The Wrong Terminal

The bus stopped and the driver said, "Terminal Four," and Carson and I just sat there like idiots because that was not our terminal.

"Camila," Carson said slowly, "what terminal are we flying out of?"

"Terminal One. Why?"

"Because we are at Terminal Four."

I looked out the window. Terminal Four was enormous. It had its own weather, practically. It was also, according to the departures board inside, nowhere near Terminal One, which was ninety kilometers away across the city and would take two hours in traffic we did not have.

I am thirty-two, by the way, and Carson is thirty-four, and we have known each other since we were twenty-two and hated each other's guts since roughly twenty-two and a half. We were lab partners in biomedical engineering, then we tried one date at twenty-three that ended with a dartboard getting vandalized, and we have been sniping at each other across conferences and dig sites ever since. This trip was supposed to be simple. Fly into the hub, connect onward, go look at rocks.

"This is your fault," Carson said.

I actually laughed. "My fault? You're the one who read the shuttle schedule."

"I read the schedule fine. You were the one who said, and I quote, that's our bus, and dragged me onto it."

"Because you were standing there sulking at a vending machine instead of helping!"

"I was buying water, Camila. Hydration. You may have heard of it, given your job."

Oh, that was a low blow, and he knew it. My job, I should note, is changing membranes in blood gas analyzers. It is real work with real patients depending on it, and Carson has never once let me forget that it involves a lot of disposable plastic.

So we argued. We argued in the terminal, we argued at the information desk, and we argued in the taxi line while a driver named Pete watched us with the expression of a man being paid by the hour and not the argument.

"Look," Pete finally said, "your flight out of Terminal One is gone either way. Next one's tomorrow morning. What do you want to do for a night?"

Carson and I looked at each other, which we try to avoid.

"I booked a hotel near Terminal One," Carson said.

"That's two hours back the wrong way," Pete said. "Or, and I'm just saying, there's a fossil site out past Kununurra way. Badlands. Old palm fronds pressed into stone. People come from all over for it. I drive that route."

"The palm site?" I said, and my voice did something embarrassing. "The one with the agave growing wild along the escarpment? I have wanted to see that for eleven years."

"You have never once mentioned it," Carson said.

"I mention things. You don't listen."

"That is medically impossible given how much you talk."

Pete cleared his throat. "So, the fossil site?"

Carson rubbed his eyes. He does this thing where he surrenders without words because words would be admitting something. "Fine. But I want it noted that we are choosing rocks over a bed because of Camila."

"Noted," Pete said, and we got in.

* * *

The badlands near Kununurra are the color of a peach left on a windowsill. Layered stone, all orange and rust, with the heat sitting on it like a lid. Agave plants crowd along the escarpment edge, stubborn and gray green, and the fossil casts of palm fronds lie in the rock like someone pressed a broom into clay nine million years ago and forgot about it.

Pete dropped us at the visitor pull off and said he'd be back at dawn, and then it was just Carson, me, two backpacks, and one hundred and four degrees.

"I'm going to look at the fronds," I said.

"I'm going to stand in whatever shade exists," Carson said. "Which appears to be mine and a lizard's."

I walked the ridge anyway. The palm casts were even better than the pictures. You could see every rib of every frond, pressed flat, perfect, like the tree had lain down to rest and stayed. I must have taken forty photos.

Then Carson strolled up, because he cannot stand to let me have a moment, and said, "So this is what gets you out of the lab. Rocks. Very adventurous. Tell me, do the fossils also have membranes you change?"

"Say what you actually mean, Carson."

"I mean you swap cartridges in a machine, Camila. It's glorified plumbing. You follow a manual and the manual is right and you go home. I coach kids to swim through open water in a current. There's risk in that. Judgment."

"Your swim team placed last in the regional finals two seasons ago."

The silence was lovely. I want you to know I savored it.

"That was a rebuilding year," he said.

"Three seasons ago was also a rebuilding year. At some point the building has to rebuild into something."

"At least nobody's health depends on whether I remember which end of a wrench to hold."

"You know what, fine. You want to talk about who handles heat and isolation and adventure better? Fine."

