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Rodney's eyes sparked under the light from the night sky. "Me either. I want to move to Hawaii after graduation. Work for a fishing company, live by the beach. Then after I save up enough money, I'm going to get a boat of my own. I'm not having kids until I'm at least thirty. Maybe forty."
This made Molly laugh; men had no clue as to the amount of energy and work it took to birth and raise children, and while she, at seventeen, had no firsthand knowledge of it herself, she knew enough to know that it wasn't something a woman just casually put off until she was forty.
"That sounds like a big adventure," Molly said, letting her hands rest in her lap as they sat there together. "I'm not sure about the boat thing, though. I'm afraid of...a lot." These words surprised her as they came out of her own mouth; Molly didn'tfeellike she was especially fearful, but as she said this, she knew it was true.
"Like what?"
"Like open water and small spaces and loneliness and danger," Molly said, ticking them all off quickly. "What if we were on a boat and there was a storm? Or we ran out of food? What if we got lost and ended up shipwrecked on some remote island with no people and no way to call for help?"
Rodney laughed softly next to her. "Sounds like paradise to me."
"It sounds uncertain. I like things to be definite."
"Huh." Rodney reached out and put an arm around Molly's shoulders, guiding her back so that they were both laying against the windshield of the truck, shoulders touching, and heads just inches apart. They were facing the sky again. "Maybe that's something you need to let go of," he offered. "Maybe knowing that the future isn't definite and that nothing is guaranteed is agoodthing. It could help you appreciate the present more."
"True," Molly allowed. She thought about it, realizing that he wasn't entirely wrong.
"Just picture it, Mol: the Eiffel Tower. The Colosseum. Athens. The Canary Islands. The world is so much bigger than this tiny town. It's bigger than Winchell's, Friday night football games, and whether Jemma Sawyer and Clay Tucker will end up being king and queen of the prom."
"You're so right," Molly agreed, mentally kicking herself for not being the kind of girl who'd dreamed beyond the confines of her own small town. Sure, she'd planned not to have kids right out of the gate, but traveling the world? Is that something a young woman could justdoin 1973? Would her parents let her? She didn't even know. "Take me with you," she said impulsively, realizing as she did that she meant it. "I want to see everything."
It was Rodney's turn to laugh. "You want to travel with me? Be my First Mate?"
Molly nodded, feeling it in her heart that she did mean this--she meant it with every fiber of her being. "Yes. I want to find out if the clay roofs in Spain are hot in summer."
Rodney tightened his grip around her shoulders and leaned his head towards hers so that they were touching, his dark hair mingling with her ashy blonde locks. "Okay, Mol," he said softly. "It's a deal. We'll get the heck out of here and see it all. But first we gotta graduate."
"Definitely," she said, nodding her head and feeling her scalp rub against his. It was surprisingly intimate to feel her head connected to his.
"But while we're still here," Rodney said, turning his head to hers and speaking right into her ear in a soft, low voice. "Do you think maybe you'd want to be my girl?"
Fireworks went off in Molly's heart, sparking and burning brightly and sending electrical jolts through every part of her body. She nodded, feeling her eyes burn with happy tears. "I do want to," she said. She kept her eyes on a star way up in the sky, watching as it blinked and danced merrily in the heavens.
Rodney rolled onto his side and then sat up on one elbow as he reached across Molly and put his hand on the far side of her face, turning it to him slowly so that they were looking at one another. They sat there like that for what felt like a long, important moment, their eyes saying things that were already understood. Finally, after what felt like ages, Rodney lowered his head, putting his warm lips on Molly's. This was her first kiss, and it was gentle. It was perfect.
* * *
Molly woke up in Madagascar with the memory of her first kiss still in her head as she stretched in her bed, yawning and curling up like a cat. She would have slept more and then rushed to the resort for another day of work, running as she ate a banana to make up for the time lost sleeping, but there was something pounding outside her apartment and it wouldn't stop.
She pulled the pillow over her head and tried to drown it out.Thump. Thump. Thump.It was insistent and repetitive and she couldn't just ignore it.
With annoyance, Molly flung the pillow off her head and climbed out of bed, searching for a pair of shorts to put on over her underwear so that she could investigate the noise.
She opened her door hesitantly, poking her head out and looking both directions. The apartment opened onto a courtyard with moss that grew between the bricks. Apartments were lined up in a row on each landing like an old fashioned motor lodge, and in the courtyard were four small iron tables with chairs for mingling and coffee drinking.
Molly squinted at the scene below her, as she was on the third floor: there, walking around the bricks were four men in khaki pants rolled at the ankles, and shirts that were once white, but had been sweated through several times without washing. One of them was beating a drum rhythmically (hence, the repetitive pounding), and the others were walking around the courtyard with lemurs on their shoulders, or on leashes, and each man held a lemur in his arms. The men smiled gleefully, singing a song that was unfamiliar to Molly as they walked the lemurs around like pre-school teachers leading their charges around on a nature hike. One of the lemurs that was perched on a shoulder stood there, its long black and white ringed tail swishing against the man's back. It looked directly up at Molly and made eye contact.
It was the most bizarre thing Molly had ever woken up to.
She watched their merrymaking for a minute more, mystified as to what they were doing (exercising their pets? Practicing for a circus show?), before leaning against her doorframe in realization: this was it. This was what Rodney had been talking about that night on the hood of his truck in 1973. She was seeing the world, finding out who and what was out there, experiencing things that California alone never could have offered her.
From Tokyo bars to the meke Christmas dance in Rotuma, from the sheep wandering the green fields of New Zealand to the lemurs parading around a courtyard in Madagascar, Molly was really doing it: she was having the adventure. She was drinking in the world. She was finding herself--her true self--and she was bravely doing it alone.
She smiled up at the blue morning sky for a moment, hoping that Rodney could see her, then she closed her apartment door and went inside to get ready for another day of work.
Molly
"So what were the lemursfor?" Athena asks as she nibbles on a shortbread cookie.
