"I don't know," she had said. "It wasn't my idea." What could she have meant by this? I spent the whole day thinking about it, running through scenarios in my head where she ran back to her friends proclaiming "You'll never guess the look he had on his face when I walked over to him!"

By the time the story had spread through the school, the synopsis would be that I went up to her, told her that her face looked ugly and that I was appalled she ever invited me to dinner, and the thought hadn't slipped my mind that maybe she'd pretend that her family had never invited me at all. "How did he even come up with such an idea? Pathetic, if you ask me."

When the bell rang for the end of the last class, I raced out the door, before anyone could have a chance to stop me to talk about it. Now, I take the walk home alone while their cars hurry past me, blowing wind and dust on my face as if I were just another object on the side of the road to which attention is rarely paid.

Besides this, the walk is not a bad one most days. I turn directly from my school onto the main street of our town. There, in between the buildings that line the roadway, although none are that tall compared to ones you'd see in bigger cities, the ocean -- a mere few feet away -- is concealed from view. The sounds of its waves crashing are muffled, and instead, I hear only the pulsing honks of cars and that music they play loudly from the auto-repair place down the road.

The scenery I walk through changes little with time. Each day I pass the same restaurants and event centers, none of which I have ever seen remodel their exteriors. On the left, there is a church (Pentecostal, it says, but I've never known the difference between this and another Christian religion). It never changes the message on its letter board. "Repent and be baptized." Following it, strings of motels all with neon plates under their welcome signs, illuminating a single word "vacancy" in bright red. The "no" which stands before it, I've never seen lit, and you'd only be able to see it was there if you looked hard enough on a sunny enough day.

Just before I reach the gas station that sits a half-mile from my school, where the street branches off to meet the coastal highway, I take a left. Here, the paved road I follow turns to dirt and gravel, and the once-flat ground starts to take elevation. I take my strides slowly from here, walking up a staircase which leads me into the hills of the elite, towards the homes that tower over the rest of the town. Among them, mine and Saxa's.

I once hated being alone on this walk, and I hated my parents for subjecting me to such inconvenience, having questioned them for their lack of effort in my personal comfort.

"Everyone else has a car!" I would balk, coming home from school a sweaty mess and throwing my school bag of heavy textbooks to the ground to create a thump loud enough to be heard throughout the house.

My mother was worried that this would destroy her the wood of her floors and, to a lesser extent, the textbooks. "Stop that, Jaime. It's not possible that everyone has a car."

"And how would you know? I obviously know more about the subject than you do."

"And the kids who aren't old enough to drive yet? Do they have a car?"

"Their parents at least care enough to pick them up from school!"

"So how come you didn't complain about walking before now, huh? Tell me that, Jaime. Before you were old enough to have a car, why didn't you complain about not being picked up from school?"

She had a point there. Why did I suddenly care? I guess it was because I felt that I was watching everyone I knew, my classmates and neighbors, no older nor more deserving than I, getting cars like a rite of passage as they came of appropriate age. Acquiring such a prize, for what? Just for growing up? While I was stuck in the same place I had been for the past five years, my peers sped past me in their little vehicles of independency, being able to go anywhere and everywhere they pleased -- gas allowing.

The official excuse from my parents was lack of money. We may have lived with the elite, but we were no longer such. According to the gossip, it was a series of bad decisions made by the city council which did them in, turning what was once a prosperous town with booming tourism and equally profitable residential developments into, over time, a land for disappointments, visited only by relatives of those still here, the occasional road-trippers stopping for gas on their way to some place better, and the ghosts of those who had managed to make it out.

Of course, the realty business was one of the first to fall. No new residents means no new business for my parents. They try to pretend to me that it's not the case, that all our money is somehow tied up in some sort of investments as enigmatic as they will be profitable. Are they really so blind to me that they don't think I notice the collection of "sold" signs gathering dust in the garage?

I retired my arguing, though, long ago. For this matter and many others. The walk home is now, for me, a time for me to reflect, to temporarily open the gates of those barricades I build, allow any thought that pleases to cross my mind.

Today, the voice that echoes most is that of Saxa. So I hear you're coming for dinner.