"Camila."

"Fine!" I said, and dropped my backpack, and dug out the thing I had packed specifically to gloat with someday, and I pulled it out and held it up.

Carson stared. "Is that a dartboard."

"It's a dartboard woven from agave fiber. I made it myself, thank you, at a craft workshop, because I knew you'd be insufferable on this trip and I wanted a hobby that wasn't you."

"You brought a dartboard. To a fossil dig. In the desert."

"I brought it to kill time, and now it's going to settle something. Center hit wins. First one to hit it. You win, I admit your team's failures were the current's fault. I win, you admit my job takes actual skill."

"That's not even the same wager structure."

"And you're stalling."

He looked at the little woven board, at the frayed rings and the lopsided bullseye, and I watched him do the math on whether refusing would cost him more than playing.

"Fine," he said. "But we throw from there to that flat rock, and no crying when I win."

"I have never cried in your presence."

"You cried at the dartboard incident."

"The dartboard was vandalized, Carson. By you. In the middle of our date. Which is why there was never a second date."

"That's one version of events."

"It's the accurate version of events."

He picked a dart off the ground where I'd dropped the little set, weighed it in his hand, and scowled at it like it had insulted his coaching record too. The heat was doing something to both of us, I think. There's a specific kind of stupid that only happens when it's a hundred and four degrees and you're standing on nine million year old stone with a man you've hated for ten years and the shade is two ridges away and neither of you will be the one to walk to it first.

"One throw each, rotating," he said. "Closest to center after six rounds wins."

"And if it's tied?"

"Then whoever's still standing in this heat wins."

"So, me."

"Throw the dart, Camila."

I threw first. It hit the outer ring, barely, bounced off a woven ridge and stuck in crooked. Carson's throw missed the board entirely and stabbed into the dirt, which I enjoyed so much I photographed it.

"That doesn't count against me, it's a practice throw," he said.

"Nothing you do counts against you, that's your whole personality."

He threw again. Inner ring. I threw again and got the middle ring, and we went back and forth like that while the sun slid down and the stone went from peach to copper, and somewhere around round four I realized I was having a genuinely good time, which annoyed me more than anything he'd said all day.

Round five, he hit the second ring from center. I missed wide.

"Tied going into the last throw," he said, his voice carrying a warmth that was new, and I didn't trust it.

"Coin flip on sudden death?"

"No. Full round each. Sudden death!"

"Fine. But you throw first."

"Why?"

"Because if I throw second, I get to watch you sweat."

He laughed, actually laughed, and I hate to report that it did something to my chest that I filed away to examine never. He lined up his dart, tongue between his teeth like a twenty-something at a pub, and let it fly.

It stuck dead center. Not near center. Dead in the woven middle of the bullseye, quivering, perfect.

"Ha," he shouted, arms up, and then he turned to me with a grin I had never once seen on his stupid face in ten years, and I thought, oh no, and picked up my last dart.

I missed. Not by much, but by enough. The dart smacked into the second ring and hung there, crooked, mocking me.

"Bullseye," Carson said. "That's the match. That's the tournament. That's the whole sport."

"Best two out of three."

"There's no best two out of three in sudden death, Camila. You invented these rules."

"I invented them badly, which is different. Rematch."

He was still grinning. It was a terrible look on him, like a dress shirt on a dog. "Say it. Say the current's fault."

"I'll say it when you say my job takes skill."

"Changing membranes. In blood gas analyzers."

"It's precision work. There's calibration. There's a whole wet panel you have to respect."

"Respect the wet panel," he repeated, and that grin got wider, and something in me snapped clean in half.

I shoved him. Both hands, flat against his chest, mostly a joke, maybe sixty percent a joke. He rocked back a step and then, because he was Carson and had never once let me have the last word in physical space either, he shoved back. Light. Playful. Still a shove.

"You want to do this?" I said.

"You started it."

"I finished it too, watch." I pushed him again and he caught my wrists, and we did this stupid slow-motion wrestling thing, sweating, grunting, both of us swearing, and at some point he got his shoulder into my sternum and walked me backward three steps