Excerpt: Things Between

A year should have been plenty of time to get over Miu, but when I saw her again, all I could think of was those legs.

Holy. Hell.

Look, I’m not some sex-crazed maniac who goes through life led by my dick or anything, but I’m a guy and I’m human, so I’m not immune to stuff like that either. So, while I should have been playing it cool, showing her just how much I’ve matured since she dumped me on my ass (I mean, since we broke up due to mutual, irreconcilable differences), I ended up just standing there stammering and staring until Travis, the kid I’ve been mentoring with all my newfound wisdom, kicked me in the back of the ankle and brought me to my senses.

We were at this park, the one across from the New Art Theatre. It used to be kind of run-down, with weeds growing through cracks in the basketball court and broken glass littering the empty fountain, but they poured all sorts of money into it when they started their big urban renewal project, the one that was supposed to make downtown into some sort of high rent shopping and entertainment mecca. They tore out the basketball court completely to make way for this sculpture garden of a skate park. “Beauty meets function,” was what the mayor crowed in the newspaper. Where “beauty” was a bunch of concrete ramps with mosaics around the outside and “function” was corralling all the troublesome teenagers in one place.

I hadn’t been there since they fixed it up. It was a place where Miu and I used to go sometimes and, though I wasn’t actively avoiding those places, I’d gotten in the habit of not going to them. No sense picking at scabs, you know? Anyway, by the time Travis suggested going to the new skate park, I wasn’t really thinking about it as a place I should stay away from because I might run into my ex-girlfriend there. It seemed like a good idea, actually, the kind of wholesome activity they encouraged us to do with our troubled protégés.

Travis saw her first. He recognized her right away, even though he’d never met her, just seen pictures of the two of us together. She’s memorable like that. Given her name, people always think she’s Japanese. She’s not, but she was born there and sometimes I wonder if the place didn’t get into her blood those three months before her family moved back to Illinois. She’s got this straight, shiny hair so dark it’s almost black and she’s petite in that birdlike way Asian women sometimes are, but she’s also got porcelain pale skin, huge green eyes, and those legs that go on and on like a prairie highway on a summer afternoon. There’s something else kind of Japanese about her too. Sometimes, it seems like she’s not quite grounded in the world. I don’t watch a ton of anime, but I’ve seen enough to understand that Miu has always kind of floated between worlds. She told me her name means “beautiful feather” and that’s exactly what she’s like. She kind of drifts back and forth, moved by the slightest breeze.