mean, I had friends whose parents were divorced, but knowing that from the outside is different from feeling it.”
“Maybe it wasn’t about them being happy with each other. Maybe it was about them knowing how to love you that gave you superpowers. My parents couldn’t stand each other, and when they were together, there wasn’t a lot of room for us kids. If they were ever in the same room, I’d turn around and walk the fuck out because it was always going to end in a TV remote or worse getting thrown at you.”
“Seriously?”
“Oh yeah.”
“I’ve never even heard my parents argue. My friend Saz says that’s weird.”
“Maybe there’s a world where parents don’t yell at each other but they talk things out when they fight. I don’t know. I don’t think I saw my dad as an actual, like, person until about a year ago. He was just this invisible force that fucked up my mom’s life and mine.” He stares out at the horizon, as if he sees something—a memory, maybe. “But if he hadn’t done that, I might not be here walking on this beach with you.” He turns those eyes on me and I can see them coming back into focus.
“I wouldn’t be here either. If my parents hadn’t split up.”
Would I trade walking on this beach with Jeremiah Crew if it meant my parents could still be together? Would I trade who I am right now, in this moment, sun shining on me, shark teeth in my hand?
He draws another circle and together we stare down at the sand. I bend over. Pick up the tooth. Hold it up.
I say, “I just wish they could have stayed together and I’d still somehow be here.”
“If they hadn’t split, you’d probably be a different Claude.”
“Probably.”
“What was she like? Pre-island Claude?”
“A big dreamer, wanting to go out and see the world and live a big life somewhere. I was, I don’t know, restless but comfortable, maybe not in my own skin so much as at home, in school. I thought I knew exactly who I was. But I was also pretty naïve. You could say I have a much deeper understanding of how the world works now.” I smile up at him. “My writing teacher told me I needed to feel more to make readers feel. And I used to wish something would happen to me to make my writing more interesting.”
As nothing as these things sound, they’re the hardest things I’ve ever said to anyone. This is me, I think. Take it or leave it.
“So are you writing now?”
For some reason, this makes me go quiet, maybe from some sense of guilt that I should be writing more than I am. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been scribbling things down lately with no real purpose or goal, and I’m not sure I can call that writing.
I say, “Not really.”
He raises the camera and aims it at the crabs scurrying past our feet. “My photos are a way of telling stories but without the pressure of all those words. I used to think of them as a way to capture everything that’s good. Everything my life wasn’t. But now I take pictures of all of it: the sad, the disturbing, the ugly. It’s kind of why I collect bones. They tell a story. Usually a tragic story, because, you know, they’re bones, but to me there’s beauty in that.”
“There’s beauty in every story. And there’s a story in everything.”
“Like these teeth.”
He draws a circle in the sand. I pick up a tooth and hand it to him and I think about what Wednesday said about never getting to know the real Jeremiah Crew. Maybe I am different.
He says, “Or maybe I’ve just been on this island too long.” And he shoots me a grin that I feel all the way in my toes. I look away, directly at the sun, because it isn’t nearly as blinding.
“So what was Pre-island Miah like?”
“You wouldn’t have liked him. Bad boy. Angry at the world. Honestly, it’s like a really reckless, really unhappy person who lived a long time ago. This is the only me I know.” He shrugs, and it’s honest. “That doesn’t mean I don’t wonder who I’d be or what all this would be like if my dad had stayed or been a different person. But it could be that no matter what happened, no matter what he did or who he was, I’d still have ended