alongside the highway with a man in a cowboy hat, and the eucalyptus brush and alternating green and brown hills. Isolated, crumbling houses dotted scrubby pastures. She’d lived in Indiana since birth, yet she’d never seen anything so rural and remote. The information packet had detailed that students would have email access for the first time in the exchange program’s history. In a place where people still used donkeys as transportation.
Outside the bus window, roadside stands glowed against the darkening sky. Racks of candy and bottled drinks flashed by. A shantytown of tarpapered plywood shacks clung to a patchy hillside. Hovels like she’d seen on evening news programs after war or natural disaster. Third World. Yellow sheets printed with the name “Bardahl” were pasted over some of the structures, the same motor oil logo emblazoned on race cars at the Indy 500. She glimpsed an orange fire with shadowed figures huddled around it between shacks. Nearby, a clothesline held what looked like dirty rags.
Pictures she’d seen of Guanajuato had featured colorful, crowded adobe houses, medieval architecture, churches with gilt altarpieces. Among this rubble and these huts, something close to terror clutched her.
Then they were pulling into town, through the subterranean highway, emerging into the winding, cobbled streets. The students unloaded their bags at Intercambio and shivered in the cool August night. Weak yellow lights in wire cages cast dim shadows on the side of the bus, the suitcases and duffels piled in a small mountain on the curbside. Inside the building, host families waited to claim their students. Teachers looked over the straggly, wilted crop of newcomers. Andrea Cunningham alternately hugged the staff and checked off names on her clipboard.
Conversation in Spanish, glances in Spanish, laughter and body language in Spanish. The building spoke Spanish, with its glowing fire safety signs: “Salida,” “Entrada.” Spain was in the building’s regal stucco and brick façade, in the moss that clung to shady stone.
In the parking lot, other American students shrieked a non-accented “Hola!” to their new Mexican parents and siblings. The noise bounced off the tile floor and brick walls. Host families held up signs, American names black-markered on flat pieces of cardboard.
Carey’s underarms began to perspire. She wasn’t ready to be claimed. She’d been on the plane and the bus for hours, almost a day, suspended in travel, barely thinking about the year to come. She hadn’t missed her parents. Not for the first leg of her journey, at least. Now she needed to be alone. She wasn’t going to cry, and if she was, no one would see her. There were, she knew from experience, many ways to hide. She stepped to the other side of the bus, blocking herself from the loud scene at the school.
Ben was there. She didn’t know his name yet. But she knew him. The curly brown hair, the green eyes that crinkled at the corners, the long arms that stretched skyward to catch pizza dough. She took a step backwards. She’d engineered this meeting, but hadn’t let herself believe it would actually occur. She and Nicole had made up nicknames. Pizza Guy, then The HPC, which stood for Hot Preppy Catholic, after spotting him in a Trinity Academy soccer sweatshirt. Here he stood, in the parking lot of her Mexican school, without pizza dough, without Trinity gear, fiddling with the metallic flashlight he’d unclipped from his belt. He belonged in the States, in her city. Months later, in her lowest moments, she would wish that he’d stayed there. She could not imagine Mexico without Ben. After, she had to recreate Indianapolis without him.
They’d never spoken. She’d imagined a thousand conversations and even acted out lines alone in the car, but never worked up the nerve. Now she straightened her black T-shirt and her spine and smiled.
“You don’t smoke, do you?” he asked. He stuffed the clip-on flashlight into his pocket and pulled a pop bottle from his green backpack.
“No,” she said. “Why?”
“You’re hiding. That’s a smoker kind of thing to do.”
She bristled, happily. He had tried to guess her. “You wanted to bum a cigarette, didn’t you?” she asked. This forwardness was a surprise. She tended to gravitate to a room’s corners.
“I don’t smoke,” he said.
“And I wasn’t hiding,” she said.
They both smiled. He nodded towards the school building and raised his thick eyebrows. “You getting a host family?”
Surely she would have spotted him if he had been on the bus. Did he recognize her? He spoke familiarly, watched her with interest, but that meant nothing. Everything.
“Of course I am,” she said, cartoon-character fast.
He uncapped the Coke and took a swig. Amused, he idly wiped his mouth.
“Hey,” she said, “can I have some of that?”
He passed the bottle without hesitation. She drank, silencing herself. They stood face to face, closer than they’d ever been. Sweat trickled into her bra. She had an urge to touch his hair. She wanted to mess it up.
But she didn’t. She wouldn’t have. Instead, the sugar rushed straight to her head, and she bent over quickly at the waist as the familiar black danced across her eyes. Sometimes she’d get a head rush after finishing a long run, six or seven miles. Her high school cross country coach claimed she’d get a cramp in her side from doubling over so soon after running. She never listened. She knew her body and what it needed.
When she leaned over, her head struck Ben’s forearm. Their first contact. Blood rushed to her cheeks, her forehead.
“It’s the altitude,” he said. “Happens to everybody. You okay?”
She assured him she was fine. She breathed for a moment before slowly rising, waiting for the black spots to fade. She heard the shuffling of footsteps before she connected them to a person. Mike Gibley, standing before her for the first time, wearing a tight t-shirt that showed off his muscles. Carey remembered her first impression: cocky, unimpressed with her. But she’d been wrong. He was like a bird, feathers puffed out to twice its size, preening. A different creature lived underneath, delicate-boned.
“Who’s she?”
Mike’s first words, both to her and about her. Ben and Mike had been inseparable for three years, when they were paired as roommates in their freshman dorm at Wisconsin. If Ben was singular, unmistakable, Mike was the opposite. He stood out in Mexico: blond hair, pasty mixed-European skin turned ruddy in the sun. A uniform of a T-shirt and khaki shorts, a ball cap. Back in the States, he would’ve been at home in a frat house, at a Dave Matthews concert, driving a used Chevy with the windows rolled down. Too common to notice. After Carey was shipped back to Indianapolis, she saw his plain, indistinguishable features in men on the street, at the store. The clear, close-set blue eyes; a straight nose with a pushed-in end; the small mouth, a thin little line, the slightly fuller lower lip. She searched instead for Ben, someone she could never find. Even when he stood directly in front of her, with Mike asking, Who’s she?
“Some girl,” Ben said. “She stole my Coke.”
Ben said some girl like a compliment. An event had happened, a ping, as if Ben were a violin and a string had snapped loose. Mike crossed his thick arms over his chest. I know Ben better than anyone, he would tell Carey months later, staking claim. He and Ben had studied at Intercambio the year before. At Wisconsin, they spent years sitting across from each other in the dining hall and the Lucky Pub, where the waitress would bring two tall mugs of beer before their coats were off.
The caffeine went to Carey’s head. She smiled at both men: Ben, a familiar stranger, his flicker of interest like a permission slip. Stocky, hesitant Mike, always waiting for her next move. For the first time, she could do what she wanted. Going away to Millerton College in Dayton was not independence, as it turned out, but disguised responsibility. A dorm, followed by a perpetually dirty apartment. Comfortable, safe, boring. But the plane and bus had somehow delivered her not to a destination, but to another version of herself.
Adrenaline signaled in her hair follicles. A light sweat beaded on the small of her back. In her memory of this moment, Ben and Mike were frozen like characters on