a cactus spur?”
“You’ll see.”
He and my mom head up the path, but I keep going just to show this boy that I don’t care about cactus spurs or snakes or anything else that might live in the grass. I step up onto the porch, which creaks like an omen, and look down at my shoes, now covered in tiny green balls. I reach down to pluck one off, and it pricks my finger, drawing blood. I take off my shoes and leave them there. There is a single animal skull sitting by the front door.
Inside, I’m hit with a blast of air-conditioning, which I wish I could drink. The house is divided in two, a bedroom and bathroom on each side. A note from Addy welcomes us. Make yourselves at home. I love you. See you soon. The kitchen and dining room and living room kind of blur into each other, and there’s a fireplace opposite the couch. The ceilings are high. There’s a cramped office off the kitchen. And the best thing of all: a reading nook with built-in bookshelves on either side of a window seat and a large dormer window looking out toward the inn.
I take the bedroom on the left, closer to the inn, so that my mom can have the larger one facing the woods. I go into the room and shut the door and stare out at the wall of trees and at the horse that stands outside my window. I suddenly feel this punch of homesickness, right in the throat. The floor is bare and dark. The bed is too large. There are two windows, not three, and they are in the wrong place. The walls are pale yellow, not bright green, and covered in someone else’s art. It’s too quiet here, and I miss my mom, even though I can hear her in the next room talking to the boy.
I check my phone, and there’s no signal. I text Saz anyway and hope by some miracle it goes through. When there’s a knock on my door, I don’t bother looking up. “Come in.”
It swings open and the boy is there with my bag. He comes right in, lifts the bag up onto the trunk at the end of the bed, and says, “Holy shit.”
“Thanks. Bye.”
“What’s in there?”
“Bricks, books, maybe a body or two.” I turn my back on him, hoping he’ll get the hint.
“I’ve found when carrying bricks or bodies or—for example—an attitude, a backpack works better. Easier on the shoulders. It’s all about weight distribution.”
I set the phone down because apparently it’s useless and frown at him. “Is there anything to do here? On this island? In hell?”
“So you’re glad you came.”
“It’s a dream.”
He gives me a look and it’s hard to read, a little less I’m so charming, a little more real.
“What?”
“You just remind me of someone. Anything else I can do for you, my lady?” Just like that, the I’m so charming is back.
“I’m good, thanks.”
In the doorway he turns. Beyond him I can see my mom in the kitchen, putting things away. He says, “There’s everything to do here. Depending on your attitude, of course.” He walks out, and I sit watching as he helps my mom, as they talk and laugh, as he scratches Dandelion under the chin. I get up and close my door.
* * *
—
In an hour, everything is put away in the closet, which is too narrow, and the dresser, the one that wobbles when you open it. There is a framed photo hanging on the wall above the dresser of a freckled and grinning twelve-year-old boy. He is shirtless and barefoot, standing on a beach, dunes rising up behind him, and this is Addy’s son, Danny, the one who drowned.
I sink onto the bed and write Saz a real message: So my mom and I took off and I didn’t tell you. We’re living on a remote island now because my dad is having some sort of emotional midlife crisis and can’t have a family anymore. You’re in love and I’m still a virgin and probably always will be because Wyatt is 10,000 miles away. And we’re not going to the same school in the fall, so I don’t know what that means for you and me.
I write more. Pause. Reread it. And then I delete it. Up on the wall Danny grins back at me, and in spite of my broken heart and the lump that now lives in my