Sideswiped, page 23
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I’m teaching English to sixty children who sit on a dirt floor. After nearly two months I’m squeezing the dregs from my shampoo bottle and have run dangerously low on tampons. Time to make a resupply trip to Lilongwe, the Malawian capital city. After a bumpy three-hour ride in a flatbed truck, I reach the Happy Days Hotel, a concrete guesthouse and agreed upon flop pad for Peace Corps volunteers in from the field.
This is the place where us wide-eyed newbies can rub shoulders with the more experienced crowd, those who’ve stuck it one, two, or even three years. These guys have a steely end-of-the horizon stare and the ability to discuss worms burrowing from their eyeball without a shudder.
In fact, seems you don’t get respect in the Peace Corps until worms emerge from somewhere in your body. The crazier the better.
Guess there’s no surprise the in-country volunteer dropout rate is close to one in two.
I’m determined to stick it out, even if it means coating myself with hand sanitizer and ordering in a self-help library. I love my students’ exuberance and my work site right near beautiful Lake Malawi. Everything here is totally different. The food. The language. The clothing. The smells.
Nothing to trigger painful memories.
No one is around when I drop my bags in the sparse hostel room. I unpack my mosquito net and check and recheck for holes. That’s when I hear the moans coming from next door. I’m not alone after all. Lilongwe is the place for volunteer hookups—people are determined to make Happy Days live up to its bold promise. The bed hopping reaches epidemic proportions.
I do my sleeping alone. Turns out I’m remarkably gifted at the cold shoulder. Guess I learned from a master.
I trudge to the Peace Corps head office and guys look right through me. Street heckling, a usual part of my day-to-day at home, is unknown here. No one tells me to “smile” or calls me “beautiful.” I’ve lost fifteen pounds since arriving and the local menfolk prefer more voluptuous women.
I stride past the compounds; high walls lined with broken glass bottles surround fancy houses, and armed guards linger out front. A little boy in a hot-pink shirt that hits near his ankles, bedazzled with the word DIVA, chases after me. Western clothing donations are sent here from all around the world. It’s not unusual to see a guy squeeze into a tummy-revealing Little Mermaid halter or a teenage boy fronting tough in a Barbie tee.
“Mzungu!” cries the boy. “Mzungu!”
White person.
The word is a soundtrack to my day.
Outsider.
I close my eyes for a second and see Bran’s face, right there, always with me.
Time is supposed to heal, but in this case, I’m not sure what remains under my scar tissue. I scan my body, starting at my scalp. So far I’m coping okay. I stopped taking medication before leaving because mental illness disqualifies you from fieldwork. No one did any hard-core background check. This is the Peace Corps, not the FBI. I did manage to avoid getting prescribed Lariam for an antimalarial—heard that drug can totally mess with your head.
All I can do is hope for the best. For me.
For him.
I walk into the Peace Corps office and the receptionist calls out, “Natalia! Mail for you.”
Sunny and Beth must have sent another care package.
An envelope is on the counter. For a second I wonder if it’s from Mom. Maybe she’s decided to stop being MIA at last. I lift the note and at the sight of the familiar block letters, my stomach pays a hasty visit to my ankles. The stamp is from New Zealand and the date is over a month old.
By the time I make it to a chair, my hands are shaking so hard I can barely tear the paper.
Talia—
I hope the fact that you are reading and not burning this letter is a positive sign. This is old-fashioned but I don’t have a choice. Your UCSC e-mail must have been deleted after you graduated. Luck’s on my side today—there’s a documentary crew visiting the ship with a reconnaissance helicopter. They say they’ll mail this letter for me but I’ve got two minutes to write. Here goes nothing.
I am so fucking sorry.
Do you still care? I do. I made you a promise to hold on. This is me holding, Talia, to the chance you’ll give us another go. I confused holding with death grip. You were right. I lacked faith, freaked out that if you left, your love would vanish.
