The Youth Fellowship had lost its way. At the crossroads, the eldest among them, Angus, had, huffily, wondered aloud which way to turn. The others were preoccupied in the back rows of the van while Frieda has obligated herself up front. Although he hadn’t actually asked her which was the best way forward, she pointed to the right. She watched Angus consider her in his peripheral vision, shake his head in that exasperated way he seemed to enjoy, and steer them all in the wrong direction.
It had been Freida’s idea to visit the Discovery Center in the first place, and now she knew enough to do nothing but await the blame. Frieda folded her map and leaned back against the headrest with an inaudible sigh. A geography major at their junior college, she had been smitten in her first semester with Angus. She initially admired his direct approach, introducing himself to her before any of the other boys. Although he had spoken to her only for a moment, Frieda had felt an immediate sense of relief, having survived her first social encounter as a freshman.
He singled her out after that, and she had not paused to think why. When he subsequently fit her into his daily schedule, she had been agreeable, had gone readily along, had not questioned. “Teacher’s pet,” he’d called her.
His ceaseless and eager manner of explanation must handily suit his position as a second-grade student teacher, Frieda had told herself. She would have liked to have been able to deem it a leadership quality. “Verbose” was the word she had overheard one teacher use in describing him to another.
He had, among other quirks, a penchant for taking long strides when walking, increasing his pace until he was whole lengths ahead. Then he’d throw instructions and admonishments back over his shoulder. Frieda became accustomed to it for herself, but she felt for the two stray lines of students she often witnessed struggling to keep up.
As she advanced in her own coursework, Frieda had felt herself growing impatient with Angus’s numerous directives and methodical ways. In situations like the one they were in presently, she’d unwittingly begun the habit of twisting his promise ring nimbly up to the tip of her finger, deliberating the fit, then guiltily pushing it back down where it belonged on her left hand.
She closed her eyes and thought back to her initial enthusiasm at the Youth Fellowship organizational meeting. Ever since she’d seen the promotional flyer picturing it, the current installation had called to her, “Hands on the Future.”
She had unfolded and laid out a crisp new map, smoothing out the creases as she had begun to speak. It had given her something to do with her hands, which helped hide her trepidation about proposing the best way to travel. She had sharpened a pencil to finely trace out a scenic route that would nonetheless allow them plenty of time to enjoy all the exhibition had to offer.
Immediately impatient with her fussing, Angus had frowned, declaring the motorway far superior. Frieda heard herself begin to protest, but she never finished. When Angus had abruptly pushed her map aside, he overturned a cup and saucer, and the marks she had plotted on the map leached weakly away. “Clean-Up Time,” Angus had said over his shoulder.
He stalked into the meeting room adjacent, where she heard him strike up a conversation with another boy about girls. “Frieda?” Angus had said. “She’s just another one of my pupils!”
So there wouldn’t be too long a pause before the laughter he fully expected, Frieda had crossed the threshold. She crouched down at Angus’s side in an exaggerated fashion to make herself appear even shorter than she actually was, helping him to be successful in carrying off the joke.
Miles later, Angus told the gas-pump attendant in no uncertain terms that it was his girlfriend’s darned map that had gotten them lost on their way to the Discovery Center. The word “girlfriend” would have swayed Frieda in months past, but today it hung like one of the placards scattered about the filling station.
The attendant hesitated, casting over him from head to foot, and narrowed her eyes slightly. Then she walked purposefully toward Angus as she spoke, directing the van back the way it had come. Angus quickly began backtracking, but the woman didn’t stop until she had him pinned up against the driver’s side door.
Unaccustomed to staring, Frieda could not avert her eyes from what was transpiring. “What moxie!” she had thought, immediately chastising herself lest she uttered such a thing. “Dawn,” she did hear herself say aloud, reading the name neatly embroidered on a patch over the heart.
“Bear right,” Dawn said, adjusting the knot of her bandana and walking around to the passenger’s side of the van. She placed both hands on the ledge of the window and stuck her head just inside the cab. “Once you’ve found the center,” she said, looking at Frieda. “You’ll know.”
Angus shifted back into the driver’s seat and did as he had been told, clumsily maneuvering the van in the assigned direction. Frieda smiled tentatively at Angus. “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” she almost said aloud, although she knew it would be just another hopeless entreaty.
