I tried to settle into the white egg of my sleeper pod. I spilled water all over myself and had to cram my eyes shut during takeoff so that my stomach didn’t fly out of my ass. I managed to doze for a while, somehow, though I don’t remember dreaming, only a blackout worthy of my best tequila benders. A sea of green beneath the plane greeted me when I woke up, with trees that seemed to stretch out forever. I bounced into one of the open pods to get a different look.

“Great Basin National Forest,” Yusuf said, a flash of his white teeth poking out from behind his lips. “Have you seen it from up here before?”

Looking back, it lights me up to think about how much courage it must’ve taken him to start talking to me out of nowhere, when he was usually happier staring out the window in silence. That was the longest string of words I’d gotten from him, with his eyes that seemed to dodge everything finally settling on me. Some accent I couldn’t quite clock flavored the low tune of his voice. His secret-identity glasses cut black lines across his face. His dark hair wasn’t short and wasn’t long, a messy, curly mop with shorter sides. He was handsome enough that it’d take me two drinks, easy, to screw up the balls to make a pass in a bar—sorry, professor, my dog ate my homework.

“Never,” I said.

I actually cried, just a few tears and a snotty nose, as I looked down at the forest that from here looked like the green crocheted comforter of my mom’s bed. She’d told me stories, when I was a kid, of shriveled-up plains, and ozone holes, and droughts torching the green fields of what used to be the United States. Before the trees spliced with quick-grow genes borrowed from bamboo birthed pop-up forests around the globe to suck up the carbon, before the United Arab Emirates-led desalination of millions of gallons of seawater a year to be used for crop irrigation, before the refreezing of the ice caps. Even though that had come a few years too late to stop the flooding of coastal cities, and the sinking into the sea of the small Portuguese island in the middle of the Atlantic where my mom was from.

One night after she’d spread little kids’ history picture books on our splotched blue carpet, I’d dreamed of elephants with rib bones poking out, of tigers konking over from heat, and I’d screamed myself awake.

“Querido, that was before we learned to work together to fix things,” she’d told me, kissing the sweat on my forehead.