Free Summer Days and Summer Nights by Stephanie Perkins Page B

math.”
    Hope laughs. Travis says, “ Best and math, used in the same sentence … You’ve lost me.” Mimi runs her hand along her tattoo and smiles.
    â€œIt’s the most personal. It relates to our bodies.” I stand up and hold my arms out. “Symmetry. Proportion. You guys know that Leonardo da Vinci drawing, where the man stands like this, and then you also see his limbs like this?” I widen my stance and raise my arms higher.
    â€œYeah, the naked dude,” Travis says.
    â€œI’m pretty sure most of his dudes were naked,” Mimi says.
    â€œBut this one has a circle around him, right?” Hope asks.
    â€œYes! And a square, too. That drawing is all about geometry. And then there’s all this other natural stuff—like when you throw a rock into water, and the ripples spread out, getting bigger and bigger? And the veins on a leaf. And the pattern of scales on fish. The way you can look at a tree trunk and see how it’s grown. Beehives! Succulents!”
    â€œWhat I don’t get,” Travis says, “is why they don’t teach us that stuff. It’s like they want us to fail.”
    â€œWhat I don’t get,” I say, “is that I signed up to take geometry because I thought it would be completely familiar and mundane, but I ended up here instead.”
    â€œThat sounds like a compliment,” Mimi says.
    â€œIt is.” I sit down again and kiss her, quick and light, right at the corner of her mouth.
    â€œLooks like some new dynamics have been established,” Travis says, raising his eyebrows. “When we get back, I’m gonna go ahead and move my sleeping bag back into Hope’s tent. Last night was fucking freezing .”
    *   *   *
    Night is falling again. Hope comes back from her car with a ukulele. Travis disappears into the brush and returns with two fistfuls of leaves.
    â€œI’m making tea,” he says. “A very special blend. Mint and some other stuff.”
    â€œIs it going to kill us?” Mimi asks.
    â€œOh, come on ,” he says. “Nobody has ever died from tea.”
    I don’t take a single sip, but it warms my hands as the air grows cooler.
    â€œIn honor of you, Flora, I’m singing exclusively love songs tonight,” Hope says.
    Mimi heats up minestrone over the campfire and divides it among four bowls. Every move she makes is enchanting. A drop of soup splashes on her thumb, and she sucks it off. She hands me a bowl, and our fingers touch.
    She doesn’t say much, but she’s still telling me things. She’s saying that yes, there are Januarys, and the terrible things people do to each other when they are no longer in love. She’s telling me that the end of love is a fine phrase to ponder, but it’s a poor choice for a tattoo. Because just as there are Post-its and red condominium doors, there are also tree branches and coastlines. There are sleeping bags and tents and pinpricks of stars, there are people like her, there is the person I’m becoming.
    I’m going to have to drive home tomorrow. Maybe my parents will yell at me for going away like this. Maybe they’ll smile and ask if it was fun. Either way will hurt.
    In two weeks, our house will be empty. And then the stagers will descend with the trucks full of no one’s furniture and art and try to make it look like a different family lived there, an imaginary family with no photographs or mail or food in their refrigerator. In real life, we were sometimes messy. We didn’t always do the dishes. We left pots soaking. We let the papers pile up, and left too many pairs of shoes by the door, and didn’t vacuum as much as we should have.
    We were not always happy, but we were always us.
    Tomorrow I’ll walk in and we won’t be us anymore, we’ll be different people; we won’t belong in the way we did before. I don’t know what to do with that yet,