I listen back to it slowly, analyzing every syllable in my head. Did she sound disappointed? Dubious? Sad? Did her tone go up at the end in a way I hadn't noticed at the time? If so, what would that mean? I question her very reason for coming to see me. Did she know how I would react from the start? Maybe she came to me with the sole intention of paralyzing me, to have be blubber at her feet while her friends watched from their spot at the gate.

As unpleasant as it would be to believe, maybe more unpleasant in the knowledge that this belief can't be true, because it would be too arrogant to believe that she, or her friends, would care about me enough to instigate such a scheme.

In the end, I realize, she probably never had a reason at all. She simply saw me and spoke to me because she knew she could, and there was never such a thought in her mind that suggested otherwise. Does she even know how lucky she is for this? To not have to be brave in order to be confident. To be born exactly the person she wants to be, to be comfortable in who she is.

She has a way about her, one that's hard to explain. Afar, I'm infatuated by her, but up close, standing before her as she towered over me both in body and in spirit, I saw that there's so much more to her. She makes you feel intimidated and safe all at the same time.

She never has to fight for her attention. She just exists, and people offers themselves to her, bowing at her feet and hanging onto her words as if these words beheld holiness simply by passing her lips. I want her to teach me how to do this -- how to be the loudest person in the room not by volume but because everyone else dares to mute themselves so that they can listen.

She of course has a car. She would never find herself at my level, a peasant walking up a mountain to get home. She plays her music and drives where the wind pushes her. Money doesn't stop her; gas doesn't either. She does as she wants because she can because she is.

This last thought, I hold on to, and I repeat it over and over again, trying to see it at different angles and from different perspectives. And as I let this thought continue to speak itself, appearing like the devil as if I had spoken his name, the silver sedan of Saxa Morstad slows to a stop and perches itself on the browning grass at my feet.

"You're a fast one, aren't you?" I assume she's referring to my speed in leaving the school earlier, but it's a strange sentiment, so I can't be sure. She has all the windows down. The music that always plays in her car can still be heard but softer, barely noticeable in its faintness. She waits for me to respond, and when it's clear that I won't she flicks her head in a suggestive manner and says "Get in."

All I can do is stare. Is this even real? A mirage of sorts? Have my daydreams finally turned to hallucinations?

"We're going to the same place anyway, right? Come on, I'll take you."

I stumble to find words. In searching for them, my gaze journeys from this image of Saxa I see before me to the sky to the tops of the trees and to the ground, as if the right sentences are by some means hiding themselves within the scenery that surrounds me. I am barely able to shake my head in disagreement.

"What's wrong?"

Come on, Jaime. Speak.

"I-I don't think we're going to the same place, is all." I talk as if I'm sure she is really there, forgetting that she could be just air, an image projected from my mind's eye. My view never leaves the rocky pebbles that cover the road. As I speak, I push some of them to the side with the rubber toe of my shoe. Digging a hole in the dirt underneath, just remnants of old pebbles which have been ground to dust by the cars that drive up and down this road every day.

"You're not coming to dinner?" The tone of the voice doesn't change. It is dispassionate but not disinterested. I makes me think that she must care in some way, but not enough to really care.

I bounce my eyes up to meet hers. It is then that I realize that she's been watching me, and it is only then that I feel exposed. I think about all the things she could be staring at: my crooked nose, my chapped lips, my dry toffee-colored hair which gathers in knaps at my ears, the red bumps and marks that trace the outline of my chin and stack themselves up my cheeks.

I hurry myself to speak. "I-I'm sorry. We aren't -- I mean, we can't -- I mean, my parents don't want to go."

I'm just as pathetic as I was in our conversation this morning, and I consider walking away just then -- if anything, to save me from the embarrassment I'll feel as she drives away first. But of course, I stay. It's impossible to walk away from Saxa. Your mind may want to go, but your heart convinces you to stick around, for what a shame it would be if you weren't there to hear what she said next.

She thinks for a second, or is it a minute? A day? "But you want to go, right?"

All I can do it nod shyly. Yes. The word is as loud as thunder in my mind. Yes, I do.

"What time do you have to be home?"

I shrug because I honestly don't know. I've never not come home immediately after school, so I guess I've never had to be home at a certain time.

"Well, get in," she returns, patting a hand on the seat next to her. "I said we eat dinner early anyway. You'll be home before sunset."