She looked at Angus again and smiled even though he continued to stare straight ahead. “We still have plenty of time,” she finally convinced herself to say. They actually did have plenty of time. They had only been on the road for an hour. Frieda looked at her wristwatch covertly several times to reassure herself of this, as if a faulty mechanism of the hour hand had to be the reason each minute of the journey was extending itself beyond measure.
Only when a there was a dust-up among those in the far back of the van did Angus respond, adjusting the rear-view mirror to see them better. Then he resumed his usual stance, issuing a warning over his shoulder. Frieda turned her head toward the passenger’s window, surprised to find herself looking straight through her own fixed smile. Frieda thought about what a refreshing change it would make to be able to lead and have others follow. Somewhat depleted and drowsy, she thought about how fortunate Dawn was, having the ability to literally stand her ground.
As Frieda’s dream bumped along, a new girl appeared and approached Angus for directions to Fellowship Hall. For reasons Frieda could not discern, they were all standing on the playing field at the edge of campus, even though the pages of a rule book strewn on the bench appeared to be printed in a foreign language, and Angus kept dropping the ball.
The new girl found nothing amiss, and gazed at Angus with great intention and admiration as he spoke, hanging on every word. Slowly, a thick fog began rising from the turf and obscuring the others. Frieda tried to clear the cobwebs away, but she could not brush aside the realization that the enamored young girl used to be her. Finding herself cloaked and alone, Frieda lifted her hands to her face as if to mold it, but found she no longer had the ability to feign a pleasant expression.
She startled awake, at once ashamed and heated. The van was passing under the exhibition banner and into the expanse of the parking lot. For the sake of all the others, she shook it off and perked herself up. “Hands on the Future!” she fairly shouted.
Angus disembarked from the van and headed immediately for the entrance while all of the other members helped one another out of the sliding side door and sorted through the pile of their rucksacks. By the time they got inside, Angus was at the head of the line for tickets. When Angus turned and saw Frieda, she knew what he intended to do.
“And one child!” Angus said to the attendant, with an actual guffaw.
The ticket taker momentarily paused, and a few in the Fellowship tittered, but Frieda wasn’t in the mood to abide it. She didn’t feel like laughing, and she didn’t laugh, even when Angus elbowed her. She’d wanted to ask him, “When is it your turn to yield?”
As they proceeded along the darkened hallways, the lights on either side glowed like beacons. Her eyes adjusting, Frieda bumped into a display table. She looked down and saw thick prisms of crystal splintering beams of light into slivers. What had started as bold strokes of color stretched out so far across the surface that they appeared fragile, almost invisible. Frieda looked on with a mounting sense of apprehension. Before she realized what she was doing, she nudged all of the divided segments closer and closer until the fragmented shafts of light became whole again.
She looked up when she heard Angus intermittently barking out comments and commands, but she didn’t have to catch up to vividly picture him tipping his chin over his shoulder as he spoke, in that gesture at once petulant and bewildering, indicating others should follow him.
Frieda felt her thumb intuitively twist the band of her ring. While trying to take in the scientific advances and make sense of the illustrated theories surrounding her, she formulated her own inquiry: “If two parts of a promise separate, how long does it take to for a vow to dissolve?”
Frieda navigated her own way in the veritable blackness. She came upon a box that invited you to don an opaque sleeve and glove, choosing randomly from a case obscured from view. You were to determine the origin of the object you chose and afterward locate the answer key to affirm your guess. Frieda first touched a group of rounded and irregular shapes. Some didn’t weigh much, like passing thoughts, but some were heavy and made her deliberate. She rolled one of them around in her palm like a talisman, feeling her ring band catch in the fissures.
Then she heard the others exclaiming from where they had gathered farther on. It appeared they were attempting to graph stroboscopes in various patterns. She started to make her way to them, shielding her eyes from the emanating light.
It was then that she realized her ring was missing. She quickly returned and scoured the box of hidden treasure, but all of the objects had lost their telling power, and her ring was nowhere within it. Instinctively, she hung her head, plunged her hands into the pockets of her cardigan, and retraced her steps, seeking out any hint of a glimmer.
Absently, she ran into a member of the group where they had converged upon another display. Frieda felt herself being nudged to the front. A boxy metallic screen was positioned in the middle of a square table between two identical chairs. She was careful to withdraw only her right hand as she sat down in the chair opposite the one Angus already occupied. She caught her grainy reflection in the monitor.
