"Breaking the Rules"

I'll have to go back to get a better picture of this. But this is where a nearby creek continues into the rest of the town's drainage system. The cement walls at the entrance to the tunnel are covered with graffiti.

What makes me nervous isn't the idea that Leese has brought me down here only two days after we met; it isn't even the sound of the cans rattling against each other in her backpack. It's the sight of her littering. Two bags of chips and a package of trail mix have already been emptied into her stomach; the wrappers have fluttered to the ground like dead leaves; and I see them and wonder what kind of person I've cast my dice with. I bend and swing around her, holding on to the trees that line the creekside slope as if I'm looking for support up a mountain instead of picking up trash. When we get close, though, I feel those strange channels open up between us, and I remember why we were pulled toward each other, and what made us decide to try this.

"Aimee. Don't worry about those yet," she says, tapping my shoulder. "You should be eating something. I don't want you to get sick."

"I don't think I can eat." I tilt my head to try to see her watch. It's neon pink plastic, a fine accessory for someone trying to avoid being noticed. Again, I wonder. "How much longer until sunset?"

She brings her wrist close to her face. "Just a few minutes more."

"Stupid rules," I say.

Leese shrugs. "Some rules are better than others. Some are okay to break." I turn my body toward her, and it's like all of a sudden I've made a discovery, because she's kissing me, and it makes complete sense. It's as if I'm a scientist (oh my god did I really just think that how am I getting kissed) and I've just discovered some concept essential to how the world works, like photosynthesis. We're so bright that I imagine everybody on the planet is going to see us. I can't tell how much of this is something I feel because this is the first time I've been kissed.

"You really think there's a rule against us kissing?" I ask when we break away. "Or was that just your bad pick-up line?"

Leese smiles. "It's that I'm sure there's some rule against kissing next to a drainage pipe." She winks at me and reaches up for a nearby branch, which she grasps as if she's swinging from monkey bars as she begins to walk toward the tunnel. "Sunset," she says over her shoulder. "Start picking up the wrappers."

I stare at her. "Wait, all of that, and now you're going to leave me on garbage detail?"

"You're the decoy. If anyone comes looking. You're the concerned teenager doing her part for the environment." Leese has made it to the mouth of the runoff pipe and is pressing herself against the cement walls of its exterior, making sure she's hard to see from the road above, not that anyone has turned this way in a while. "Beats what I have to do," she says, taking a can of spray paint out of her bag.

It's a lazy Sunday evening, and most of the people who live in this subdivision are at home, preparing for dinner and contemplating the week ahead, except that I'm here, collecting junk from the undergrowth near the creek, and Leese is a few feet away, doing some graffiti work on an entrance to the town's sewer system. I try not to look at her, try to pretend she's not there, but it's hard. I keep catching sight of her twirling the cans, and I imagine her in the Old West with a pair of revolvers she keeps holstered on her hips.

"How's it going?" I ask after I pick up the last wrapper I see.

Two short blasts of air, and then I hear her laugh. "It's good," she says. "Quick."

I stuff the wrappers in my pocket and run to her across the low part of the slope, over twigs and shallow water. I arrive at her side and see adorning the cement the symbol we've spent the past two days studying. I take her hand.

"You ready?" Leese asks.

I give her hand a squeeze. "Probably not," I say, grabbing hold of a tree.

We recite the words we learned, the language scratching our throats as it climbs its way out of us. We each place a palm on the wet paint. A light appears in the drainage pipe as if from a door that just opened. Faster than anything, all the rules to explain the world that I thought I learned when Leese kissed me suddenly break and give way, just like the branches to which we've been clinging.