But I can’t live a life expecting disappointment or fearing ghosts.
I get who you are—to your bones—and the simple fact this crazy-ass world can hold such an amazing person within its gravitational pull should be more than enough to give me confidence.
You had every right to want to claim your own life and independence. I should have been the guy to love and support you. I wasn’t but will never make that mistake again.
They’re saying I have to stop writing. Fuck, there’s still so much to say. I talk to you all the time in my head. Do you ever hear?
I have no clue what the next steps are, but there’s got to be a way. So here’s the million-dollar question. Will you give us another chance? Let me prove I can love you no matter the distance. You are worth it. You are worth everything.
I don’t know how long I stare at his hastily scribbled words. He’d pressed on the paper so hard the pen tore through in a few areas. I close my eyes and tears cascade over my cheeks. Bran included an e-mail address for the ship under his scrawled signature.
It takes the length of a heartbeat to arrive at my decision. After four deep breaths, I’m moving to the computer room. I know what I want to say, what I’ve imagined saying a thousand times, but here in the actual moment…
Please let me make the right choice.
Because this is the scariest thing I’ve ever done.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Bran
February
I scan the horizon from the ship’s bridge—blue, white, sea, ice.
There are times my eyes ache for a richer color palette. Fern greens. Ripe lemons. Lavender stalks. The sweet-tea brown of a pretty girl’s eyes.
After Talia left, I dropped out of honors and joined the Alliance. She was right, as usual. I needed this, wasn’t ready to settle into the academic track. I have too much anger inside me. This work helps to channel the emotion into something productive, like activism, where injustice, greed, and rash destruction are my targets.
Every day is full with the right sort of mission, defending the fragile marine environment. We are trolling for the commercial whaling fleet at present. So far no luck but there’s a general feeling on board that we are closing in and everyone’s buzzing from the tension. These days down south are grueling but the work’s good—important. As crew, I keep fit and focused from rigorous ship maintenance. Nights, though, when it’s only me and my head—those are a different story. Can she feel me? Does she know I always think about her?
“How’s it?” Right Hook, the first mate, strolls in, the same build and temperament as a water buffalo. He’s South African, and a temperamental bastard, but guess I don’t have much cause to complain.
“Going well.” As a lowly deckhand, he’s allowed to shuffle me off with a menial task.
“Am I supposed to tell you something?” He squints in my direction.
“Don’t know, are you?”
“Oh, right.” He nods, relieved to have located the errant thought. “An e-mail came in for you on the general inbox.”
I fight the urge to climb the ceiling. “Mail, for me?”
“Yes, Princess. Maybe it’s an invitation to the big ball.” Right Hook raises a pair of binoculars to his eyes and turns away. “Com-Ops taped it to your door.”
There are two likely outcomes. Dad is relapsed.
Or it’s her.
She’s made a decision.
Since hitting the Antarctic coast, I’ve watched countless glaciers calve. The same ice sheets I’d studied so abstractly now rise in all their white-walled magnificence and when they break, there’s a thunderous reverberation you feel in your molars.
The same phenomenon is happening inside my brain.
“Who sent it?”
Right Hook snaps his chewing gum. “Some girl. Your fan club was moping below. Don’t know what everyone sees in your skinny ass.”
“Where—”
“The e-mail is taped to your berth’s door as per standard procedure.”
I’m out before he can do something totally within character like order me to go swab a deck or inspect the produce in the galley for mold.
“Please, please, please.” I’m praying. The knowledge nearly slams me from my feet. Never, not even when I was strapped into a fucking jet, minutes from crashing into the Indian Ocean, have I prayed.
Sure enough, a printout is folded and taped to the center of my door.
“Courage,” I mutter, and peel away the tape.
Do I have the guts to unfold the message? My breath stutters like a car running on its last fumes. Right now the possibilities are infinite but any moment my dreams might detonate. Bloody hell, this could be a paper hand grenade.
