I find him outside on the porch, under the moon, shorts, black shirt, bare feet. He stands, arms folded across his chest, looking up at the stars. I prop the bike against a tree and wade through the grass and the cactus spurs. I climb the steps and now I’m next to him.
“Hey,” I say, a little out of breath.
“Hey.” His eyes don’t leave the sky.
I think of all the things I want to say to him, and then I don’t say anything. I follow his gaze upward and it’s like a blanket of the deepest, darkest blue, covered in a million tiny pinpricks of light.
He says without looking at me, “What do you want, Captain?”
“I want to tell you I’m sorry. I want to apologize a thousand times and tell you why I think I did what I did, not that there’s any excuse. I want to tell you how scared I am that I just fucked this up, when it’s the best thing that’s happened to me for a long time. You’re the best thing that’s happened to me for a long time. I want this Grady thing to not exist, but it does exist and that’s my fault and I want you to know that I know it’s my fault, no one else’s. I want to tell you how much I hate my dad right now and how confused I am and how lost I feel, but how I know that doesn’t make it better. I want to be here with you, even if I do all the talking and you never speak to me again. I want to have the chance to tell you how I feel and what you mean to me. Like, you’ll never know how much you mean to me. I want to tell you that I don’t want this to be the end of us, right here, right now. I want to ask you to forgive me.”
My throat has gone lumpy and my eyes have gone wet. Miah is looking at me now, not the sky. For a moment, he just stands there. But then he says, “Let’s get out of here.”
Before he can change his mind, I am up and in the truck. I wait, listening to my breath. I sound like I’ve just run a marathon. I focus on breathing in, out. Steady. Calm. I wait, and he doesn’t get in, and he really has changed his mind. But then a thud as something is dropped into the back of the truck, and then the door swings open and he’s climbing in.
* * *
—
We drive in silence, bouncing down Main Road. I have no idea where he’s taking me. I’m trying to think of the right words to say, but there are too many things to say, so we’re both just sitting there. We turn toward the beach on a wide, overgrown trail I don’t recognize. Every time I think I know this island, he takes me down some road like this, somewhere I’ve never been.
We don’t talk and there’s no music except for the cicadas, which seem louder than normal. Trees blur past and we move through the dark, no headlights, fireflies lighting our way. I half expect us to drive until we hit the ocean, but at some point he slows the truck, and then we’re stopped.
He gets out and I get out, and we still haven’t spoken. He grabs something from the bed of the truck—a bag—and I follow him under the tree canopy for what seems like a mile. We cross the inner dunes, the ones closest to the woods, and before we get as far as the beach, he turns into the little valley between the inner and outer dunes. Here, sheltered from the wind, he stops, drops the bag, and hands me a pack of matches.
“What’s this for?”
“It goes with this.” He holds up a bottle of lighter fluid.
“It’s a little hot out for a bonfire, isn’t it?”
But too late: he’s gathering driftwood and stacking it in the basin of the dunes. He douses it with lighter fluid and then he nods at me. I strike the match and drop it onto the wood. I watch as it catches hold and the fire grows, snapping, crackling, flames dancing in the night.
He digs through his backpack and comes up with a notebook, which he hands to me. “Write down every shitty thing you’re too scared to say