Pedro came in hesitantly; I didn’t really blame him this time. We both had completely missed each other the last time we said we’d meet up, and I’d spent 20 minutes lazily going up and down the escalators looking for him. Apparently he was always just out of my eyesight. I felt like a dick about it – who wouldn’t, really? – but that was behind us now. I sat at the table and shook his hand, warm as ever.
The conversation moved slowly, clanging and clattering along like a jalopy in summer. We began, as we tend to do, by talking about the weather. What it was like, how it was clearing up, how it was just gorgeous compared to last week, when the skies were cloudy and everyone seemed depressed, angry, or just apathetic.
Gradually, our dialogue shifted to the people around us. It was a busy coffee shop atmosphere; girls were studying and talking on the phone at the same time, guys with ponytails were ordering sentence-long drink orders, and the green-aproned arbiters behind the counter were doing their best not to suffocate from all the pretentiousness.
Pedro looked surreptitiously at the posterior of a girl who walked past our table and raised his eyebrows subtly. “How about that, huh?” he whistled softly. “Nice, eh?”
“Yeah…” I said. OK, so I hadn’t told him that wasn’t my fare. But then again, it wasn’t anything I wasn’t used to. I knew cultural attitudes in Brazil, as well as the rest of Latin America, were shifting towards gay rights and equality. However, something about Pedro made me not want to divulge that information to him. Maybe it was his small-town upbringing; maybe it was me just being cautious about the only real representative he knew of American culture being gay that I didn’t want to put him on edge. Maybe it was none of those things. I wasn’t sure.
Some guy – some asshole, I muttered in my conscious – started playing his guitar in the middle of the bookstore. My (and Pedro’s, I found out) ears are attuned to music; we hear it playing more often than we hear conversation. Both of us winced and started grumbling about the idiot that would play “Wonderwall” and sing it while “Black Velvet” was already on the radio.
Both of us were stressed, and it showed. We were each about to take important tests. I had the first test in my hardest English class the day after, about great works of poetry and literature in the Roaring Twenties. He had the SATs in a few months. I remembered reading an article about the SAT being biased towards native English speakers, and he said he was just taking the Portuguese equivalent. What, essentially, would allow him to come to TCU as a student next year. He was begging for it, I could tell. He wanted it badly.
I wanted this grade badly, too (I found out later I got the fourth-highest grade in the class). We talked about how we were at taking tests. Do you get nervous when you’re put on the spot? Why? Why not? Are there certain subjects you like writing about or testing yourself over?
I was fascinated by the tenacity with which he was pursuing this test. It was in June, and he was already taking practice exams and synthesizing information. But then again, he reminded me that in Portugal most of the schools are more advanced than American ones. I nodded, and silently was reminded of why I wanted to teach.
We walked out of the bookstore, sun dappling our shoulders and birds whispering to each other over the leaves’ lecture. I shook his hand in a firm farewell, and watched him board the bus. It wasn’t long before I had a road trip to look forward to. Not just in Spring Break, but over the rest of my life. I knew then, as I know now, that I will never be satisfied with living in Texas. I will spend my dying breath grateful that I got out of the state, or cursing the circumstances that left me in it.
I can only hope one day I will be as brave as Pedro, to just get on the bus and leave for where he wanted to go. I can do nothing but admire that, every time we meet. His courage astounds me.
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