, so I leaned in and kissed him. It was soft this time. Different. It was the first of many, and somehow we both knew it, so we let it stay sweet.
 

He kept his hands in safe places after that, like around my waist or in my hair. I learned all the secrets our mouths could know and never say. When we held hands, I explored the space of skin between his pointer finger and thumb by rubbing circles into it with my fingers. There was so much to learn about desire, and I never knew what I was doing.
 

I thought he was being patient with me— accepting I wasn’t ready for more. I thought he understood— that is, until we met Legs a few months after that.

That’s how I learned that boys are never as patient as they seem to be.
 

I didn’t answer him. He didn’t pry.
 

We waited for the train to become louder and louder. The rumble grew like wind before a storm, kicking up sound waves in my ear. Before we knew it, the engine passed and the graffiti coated cars zipped by. I loved the moveable art. I knew the Republic worked hard to repaint them, but Vagabonds always found a way to tag their stories everywhere they went.
 

“This is crazy!”

“No crazier than anything else you’ve ever done out here,” Xavi shook the spray paint. He’d lifted a red and a silver from the hardware store that day, and he leaned over the railing of the open car. “The trick is to paint upside down, so that it appears right side up to those who see it… and, luckily, we’re going slow enough that the wind won’t blow it back in my face.” He shook the canister again so that the ball inside mixed the paint and made a metallic melody.
   

He painted the reds first, then outlined them in silver, while I held onto his feet. I could only feel the rumble of movement between my toes, like every ounce of me was electricity in that moment. The scahhh-schahhhh of the paint as it escaped the bottle was a sigh of relief and despair. It was the sound he made when I made him stop kissing me because his body would be so tight against mine that I wasn’t sure where one of us began and the other ended. It was the sigh he got when our hearts burnt too hot. Even thinking of it made mine beat fast.
 

When he was done, he stood up and grinned. “Get up here!”

So I climbed on the bar that let my body rise up above the top and gripped the lid on the open-topped car. He wrapped his body behind me, and I adjusted my beanie so that my hair didn’t whip his face to shreds.
 

When I looked down, red and silvers spelled out the math I’d been trying to formulate in my head since I’d met him.
 

Xavi+Niko=Epic

It was loopy and fat and bold in ways normal handwriting was not. Normal handwriting was bulimic and thin, written in boring grays and blacks against pale whites. This was color blooming on rust, big and loud and unavoidable.
 

I stared at it for what felt like forever, contemplating all the other things we could equal if we could figure out how to do the math just right. I moved my face so that his lips could reach mine, and we kissed against the wind, against the train, and against the blurring world.
 

Chapter Ten

I threw my pack in first, since sometimes it was an easier risk when the boxcar didn’t have an easy access ladder or was going too fast. I had to hope no one was already in the boxcar ready to steal my pack and push me out. I gripped my hands along the door while I swung my legs up into the open space, and I was in. My eyes adjusted as Flea followed suit. Mr. Perfect never needed much coaching. He just watched and mimicked. His Instructors at Institute must have loved him.
 

Questions kept itching at me. Why would he leave a life of so much privilege? He hinted at it too often not to have been someone important. He was close to Celebrity status, and to throw all of that away was an absurd waste, not just for him, but for the Republic. I wondered what it was that sent him spiraling out? Did he commit some type of treason before blowing up the train? Did he get labeled as a genetic dead-end and want to run from the shame of it? What was I not seeing about him?

The box was empty. No soldiers. No Vagabonds. We leaned against the wall that faced the door and watched the world slide by. The train was slow and steady, but after a few hours, it began to chug along faster. Sometimes heavier trains conserved energy that way, or they slowed to allow another train on the line to get a head start rather than be trapped behind them. This one was probably reading a dot on a screen that foretold of some nearby future stuck behind another train.
 

Lucky for us, it gave us an opportunity to get on.
 

“I made out with a conductor once.” Celeste confessed.
 

“What’s making out?”
 

Her laughter laced with the answer. “Kissing. A lot.”
 

The thought of kissing made me cringe. I’d seen it several times by then. Of course, in the Colonies, it was different. Any more than small pecks was excessive and shameful. On the Tracks, what I’d seen of this “making out” business looked sloppy and awkward, like people were trying to eat each other’s faces off. Not to mention the spit and slobber. I had to look away and try not to be disgusted by the sounds and sights of it.
 

