You’re not sure when you began to stare at the glittery back pockets of your classmates’ jeans or when you became blinded by the glimmering of college girls’ hoop nose rings. It was a problem, nevertheless, because Aunt Vivian would faint if she knew.

Aunt Vivian is full of talk about things teenage girls are supposed to be doing. Girls your age are supposed to have at least three good female friends. Girls your age are supposed to be going to parties – not the rowdy, alcohol chugging kind, but the kind where only girls are there, wearing pajamas, and gushing about boy bands. Girls your age are supposed to like boys but not enough to get pregnant; that is for later.

You don’t know how to make one friend, let alone three, probably because once the school bell rings, you race for the door as if it is a contest to get there first. You never go straight home from school because Aunt Vivian always visits your mother then. It is best to go to the café and pretend you are interesting because interesting people often sit alone in cafés.

There is always a girl reading under an oak tree in the park you cut through. Her hair is poofy and golden, and the sunlight plays in the strands, displaying the different shades: tawny, white, honey. California must have kissed her. Passionately. Her eyes, dark and almond-shaped, pull up from her book, and she waves. You’ve become too accustomed seeing her, and familiar nausea roils in your gut. You’ll need to change your route soon.

This time, as you pass by, she calls out to you, lifting a hand in a shy wave.

“Hey, I like your hair today.”

You almost trip over an uplifted stone in the ground. Your hair looks like a thornbush today. “Thanks.”

“Where are you heading?” she asks.

“I’m on my way to get coffee with my boyfriend.”

Something in her dark eyes shifts, leaving you unexplainably disappointed.

“Well, see you next time,” she says.

There will be no next time. You can’t have that happen again.

At the café, you sit alone at a booth in the corner, by the window, so you can watch people with dogs walk by. You dig into your backpack for your book. You prop it upright on the napkin holder while Carly Simon sings about an apricot colored scarf on an attractive man. You suppose that would be attractive, but for some reason you can’t picture him.

You just keep seeing the girl in the park with the twinkling dark eyes, her slender, elegant fingers splayed into a wave. The apricot-colored scarf is tied in a bow around her neck, fluttering in the park breeze.

Once the song ends, you form a plan. You pack your things and hurry home. You spend the next few days scouring the newspapers for a suitable pen pal. You find a boy’s name on the list and choose him how you would a puppy: quickly and without remorse.

Wait a week for a letter to come back. Shred the envelope trying to get to the letter within. Seeing his handwriting is like hearing his voice; now you know his personality. He spends so much time in the arcade that he knows exactly how many wads of gum are stuck to floor on the way to Street Fighter. He adores books that take place in space and fantasizes about having his own lightsaber.

Aunt Vivian doesn’t believe you really have a “new beau.” You need proof.

Send him some pictures of yourself that don’t look half bad, just so you can ask him for some pictures of himself. Have his pictures ready for Aunt Vivian’s scrutinizing stare.

Share plenty of stories about his dorky mannerisms and his habit of doodling funny little characters in the corners of the letters he sends you.

After a year passes of writing back and forth, tell yourself you like this guy. Maybe someday he could be yours, even though you live in Omaha, and he lives in a small town on the other side of the state. He mails you photos all the time of the bluffs, which seem to be the only thing the town is known for since it’s called Scottsbluff.

Brush off your mother’s skepticisms; the relationship will work despite the distance. Tell her you’re thinking of visiting him that summer.

“That would be nice,” she says.

“I know,” you say.

“Young love is so precious,” she says.

“I know,” you say.

You whittle away the days with pen and paper, sitting in the big recliner your grandmother used to sink into. A glowing cigarette always dangled between her bony fingers. She used to complain about men and watch talk shows that also complained about men. You would sit on the floor next to her indigo slippers and let her ashes drop into your hair. You made sure to shake them out before they could start stinging.

You miss her.

The small, colorless TV plays while you write your next letter to the beau. You are in the middle of complimenting his subpar photography skills (he has included photos of his recent trip to the local zoo, and his finger is in every one of them) when you glance up at the TV.

On the little screen, girls run up the beach in one-pieces that you imagine are red. There are guys there too – hulking and muscular, chiseled and smoldering – but they are not as enthralling.

You rush to the TV and smash the button to turn it off. The screen shrinks to a pinpoint before disappearing completely.

Aunt Vivian visits on the last day of school before summer. You, your mother, and Aunt Vivian sit around the tiny kitchen table, drinking tea, surrounded by Aunt Vivian’s cloud of spicy perfume. She asks about your upcoming trip to visit your beau.

“I just bought my bus ticket,” you say.

“My,” she says, “going alone on a bus.”

“She’ll be fine,” your mother says.

“I have no doubt she will be fine,” Aunt Vivian says. “She will blend in with the surroundings.”

She didn’t say it, but you could hear it: Girls your age are supposed to have long, flowing hair like a horse’s mane. Girls your age are supposed to wear tops that complement your frame but don’t show too much cleavage.

And you don’t look like any of those things. You have hair stands up like a scared cat’s, and your clothes are like a boy’s.

Sit through the rest of the afternoon before finding an excuse to go to your room. You had snagged a letter from your beau from the mailbox, and you have unrelenting curiosity to open it.

