Field Notes on Love

Prologue

Mae wakes, as she does each morning, to the sound of a train.

Even before she opens her eyes, she can feel the low rumble of it straight through to her toes, but it’s the whistle that finally tears at the thin gauze of sleep. She turns over to peer through the blinds. Just beyond their backyard, a long chain of silver cars is streaking past.

Two weeks from now, she’ll be standing in the middle of Penn Station, waiting for a train not so different from this one. The minute she steps on board, she’ll no longer be a fixed point on the map, the way she’s been her whole life.

On the other side of the ocean, a boy named Hugo is holding the tickets that will carry them both across the country. He’s thinking of that old math problem, the one where two different trains leave from two different stations traveling at two different speeds.

The point was always to figure out where they’d meet.

But nobody ever explained what would happen once they did.

They both sit very still, three thousand miles between them.

Hugo is staring at the word printed neatly across the bottom of the tickets: California.

Mae is watching out her window as the train disappears.

If you saw them, you might think they were waiting for something.

But what they actually are—what they’ve each always been—is ready.