It made me wonder if the moment under the canopy with Xavi would have been like all the things I’d seen around campfire after campfire. That thought made me shudder. I couldn’t help but imagine it, over and over again in my head. With Xavi, it didn’t seem like it’d be that gross. If only Randolf hadn’t—

I always stopped at that thought. I couldn’t imagine a life that did not have Randolf in it. Even it it was such a short time, he taught me so much about accepting my new life. I was thankful he interrupted and stuck with us for as long as he did.
 

Celeste always talked about these things openly, and I started blushing less and less as I grew used to her bluntness. I began to love the stories, no matter how uncomfortable they made me. “How did you meet the conductor?”
 

She winked. “He’s a spy for the Rebels. There’s a secret sign they use in the lighting of the wheels. At the time, every eighth car blacked out the light on the third wheel. Engineers can control lighting from the control panels, and they’d let us know if it was clear of Militia. By the way, never get on a freight that’s completely lit. That always means trouble. “

“How do we know the Militia hasn’t figure out this signal to use against us.”
 

Celeste always knew things about spies and secrets and tricks. She hinted that she knew even more than that, but never revealed anything by accident. Her stories were always calculated, but it didn’t make me like them any less. “We don’t know. Nothing is ever certain here. For now, it works. One day, it won’t. Rebels always learn the hard way when things change, but they adapt, just like all Vagabonds do. Every time the Republic thinks they’ve defeated the Rebels, they find a different way to survive.”

I nodded. Too many tricks of the Tracks were fleeting. We had to race discovery and jump ahead of the Republic before they caught us.
 

“He was a cutie, this one. His partner was driving, and he scaled a few cars back to see if he could get any news. I could tell he’d only ever kissed his partner. I wonder if he ever told her what he did? Of if he ever tried to kiss her like that?” Celeste laughed at the thought.
 

“She may not have appreciated it,” I sniffed. I imagined a proper Colonial woman bearing the indignity of all that slobber.
 

“You’d be surprised, puppet. Anyways, he told me that most conductors like imagining they are the only ones that exist in the world. If another train is blocking their view, it’s hard to imagine that. So, they pay attention to locations. Timing is everything in this life, and conductors know how to manipulate it. In a way, they participate in their own form of rebellion against time and space. Although they are chained to the tracks, they are not chained to a single Colony. They see everything. They savor every view along the tracks and embrace the peace that a change of scenery offers. All this change starts to get to them, and they see too much not to start questioning.” Celeste always got pensive when she spoke of change and rebellion, like she found answers to her own questions in those musings. It always felt as if she fell just short of a perfect truth, and it tormented her. “So many conductors become sympathetic to us, you know. They start to connect the dots. If the Republic was smart, they’d start limiting the years of service conductors serve to cut off the questions before they form.”
 

“His name was Xavi,” I whispered. We’d been quiet for some time, just watching. Flea was good like that. He read the moments of when to push and when not to. I looked down at my feet. I hadn’t even noticed how close we were sitting until I saw my boot dwarfed by his. Our laces looped in brown criss-crosses, one on top of the other.
 

It’d taken months upon months not to be afraid of sitting this close to Xavi, but Flea was already braver than me. His breathing matched mine, slow and steady. I was getting used to him too. I’d already learned all the paces of his breathing. The way the speed of intake and exhale changed depending on the situation. It was like learning a new song by putting it on repeat until the words were clear and stained on the memory.
 

“I’m sorry he left you. That must have been hard.” He actually sounded angry for me. It wasn’t a reaction I expected. The truth was, I hadn’t even thought to be angry at Xavi. I wanted to try anger on for size, but I would feel too guilty with the knowledge that Legs was dead. Being angry at the dead was useless. “You don’t have to call me Flea anymore, by the way. My friends call me Ono.”
 

“We’re friends?”

“I hope so.”
 

I nodded. Ono. I wondered what it was short for, because it was too short to be a Republic name. I rolled the three letters in my head and tried to pair it to a name, but none came forward. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Ono. My friends call me Knucs.” I laughed. It was a strange laugh, because in that name, there was a new truth. I only had one friend at the moment. Flea. Ono. Whatever his real name was. He was the only person that mattered for the present. I was learning that the way people mattered was transitional. For the moment, he was my only friend, but that didn’t mean he’d be my only friend forever. People kept coming and going, and what they were to me was always different from what they were to others. Flea’s real name didn’t matter much, because to me, he was the nuisance who became a friend.
 

I liked the name Knucs. It took me one step farther from my past. I didn’t want to remember that I had another life before the one I was currently living. I wanted to wear this new name because my old one no longer fit me. I was growing tough. I could hit the world back when it struck at me. I was stronger now than I’d ever been before, and this name was going to be the one I grew into… the way Polo grew into his.