It reminded her of the Etch-A-Sketch game she played when she was younger. She would work the dials beneath a silvered flat screen, executing hundreds of straight lines and finagling difficult curves until she had created a self-portrait as suggested on the box. No matter how carefully she tried to carry it with her, the image she had perfected shifted too easily. Even small steps could be disastrous, leaving her messy and distorted. She would have to turn the game upside down and shake it hard in all different directions to completely erase herself. Despite her sister’s urging, it was sometimes days before she could summon the energy to try again.
Angus was busy studying the instructions and informing the others what the experiment entailed. Any one of them could have already completed the exercise by the time he was done spelling it out, but no one seemed to think it worth mentioning. When Frieda turned the knob to the right on her side of the table, and from his side Angus turned the knob to the left, they were to see half of his face and half of her face projected as a joined image on both sides of the monitor.
“Let’s hear Frieda count to three,” Angus said, addressing the Fellowship more than her, but Frieda pushed her left hand deeper into her pocket, and did as instructed.
Even after counting to three several times, it was all for naught. Frieda’s side steadily projected only her own reflection. Her hair, her clothes, her features were all the same, but as Frieda stared at the convex glass, she saw herself a bit differently, too. Her eyes were wider, her complexion was a shade more intense, and she noticed she had a little grit.
They heard Angus grumbling all the way as he returned to the main entrance and fetched a member of the management. Frieda, resisting the urge to apologize, inched from the table and moved away, catching, out of the corner of her eye, their installing a sign that read “Pardon Our Appearance.”
At loose ends, she didn’t bother watching where she was going, but allowed her feet to guide her, moving beyond the other fellows until she found herself alone at the tail end of the exhibition. Pausing, she glanced up, surprised to see gemmed webs of light descending upon her.
They clung to her like a new friend, and she suddenly had the urge to hug herself. She stretched out both of her arms and caught sight of her left hand, actually, she determined, more unencumbered than bare. Frieda felt lighter than she had ever felt, dawning a second skin as the ethereal web clung to her hair, decorated her face, embraced her shoulders, and turned her fully around like the spiraling quartz constellation suspended above with translucent thread.
All she could hear now was a score she seemed to be conducting with her own motion. When she moved gingerly, unseen chimes whispered to her. When she moved swiftly, the sound came again, fuller and more eclectic. She moved her arm up, and the notes rose higher. She extended a steady hand, and the notes held. As the surrounding panels orchestrated her every movement into song, she became more and more intrigued with creating her own direction.
She pointed north, then south, and the music followed. She stretched out her arms and began swinging east and west. Then she swung northwest, then southeast, then southwest, then northeast. She created a compass, thinking herself not lost, but found. What was it Dawn had said? “When you find the center, you’ll know.” Now Frieda did feel like laughing! She whirled until her former worries waned into wordlessness, and her pure resounding chime carried her into the next phase.
Acknowledging the calm settling within, Frieda opened her eyes. Just as featured in the flyer, there it was, finally within reach. Like a crystal ball somewhat crazed with myriad possibilities of the future, a large crystalline orb was generating hundreds of colored rays in an ecstatic rainbow. Rather than a harbinger of danger, its sporadic motion mesmerized, and drew her to it with the inherent attraction she had been craving all along.
Frieda watched the colored rays rave red from the center in time as she caught her breath. Bright blue and green vibrated in welcome as she stepped closer. When she reached up and touched the crown of her head, purple unfurled from the core. When she stood on her toes, oranges and yellows came forth, blooming. In an act of faith or daring, she laid her face gently on the transparent arc, and was rewarded with colors crazing like a million stray thoughts unifying one brilliant idea. At once, she knew she had it!
She kicked off her loafers and began to rub her feet along the carpet. She bent down and soundly rubbed her legs all the way up to her waist, hearing her slip crackle along her nylons and wool skirt. Furiously, she rubbed the forearms, elbows, and chest of her sweater until the fibers stood. Moving swiftly up to her forehead, she unclipped the fascinator from her set curls and roughly combed through her hair with the splayed fingers of both hands.
Careful not to waste one single spark of what comprised this moment, she leapt toward the globe with open arms, intent on absorbing the entirety of this astonishing shock—captivating her fitful breath, animating her tender pulse, and in a finite and merciful stroke, restoring her wayward heart home.