a long time. I try not to concentrate on the blanket and the image I have of Miah laying me down on it. Then I look at him more closely and he’s wearing these super-short shorts, the kind my mom and dad wore in gym class back in the 1980s.
“What in the world?”
He shines his flashlight on them and now I can see they’re a dark camouflage green. “Official shorts of the US Army Rangers. Military grade. Basically, only badasses wear them.”
“And you.” I smile.
“Including me.” He smiles. “My work shorts. Better to climb trees with. Better to clear trails with, especially in this heat. Easier to pull off when skinny-dipping.” And then he drops his eyes and lets them linger on my mouth, which causes my heart to do an extra thump-thump. His eyes meet mine again. “Let’s go.”
Yes, let’s go. Let’s go right now. Let’s go back inside this truck so you can kiss me all over my body or let’s go to the beach and lay that blanket down on the sand….But now he’s walking, and what do you know, the shorts are starting to grow on me.
We pick our way across the dunes in darkness. When we come to a pool of water that floods our path, reaching up into the long grass on either side, Miah says, “Just a little water left over from the storm. Jump on.” He turns around.
“What?”
“Come on, Captain. Jump on.”
“I’ll break your back.”
“No you won’t.”
So I hitch up my dress to mid-thigh and climb on. We almost tip over because one of my legs is flailing around and the other is hanging on to him, and I’m practically strangling him with my left arm while the right one is grabbing at the air. I send up a silent prayer: Please don’t let me break his back. Please don’t let him wonder what the hell I’ve been eating to make me weigh this much.
I’m finally secure, and he’s got his arms hooked under my legs. And he’s wading right through the water, which barely brushes my toes. I lean into him. Too soon we come out onto a great, wide expanse of beach.
He throws down the bundle he’s been carrying and I pull off my shoes. He does a handstand while he waits. Hangs out for a couple of seconds, legs in the air. And then he’s right side up again and we start walking.
I wait for him to take my hand. To kiss me. To try to get it on with me right here under this moon on the blanket he brought.
Instead he says, “Want to walk?”
“Yes.”
So we do. The waves catch us sometimes and the water is warm. There is no one awake but us, and we are the only ones in all the world. Jeremiah Crew and Claude Henry. Just the two of us. We bump into each other, arms brushing, close together, but we don’t hold hands.
After a while he says, “We don’t have to talk about your parents, but if you need to, this is a good place to do it. I’ve had a lot of conversations with myself at night on this beach.”
And, like that, I can feel it all wanting to flood out—the same things I’ve already told him and more. But I also want to preserve this night, protect it from anything sad or painful, which is why I tell him about my parents Before, how they never fought, how they always got along. How it was always the three of us, all of my life, which is why I never noticed the plumes of smoke or the earth tremors.
He says, “People can be really good at only showing us what they want us to see.”
“I think I’m learning that the hard way.”
Then he tells me about his mom, who has to go to bed for days, sometimes weeks, at a time, and about the way he’s had to take care of her for the past five years and raise his four sisters. When he talks about his mother, I can hear the heaviness in his voice—burden, love, responsibility, resentment, protectiveness. All these things weighing it down. And then he tells me about his sisters, one by one, and his voice goes light as a balloon floating up into the sky. I learn that Kenzie and Lila love to read. That Kenzie is already winning awards for her photography, and Lila has seen Harry Styles in concert three times. I