A Different Kind of Light

"Bats die all the time, Jeremy." That was Christa's perspective. She didn't want me to take this internship in California. She wanted me to go backpacking through Europe with her. But she said it: bats die all the time. They don't stop for your vacation.

We traveled opposite directions when the semester ended, and she broke up with me when her plane landed at Heathrow. She's been sending me drunk pictures ever since. Tonight it's a blurry shot of a make-out in Budapest, so I guess she's having fun. The guy in the photo doesn't look enough like me that I'm flattered. I don't have anything to send back.

It's three in the morning in Budapest. I checked. It's six p.m. in California. The barracks I live in have undrinkable water, grainy satellite TV, and cell service that only works if you stand on the gray boulder in the parking lot between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. And then there's Cassidy Vorchak. Cassidy, much like Christa, couldn't care less about bats, but she wants an impressive resume when she applies to law school. She's spending the summer educating the public on white-nose syndrome, crawling through caves, and drinking to keep the boredom at bay. Well, I drink. Cassidy listens to podcasts about the LSATs and takes notes on legal pads because she's a literal kind of person. I could send Christa a picture of Cassidy, I guess. She'd eat her heart out.

Cassidy's the prettiest girl I've ever seen. She also hates me. There's still hope for one of those things to change.

** ** **

I've been told I'm a polarizing guy. My nose has been broken a couple of times, but I have great teeth and a smile that makes girls feel like they're being seen for the very first time. Direct quote from my grandmother, and she's not the type to lie.

Cassidy showed up to our internship with a boyfriend at the other end of a telephone number. He liked to call once a week, never between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., and would stay on the line for less than ten minutes. She dumped him after a month, which meant that one of the three women living in the barracks was now single. The other two are old enough to be my mother, not to mention married and unmoved by my charms. They stay here to avoid a three-hour weekday commute, and go home on the weekend.

Both are lovely, but they can't hold a candle to Cassidy.

I didn't make a pass at her after she dumped her boyfriend. I just told her she looked lovely before we started the trek into 5 Mile Cave. Cass glared at me and stopped wearing makeup after that.

It's not like mascara matters when you're in a cave, and she still looks nice. But I don't say that, because she doesn't like compliments. At least not from me. Cassidy doesn't like anything from me. I've offered her dinner, and beer, and board games, and an illuminating lecture on white-nose syndrome, because as I said before, she really doesn't care about bats, and she should know something.

She doesn't talk to me at work. She shuts the door to her room at the end of the day, only coming out to microwave those sad plastic frozen meals that people resigned to dying alone eat.

That is not the kind of meal Cassidy ought to be eating.

** ** **

The caves we work in are lava tubes, which means they suck. They range from comfortable ceiling heights that require no contorting down to ceilings so low you do an army-crawl and bruise your entire body on the knobby cauliflower cave floor.

Cassidy panics in the middle of an army-crawl, and even though the cave is less than a foot in height she has four feet of room on either side. She could sidle to her right and then forward, but she doesn't.