a couple of years ago, but he’s not ready to talk about it.
His favorite color is blue like the sky, or green like the trees.
His middle name is Shepherd. For approximately three minutes in ninth grade, he tried going by Shep.
His favorite song is “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night, not just because his name is in the lyrics, but because it captures the feeling of what it’s like for him living on this island.
If he could live anywhere other than here, it would be somewhere out west, a place where the land is open and the people are broad-minded and easygoing and they leave you alone when you want them to.
The photo he’s proudest of taking is the one of the heart-shaped deer vertebrae. He likes the simplicity of it. He likes that he didn’t have to try hard to capture a feeling, like he does sometimes with other photos. He likes that it’s honest.
Not all boys are the same. The way I touched Shane or Matteo or even Wyatt is different from the way I touch Miah because they are different people. It’s like I had to think about it more with Shane and the others. Through a lot of trial and error, I had to learn the things they liked and the things they didn’t. But touching Miah is more instinctive, as if my body and my hands and my mouth knew his from the beginning.
Most of all, he learns me—as in all of me—and I learn him. And in this moment, right here on this island, right now, we fit.
THE THINGS I LEARN ABOUT MYSELF
I love:
The way he kisses me just behind the ear and at the curve of my throat where neck meets collarbone.
The way he hums into my skin, making it vibrate.
The way his hands are rough, gentle, strong, soft, light as a breeze.
The way he explores me, as if he’s creating a map of all my erogenous zones—the places that make me laugh and smile and sigh.
The way his breath feels on my hip bone, on my inner thigh.
The way he looks at me just before he kisses me, like I’m all there is in the world.
The way I fit into him afterward, head on chest, shoulder under his arm, leg over his.
The way I feel strong and beautiful. The way I know my body like I never have before. The way this body of mine feels desirable, powerful, invincible, and free. Completely and utterly free.
DAY 15
Another box arrives from my dad. The moment I open it, I can smell it—home—and I’m hit with a wave of homesickness, the kind that lodges in your throat so that you can’t swallow or breathe.
Dear Clew,
Counting the days till I see you. Until then, here are some of your favorite Mary Grove-isms: thumbprint cookies from Joy Ann, nonpareils from Taggart’s Chocolates, the disgusting sour balls from Veach’s Candy, and the latest issue of the paper, because I know you and your mom like to read the Everyday People column, and this is a good one.
See you soon.
Love,
Dad
I dig through the green-and-red reindeer tissue paper that lines the box. I pop a nonpareil in my mouth and browse through the Mary Grove Tribune. My mom and I used to read Everyday People to my dad like we were doing some sort of stage show. “I need to set that to music,” he’d said one time. “Maybe an opera.” And for the next week, the three of us sang our favorite lines to each other in our loudest operatic voices. For a minute I can hear us. I sing a few lines of the column and then start reading the article he’s flagged with a Jane Austen Band-Aid he must have found in my bathroom cabinet.
I laugh out loud, and for a minute I picture my dad reading this same article, about an elderly widow who made a giant American flag out of dryer lint. He would have been sitting on the screened porch, drinking coffee out of his favorite Sex Pistols mug, the one I got him on Father’s Day when I was nine. The only mug he’s used since then. I can see his face, the way he must have smiled at the paper because he wouldn’t have been able to help himself. The way he must have jogged into the house, one finger holding the page, to search for the weirdest