“I read an article about passenger pigeons,” he said, in front of their display. “In the nineteenth century there were so many of them they flew in thick clouds, millions, even billions strong. There were stories of them blotting out the sun and nesting in trees until their weight snapped the branches. When they’d fly over towns, people would run inside and come out to find bird shit covering everything.”
I cringed. “I get why Hitchcock didn’t go with carrier pigeons, then.” Dane smiled. “I wish the display was better here. I hate how some of them have cotton eyes instead of glass. And you don’t really get a sense of their movement. Which makes sense for the dinosaur skeletons ’cuz the stillness gives you an impression of their weight and size. But it seems like the birds should look more…fly-y, you know?”
He nodded. “You really like this stuff. The displays.”
“Yeah. When I was in elementary school we took a class trip to the Geology Museum at Rutgers. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Like the world in another time, or from another vantage point, come to life. On one hand it’s just stuff, stuck in boxes. But it’s also, like, a way to actually walk through history or other places.”
I came home from that field trip and told my mom about every single thing I’d seen. She listened and asked questions and never got bored, even though I talked about it for weeks.
“After the field trip, our homework for science class was to pretend it was a thousand years in the future and someone was coming to a museum so we had to make a diorama of what our world looked like. Oh man, I spent weeks on the thing.”
Dane was looking at me intently.
“I kinda kept making them for a while,” I confessed. “They were terrible—shitty paper cutouts in shoe boxes my mom would find for me in the hotel where she worked. But I loved the idea that what you chose to include in the space of the exhibit would tell people as much about the creator as it did about the world. What you chose to exclude, what you put in the center. So many museums have these super-high-tech, interactive exhibits these days. Which are cool, I guess. But I still like these the best. Where if you position things just right, even if they’ve been dead for thousands of years they still seem like they could come to life any minute.”
“Feel that way when I read sci-fi,” Dane said. “It’s a world that doesn’t even exist, but while I’m reading about it, it feels like I live inside it.”
We spoke quietly as we moved through the still rooms with sarcophagi.
“Do you still make them? Dioramas?” he asked a few minutes later.
“Nah, not for years, though this place always makes me want to. There’s no room in our apartment anyway. It’s a one-bedroom, so half the living room is my bedroom.”
It wasn’t ideal, but Sofia and I were used to living in tight quarters. She and Ramona had shared a room growing up, and I had shared one with Adrian and Lucas, so we were well-practiced at navigating around each other.
“Hey, did your article say if carrier pigeons still really carry messages?”
“They’re extinct now,” he said. “Overhunting. The railroads provided access to them. They were so populous that their numbers made hunting them easy. Went from billions of them to none.”
“Jesus, that’s horrible.”
He nodded. “That’s humans.”
* * *
—
“Do you want to get some food?” I asked as we left the museum.
Dane hesitated, shoulders tight again.
“I’m supposed to go to the gym now.”
He said it as if it were an unchangeable appointment, but I was pretty sure he just worked out a lot. Then I realized that he was looking for a natural way to end our date without hurting my feelings by saying he didn’t want to hang out anymore.
“Oh, sure, okay, of course, no problem.”
I made my voice breezy and light and reminded myself that it was only our second date and it was fine to keep things short. He hadn’t agreed to an all-day hangout.
Dane frowned and cracked his knuckles. He looked back at the museum. He looked at me and shook his head.
“Damn it,” he muttered.
“Huh?”
“Okay, let’s get food.”
But he didn’t sound happy about it, and I cringed at the idea that he’d say yes because he could tell I was disappointed.
“No, I don’t wanna mess up your schedule. I should probably go home anyway.”
He made an uninterpretable sound in the back of his throat and steered me toward a park bench.
“We can,” he said. “I mean, I want to.”
He sat stiffly, shoulders bulging beneath his shirt, jaw tensed. I sat cross-legged on the bench next to him, equally uncomfortable.
“Guess I’m a little stuck in my ways,” he muttered. It sounded innocuous, but his jaw was so tight I could see the vein in his neck pulsing.