I don’t disagree with her. But I don’t tell her why I’m relaxed. Why I’m happy. Her energy has always had that effect on me. She energizes me but in a completely calming way, like lying out in the sun, feeling your insides heat up, all the way to your core.
“You must be happy you played so well this season,” Dylan guesses. “I heard you say you got VIP?”
“MVP, Dylan,” I correct her.
“Right. Or maybe it’s because of Rachel?” she suggests.
I lock eyes with her and Guilt stomps hard on my chest and it makes my shoulders tense. He must wear steel-plated boots. But I ignore his persistent kick. Rachel is the only wall I have left. It’s my only line of defense right now.
“It’s something else,” I admit. “I’m starting to get why you like traveling so much.”
“Why’s that?” she asks.
“It’s just freeing. Going to a brand new place where no one knows you. You get a fresh start. It’s like you purge your old life and you’re new again. You get to reinvent yourself.”
She nods. “Everyone needs to do it. People get so domesticated.”
“That’s because we’re designed to domesticate,” I point out. “We’re not wild animals. We have this whole evolutionary gap with apes for a reason.”
Dylan gives me an unbelieving stare. “But maybe we are wild,” she says. “I think deep down, in the oldest part of our reptilian brains, we still have that instinct in us. I think we’re meant to be wild, at least for a while.”
She makes a good point.
“Don’t you ever feel like you’re running away, when you’re leaving all the time, when you never stay in one place for very long?” I ask her.
“No. I’m not running away,” she says. “I’m just on my own path. It’s hard to explain because it’s uncharted. It isn’t paved out and marked with street routes. It’s invisible to everybody but me. I think that’s the best part about it.”
I listen to her talk and her words slide into places inside of me. They fill empty spaces and cracks like caulking fills holes and I’m nodding in agreement.
“Moving to New Mexico was the best thing I ever could have done,” I tell her. “And I get to leave every summer to play baseball. It’s almost too easy. I feel like I’m cheating. I get to leave all my problems behind, shove them in a closet and forget about them.”
“It gets old though,” she says and finishes her last bite of pancakes. “And your problems always resurface, no matter how deep you bury them.” I’m surprised to hear this.
“That doesn’t sound like White Fang talk.”
She shrugs. “The last time I was home, I spent a couple of hours just walking around my house. I was enamored with our basement. My parents have a storage room with all these boxes of decorations labeled for every holiday. They’re in neat stacks piled all the way to the ceiling. It made me jealous.” She sets her elbow on the table and rests her chin in her hand. Her eyes turn thoughtful. “I wonder what that would be like,” she says.
My forehead creases. “To have a holiday decoration box?”
She laughs. “To have some consistency. Rituals. Traditions. My only tradition is to be nontraditional.”
I smile and swipe the last smudge of syrup off my plate with a piece of toast.
“After a while it’s nice to be around people that get you,” she says. “Starting over all the time, making new friends, it gets exhausting. When nobody knows you it’s hard to even know yourself.”
I read into all the things she’s not saying. Is Dylan considering settling down?
“Do you think you’ll ever go back to college?” I ask.
“I went to a class this spring,” she tells me. “I was living in Minneapolis, and one of my friends was a student, so I went with her to experience this whole ‘college phenomenon’ everybody talks about.”
“And?” I ask.
“They were all introductory courses,” Dylan says. “Intro to biology or intro to drawing. I watched people study in coffee shops, quizzing each other with note cards, memorizing words that mean nothing to them. Real life isn’t like that. You don’t get ABCD options. You can’t fill in the blanks of your life. It’s maddening if you think about it. Life doesn’t start out easy and eventually get harder. Life asks really hard things of you, right away. That’s what I love about it. Life’s the best teacher.”
“So what are you going to do next?” I ask.
She lifts her shoulders. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”