We had stood at an abyss. Talia offered to build a bridge but instead I jumped into the blackness. I fell and fell until I realized that with this girl, failure’s never an option. At last I bottomed out and discovered the one thing I never expected.
Hope.
It’s a thin little sprout—spindly as shit—but alive, sending roots into my soul’s bleak lunarscape.
I open the door to the dormitory and roll into my bunk, not trusting my legs.
“Please, Talia,” I whisper. “I made so many mistakes. Let me put us right.”
I must have opened the note the same moment as a solar flare or a gamma ray burst. Maybe the earth shifted magnetic poles. I’m flat on my back, mind sailing beyond time and space. When I return to my body, I reread the note. And once more for good measure.
Will you give us another chance? I’d asked, expecting nothing and everything.
Will you give us another chance? I’d asked, when I’d lost the right to make requests.
Will you give us another chance? I’d asked, because when you truly love someone to the dirtiest, dustiest bits of their soul, you need to believe in the impossible.
Will you give us another chance?
My laugh is also a sob. I press the paper to my face and kiss the most precious fucking word in the English language.
“Yes.”
About the Author
Lia Riley writes New Adult romance. After studying at the University of Montana–Missoula, she scoured the world armed only with a backpack, overconfidence, and a terrible sense of direction. She counts shooting vodka with a Ukrainian mechanic in Antarctica, sipping yerba maté with gauchos in Chile, and swilling Fourex with station hands in outback Australia among her accomplishments.
A British literature fanatic at heart, Lia considers Mr. Darcy and Edward Rochester her fictional boyfriends. Her very patient husband doesn’t mind. Much. When not torturing heroes (because, c’mon, who doesn’t love a good tortured hero?), Lia herds unruly chickens, camps, beachcombs, daydreams about as-yet-unwritten books, wades through a mile-high TBR pile, and schemes yet another trip. She and her family live mostly in Northern California.
LOVE IS UNCHARTED TERRITORY
See the next page for a preview of the third book in the OFF THE MAP trilogy
INSIDE OUT
Chapter One
Talia
“Mzungu!” The village kids can’t get enough of daring each other to spy through my mud hut’s single window. “Azuuuuuuuuuuungu.”
Mzungu means “white person” in Chichewa, Malawi’s national language. Since I arrived in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer, the word follows me throughout the day. It’s taken the last three months in-country not to cringe at the term.
“Hey, Mzungu!”
I uncurl from child’s pose, push off the straw mat, and wince. Yoga therapy isn’t doing much in the way of curing my abdominal crampage. Still, I manage to pop my head out the front door. “Boo!”
My barefoot students scream with delight and scamper toward the shoreline. A hazy plume rises over Lake Malawi as if the water were on fire. Weird. Is it going to rain? The wet season is long over, but this country is nothing if not unpredictable. I pass a hand over my brow. The noonday sun is warm, but not enough to justify this much sweat. My mouth fills with saliva.
Great, here we go again.
I drag my feet around the side of the hut to the outdoor latrine. Eighteen steps. Twenty at most. I make it just in time, thighs quivering from the effort, and get quietly sick for the fourth time today. What the hell do I have? I’m anal-retentive about using a water filter and iodine purification tablets. Still, there must have been a breach. Local families have taken turns hosting me for dinner since my arrival in a sweet, generous gesture. It doesn’t take an expert in cross-cultural communication to know it’s impolite to drill people on their household food preparation methods if you’re the guest of honor. No matter how teeth-clenchingly bad you want to do exactly that.
My stomach roils, painful to the point I moan out loud. What if parasitic worms hatch in my stomach or burrow through my liver?
I linger in the mango shade, brace my hips, and stretch my back. The cloud over the lake drifts closer. A trio of local women skirt my yard, swinging plastic utility buckets and handwoven baskets. Their lively chatter makes me miss my best friends, Sunny and Beth. I wonder what they’re up to? I’ve avoided their e-mails since Bran and I got back together.