As you stand up from the table, Aunt Vivian grabs your hand with frigid fingers. “Don’t disappoint this boy, please.”

You pull free with a taut smile and hurry up the stairs.

In the safety of your room, tear the envelop open and stare at the warped page.

Little dogs touching noses are doodled in the top right corner. Below is his lopsided handwriting that can never go along the page evenly. You think he should probably invest in paper with lines on it.

He thinks you’re pretty, and he’s excited for you to visit. He lists all the things he wants to do with you: board games (he likes Risk), arcade games (he likes Street Fighter), go out to his favorite Chinese place.

You won’t disappoint him.

A couple days later, you have the bus tickets clutched in your trembling hand, and your mother is arranging your luggage by the front door. For some reason you can only watch her.

She straightens and gives you a watery smile. “You’ll be back next week.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll sit away from the crazies on the Greyhound.”

“Of course.”

“You’ll call me once you get there. You’ll ask to use their phone; I don’t want you using the dingy payphone at the bus station.”

“Okay.”

She hugs you and pats your hair before pulling away with the same watery smile.

You look at her, really look at her. You had been avoiding looking at too many people these days, your mother being one of them, but now you can’t avoid it any longer. Her eyes don’t tell you anything Aunt Vivian has ever told you. Her eyes tell you what your mother has always told you: she understands you.

When you board the Greyhound, the bus smells like eggs gone bad and feet that belong in very thick socks.

You make your way down the aisle, trying to find a seat that is empty or doesn’t have a man with scabs all over his face and arms already sitting there. Your suitcases narrowly bang knees, and your feet almost stamp on a few sandaled feet with yellow toenails.

You reach the back of the bus and have not found a seat. On the left side of the aisle, a girl with a dyed black pixie cut sits next to the window reading a book. She looks up at you and smiles, and you realize two things: one, her eyes are different colors, cognac and sky-blue, and two, she is reading Orlando.

“You can sit here,” she says.

You wiggle into the seat, and she shuffles her Doc Martens aside to allow you more room. Her halter top exposes a bare shoulder to you, where an Om tattoo is inked. Its black curves stand out on her calla-white skin like button eyes on a snowman.

She smells like sandalwood, like being deep in the forest in the fall, like sitting next to the fireplace when it’s frigid outside.

She turns back to her book, and your eyes are again drawn to her tattoo. You can tell she doesn’t get many compliments, and you have to say something.

“Nice tattoo,” you say.

She smiles again, and it’s the kind of smile that makes you fall in love with her just a little, just for a little bit.

“I got it to piss my Catholic parents off,” she says.

You have never done anything to piss anyone off. You wonder what it is like. She looks like her life is so much more exciting than yours. She looks like she doesn’t care what Aunt Vivian thinks. She looks like the kind of girl who isn’t that desperate for a boyfriend.

Her hands hold her place in the book, the page held between her index and middle finger. Her nails are painted black, stark against the white pages.

Her knee, clad in black floral-patterned tights, brushes against yours. It’s brief, like a flash of a bird flitting past a window. But it is enough to send you falling and spiraling like Alice down the rabbit hole.

You look at her. She looks at you with her eyes that are like a coloring book. You can tell there is something you both know about each other in that moment. Her eyelashes are dark and heavy from mascara, and her lips are painted the purest black.

Aunt Vivian wouldn’t like girls like this one sitting next to you. Girls aren’t supposed to be so morbid, she’d say.

“Where are you heading?” the girl asks.

You think about this for a moment. Little doodles of dogs flash on the backs of your eyelids when you blink. You see a fingertip hovering in the corner of a photo of a giraffe. You see a boy with droopy brown hair and a too-long nose. You see a boy with a smile that is probably cute; you just can’t tell. You smell Aunt Vivian’s spicy perfume, threatening to overpower the girl’s earthy smell.

“Nowhere,” you say.

She laughs, and you decide it will now be the melody stuck in your head. “Hey, me too. To be honest, I’m kind of running away from home.”

“Really?”

“I do this about every six months,” she says. “I always go back because I think I need to go back. This time I’m not.”

“So, you’re just going to ride this bus until . . . when?”

“I was thinking California, but I might get off sooner if I see something I like,” she says. “My name’s Olivia, by the way.”

“June,” you say. Your eyes stray back to the book in her lap. “How do you like it?”

“I’m struggling to imagine how in love with someone you have to be to write a book in honor of them,” Olivia says.

You can’t imagine it either, especially if you were thinking of the beau.

Twelve hours later, when the bus screeches to a halt in Scottsbluff, you stare out the window at the bench. The beau already there, flipping through a magazine. He looks like his picture in that weird way that people really don’t look like their pictures. You don’t feel any more looking at him than you do a dropped ice cream cone that is not yours.

You don’t budge from your seat and let the bus’s door slide shut. Slowly, you leave him and that city with bluffs behind. You watch Olivia’s fingers skitter over the book’s pages. You drink in everything about her, and for once, you don’t look away. You don’t feel like running.

She feels your stare and looks up. She grins in a way someone does when they catch you admiring them. “See something you like, June?”

“Do you want to be Virginia or Vita?” you ask.

Her black-lipstick-smile is blackhole, sucking you in. You don’t struggle. You let it take you.