The Summer I Learned to Fly by Dana Reinhardt

bad behavior.
    “I’m new to the area,” he said. “I moved here from down south a while back.”
    “Down south like Alabama?” We’d studied the Montgomery bus boycott in history that year, and it had entered my consciousness in a way I couldn’t shake.
    He laughed. “Down south like Los Angeles.”
    L.A. I’d never been, but I knew from movies and TV shows that everything, all those mansions and palm trees and swimming pools, all of it, was always bathed in blinding white light. How could someone ever go from there to here?
    “So where are you living?”
    “For now we’re staying with some friends of my dad’s, but when he finds a job we’ll get a place of our own. A bachelor pad, he likes to say.”
    I’d told him about my father when I explained my name to him in the alley, but he didn’t offer information about an absent mother, so I guessed it was something he wasn’t eager to talk about.
    I picked a blade of grass at the root. My father had taught my mother to whistle on a blade of grass, and she’d passed the trick on to me. I couldn’t pull it off just then, so I tossed it away.
    “Why would you ever come here?”
    I’d always felt like I lived at a stop somewhere on the roadto where life really happened. You didn’t come here; you left here.
    Sure, there was Swoozie, who’d moved from Wisconsin, but by her own admission real cities were too much for her. I always pictured Swoozie’s beat-up Porsche running out of gas on Highway One, getting a tow to the Mobil station on the corner of Euclid and Fourth. I could see her getting out of her car, taking a look around, and deciding there were worse places to start over.
    “Well, like I said, we have friends with a spare room.” He didn’t say this rudely, but he said it with an emphasized period, signaling the end of this part of our conversation.
    “I’m almost fourteen,” I blurted out, and immediately felt stupid. For one thing, my birthday was in January, so I was thirteen and a half, and everyone knows that only someone insecure about her age rounds up to the next year.
    Also, he hadn’t asked. So he might have wondered why I’d blurted out this random fact about myself. It could have been worse. I could have said My favorite color is magenta . But I didn’t care about his favorite color. I cared about how old he was.
    “Well, happy almost-birthday.”
    “Thanks.”
    “You’re welcome. And thanks for coming all the way up here.” He paused. “You’re cool, Robin.”
    Once Chris Tanner told Georgia she was hot while he walked by her in the hall at school. Georgia told us at lunch. And she told us again the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.
    I’d thought, What’s the big deal?
    But now I knew.
    Emmett Crane said I was cool, and had Georgia and Beatrice and Janice not been half a world away, I’d have told them. Over and over and over.
    “Thanks,” I said.
    “By the way,” he added, “don’t be in any hurry to turn fourteen. Believe me, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
    From Dad’s Book of Lists, third on the list of Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was a Teenager: it gets easier .
    Sometimes Dad’s brevity was crazy-making. Would it have killed him to write more? What gets easier? Riding a bike? Learning a foreign language? Understanding the opposite sex?
    When I read this for the first time I found it totally perplexing. Then I moved on and forgot it. But now these words found their way back to me, right at the moment when words were so hard to come by.
    “I think it’s supposed to get easier,” I said. “So maybe fifteen will be better?”
    He shrugged. “I hope you’re right.”
    We’d finished everything. Every last scrap of Emmentaler and bread and tart. I peered in my bag anyway, hoping for something to extend our picnic, and I spied a flash of red. Hawaii’s favorite candy bar. I’d picked it up the day before at Fireside Liquor and forgotten all about it.
    I held it