To say my girls aren’t Bran’s biggest fans is a rather epic understatement. In December he morphed into the Big Bad Wolf, shredding my heart as easy as a straw house. After a cooling off period—literally in his case, as he joined a marine activist organization dedicated to preventing illegal whaling in the Antarctic—he wrote an apology and asked for an opportunity to set things right.
I’ve seen Bran at his worst, know his best, and somehow reconcile the two. I had no choice but to screw second chances and give the guy a third. Yes, he’s broody, unpredictable, and twists my brain like a pretzel. Nevertheless, despite his past wounds, he craves heart-peace as much, maybe even more, than me. When he finally mustered the guts to step up and show courage, there was no way I could say good-bye. I want to believe he has a chance for happiness.
I need to trust we both do.
The women notice my stare and slow their pace, brows knitting. I haven’t been at my site for long. The mandatory three-month volunteer training wrapped a few weeks ago and here I am. Home. Sort of. The village is quietly assessing me and I’m not exactly putting my best foot forward. This is my fifth day out sick from teaching. Hardly a confidence booster.
I raise a hand in forced cheer that the women return with shy waves. Once they’re safely out of sight, I double over. It takes serious diaphragmatic breathing before I can hobble back toward the refuge of my bed.
The doorway provides a welcome rest stop. Fussy stomach aside, I’m glad I came to Africa, right? I mean, in a great many ways, I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted—plus a guy who loves me and has come around to accepting that long-distance relationships don’t mean doom. I should be happy. Am I happy? Sometimes. And sometimes not.
When we get what we want, the dream becomes real, and real life is never perfect. I realize some of my naïveté in joining the Peace Corps. I think deep down inside I really believed something would shift in me, in my life, like I’d wake up one morning and it would be a whole new world. Instead, I’m still me. Just here, in Africa.
At the end of the day, I’m not saving the world. I’m teaching English as a second language in a rural school. While I adore my students and their sweet enthusiasm, the subject matter? Not as much as I thought.
I was having a twentysomething crisis when I applied to the program. The Peace Corps was one of many pipe dreams that floated around during my undergrad years, and in a desperate Kermit flail, I snatched the opportunity with two hands. My Facebook feed was littered with people from my major squeeing over cool jobs, internships, or graduate school admittance.
I wanted in on that success. The Peace Corps seemed like the perfect way to have an adventure while advancing my future. Just because an idea is good in theory doesn’t mean it works in practice. Now that I’m actually here, I can’t shake the sense that I’m an imposter, a fraud. I should like it more.
And I don’t.
God, whatever, Talia. Pack away the tiny violin.
I shuffle to the crate beside my bed. Inside are seven crinkled pieces of paper. I’ve printed each of Bran’s e-mails. Our communication has been infrequent. He’s not able to write much from the ship and I have to hitch to Lilongwe, the nation’s capital, to source reliable Internet access.
When we met in Australia during my exchange, I tried to convince myself he was a little adventure, some uncomplicated fun. The first time he touched me, my body went, Ah, okay, there we go. Bran revealed himself to be the exact puzzle piece I was missing. I ease onto my bed and peer at the first dog-eared page.
Hey darling,
Wait a second. My vision is wonky. I blink to refocus.
Hey darling,
What the hell? Words skitter in every direction. I try to give chase, but my eyes no longer operate in unison. Pain explodes behind my sockets like a hand grenade. I fold Bran’s note and tuck it inside my shirt, next to my heart as my stomach constricts again. Something is wrong. Really amiss this time.
At some point, almost everyone confronts debilitating sickness during their Peace Corps placement—practically a part of the job description. The other volunteers regard parasitic worms as an African red badge of courage. More power to them. Me? I’m content to play the coward.
Still, did I really have to downplay my symptoms at the health clinic this morning? What was I thinking? That I could live up to the myth of the badass Peace Corps volunteer? Guess I should have rethought the move because this feels different. Not good. Not good at all.
