she hums to herself now and then, as if she’s listening to a song I can’t hear.
Suddenly I’m filled with all this love. I walk up and, without a word, wrap my arms around her. Mom drops the papers she’s reading and hugs me back, and we stay like this for a long time.
DAY 11
The next afternoon, Miah and I rattle and bump past Rosecroft in the truck, down a dirt path through the scrub. On the dash, the shells and alligator bones and other island relics flash in the reflection of the windshield, disappearing and reappearing as we drive in and out of the tree cover. He is singing, completely off key, as I hold on to the fisherman’s cap so that it doesn’t blow away.
As he sings, I think about second chances and being human. About having no clue whether or not something’s going to work out. I used to believe I knew all there was to know about myself and everyone around me. My world in order. Everything in its place. And now I’m riding in a truck with a boy I’ve just met—a boy I’ve had sex with—who is taking me somewhere I’ve never been.
The truck bumps to a stop on the edge of the marsh. Miah reaches behind the seat and pulls out a pair of rain boots, dark green and crusted with mud. “You’re in luck.”
“You don’t have anything cuter? Like in a red polka dot?”
“Get out of the truck.”
I perch on the running board in my bare feet and pull on one boot and then the other. There’s water in the left one but I’m not taking it off again. Instead I stand in front of him—sundress, fisherman’s cap, mud boots, left foot squishing in an inch of standing water—and squint up at him like, Ta-da.
He says, “You’re officially an islander, Claude Henry. You’re one of us now.” In that moment, they’re the loveliest words he could ever say, as if all my life I’ve been waiting for them. He’s shoeless, of course, and wearing the super-short military shorts.
“You do know you look like a giant dork in those.” I nod to the shorts.
“I actually prefer wild-animal-wrangling, shark-teeth-collecting, freedom-dispensing warrior. Why don’t you touch them, Captain? Go ahead—you know you want to. They’re the softest things on earth.” He kisses me. “Next to your lips.”
I kiss him back and then we’re basically making out against the truck. His arm goes around me, and he’s pulling me in, and I’m pressed up against him.
“Ready?” he says into my ear, and at first I think he means, Are you ready to have sex again? Here, with me, in this truck?
“Ready.” Yes I am.
But then he’s slinging the camera over his shoulder and we’re off, and I’m following him down this path, which opens onto a vista of sky and water. We go tromping across the sand, packed flat and hard, not soft and white like Little Blackwood Beach and the dunes. The marsh water cuts in and out, and we wade through the shallows, hopping over the deeper sections. He extends a hand and I take it. When we come to water the size of a small river, he stands there.
“I don’t like the look of the creek.”
“That’s a creek?”
“The tide’s still coming in, which means we’re going to have to swim when we come back.” He frowns at my sundress.
“You’re not the only badass here.”
He goes first, and the water only comes up to his knees. He waves to me and extends his hand, and I go in, dress plastering to me like a second skin, and wade through sludge. I push in front of him and claw my way up onto the shore, into the marsh grass.
He’s up after me, and we’re already muddy and wet. He leads the way, through the reeds and onto the beach, what there is of it. All at once, the sand turns to mud, thick and dark and suctiony. My boots make a thwup-thwup sound as I walk. It’s a balancing act, trying to go across it without sinking, and I feel it pulling me down, down, down. Whenever I get stuck, Miah takes my arm and wrestles me out.
“Pluff mud,” he says. “Some people call it marsh mud. That grass growing out of it is spartina.”
“I know so much about nature now.”
This makes him laugh. He pulls off his shirt, and at first I think he’s going to just keep going and shed his