She turns off the music, disappointed I'm sure in my chosen response, and for a few moments, she doesn't speak. Through the silence, all I can hear is my own breath as it syncs to my palpably beating heart. Is the silence worse than the speaking? I can't tell. I should find comfort in the silence, I'm telling myself. It seems hypocritical in a way to hate it. Isn't it the thing that I've always found the most comfort in? Like a friend who's always been there for me, always given me what I need, and now, as I sit here in Saxa's presence, at the first moment I have to do so, I betray it.

We make our final turn onto the road where we live, and I begin to grasp the edges of the leather of the cushion I'm sitting on. I can hear the sounds of the tires of the car as the road shifts from dirt and gravel back to cement. The earth flattens out, and the trees that surround us are so thick now that the light of the sun no longer shines through their branches, and their leaves cast their shadows onto us.

"He'll like you," she says, and her head is turned away from me, so I can't tell in what manner she means to say it. The words themselves are optimistic, I think, but her tone – impassive, almost?

I'd like to know what she sees in me that makes her say this, but I don't know how to ask. I dig my nails deeper into the seat and push myself to speak. "Do you like me?"

This wasn't the question she was expecting. I know this because for a moment, she doesn't know what to say. Secretly, I love this moment. I want to keep this moment. In it, we're the same, and it's this happy type of silence that I crave.

"I do."

There's a heat that rushes to my face. It's not a giddiness or even a relief. It's a new feeling that I can't quite explain. It makes me nervous mostly because I don't know what to say, how to act. Normal people must know about these things. Normal parents must teach their children how to receive compliments and what to respond to them and how to handle the responsibility that comes with them. Normally, a person should be used to these things by now. My natural response is to turn away. I let go of the seat and push my hands in between my thighs, challenging the tips of my fingers to press as tightly into my palms as they can possibly go.

I look out at the firs as we pass them. The jagged skyline that they form blurs into a gradient of different shades of green. I've never noticed how many shades of green they are before now. Leaves colored like olives, emeralds, jades, the dusty pigment of seaweed. A pine needle the shade of avocado spirals to the ground, more beautiful as it falls than when it had been attached to the tree. I try to focus my eyes upon it, but the car drives past it too quickly.

A sudden pressure on my left knee, soft and reassuring, I try not to acknowledge it. I close my eyes, hoping to be transported somewhere else: back to my bedroom, to the side of the road where Saxa had found me, to the ocean in my daydream.

"I do," she repeats. She squeezes my knee earnestly before she lets go, both hands back on the steering wheel just as I open my eyes again to look at her. "Does that worry you?" she asks.

"I think so."

"Why?"

"I'm worried that you're wrong."

This makes her laugh. "How can I be wrong about my own feelings?"

"Not your feelings. Who I am. Whatever makes you think you like me."

She laughs, again. I wish she would stop. "Then teach me who you are." The car slows as we approach her home. The gate opens slowly, and as we wait for it, there is complete stillness, save the little vibrations of the car. "Tell me a story from your life."

I ask her what type of story she wants, and she tells me any kind. Something that means a lot to me. Something that made me who I am.

It's a difficult request, and I spend a while trying to find a story that I think she'll want to hear. Finally, I settle for telling her of a day at the beach with my mother. I was nine. Joy was there.

"It was an unnaturally warm day in October." We hadn't gone out since Joy was born, and the sun on this day was the brightest I had ever seen it. I begged my parents to take me out. To the park, to the ocean, wherever I could be where I could feel the sun's warmth. "So my mother took us to the beach."

There were no waves on this day, or only very little ones, just thin white lines that had been drawn onto the surface of the sea, and if ever they came too near to the shore, they dissipated almost instantaneously. "The water was calm, but there were a lot of people there that day." There was a shallow pond a few feet inwards from the waterline, where the dirt had caved in slightly, and it had been filled with water from the sea by the high tide of the night before. My mother perched by this pond, as it was a good depth for Joy to play in, but she told me I could play wherever I'd like. "I went out by that rock, the big one in the middle that separates the north and south side of the coast, and at first, I was just going to look at it, swim beside it. But in the end, I decided to climb it." Climbing, it was a joy beyond words in those days. As I ventured to the tops of the rocks, the crusty jags of the boulder making dents in the soles of my feet, it reminded me of my lion phase. Every step I made, I made with both arms and legs, like a cat needing to walk on all four limbs.

"I challenged myself to go higher, and once I had reached that, I challenged myself to go higher even." I wanted to stand at its peak, open my arms, and bask in the rays of the sun.

The higher I went, the more important I felt. I could look down at the beach and instead of seeing people, people I knew because they were friends of my mother who came by every once in a while for a cocktail and good gossip, who brought their husbands over to stand in the corner with a beer and watch, who brought their kids with them sometimes and presented them to me saying "You're going to be the best of friends; I just know it!" not understanding that their kids had no real interest in me, who had no really interest in me themselves – instead of seeing these people, I saw art, a watercolor of children and parents just having a day at the beach. There was a carelessness in the air, as if society and all its expectations couldn't touch here. The waves, still as in a photograph, and the only sound besides the wind as it blew past my ears was the roaring laughs of children as they played in the salty ponds.

"Those rocks are dangerous," Saxa says, as she drives the car through the opened gate. She parks it under a detached awning next to the cars of her parents.

"I know," I continue. "That's the story, actually. The rocks, th-they were very slippery towards the front where maybe there's water from the waves that crash into them. There's a big cliff off the front that I didn't notice when I was young." As I reached the summit, my gaze skimmed across the edge that lay before me, and I let my body shift forward with it. "A woman saw me and screamed for me to get down." It was so silent up there until she did, "and it startled me." I jolted back and pushed down into my footing in some sort of effort to distance myself from the cliff, but the rocks that I stood upon shifted, and "I slipped."