we’re in a small town. She looks around and smiles, smelling the loose blue air of the ocean. Wrapping her arms around herself, she follows me into the second-hand bookshop.
The owner isn’t here, the girl serving says. And he hasn’t left a note about the Walcott. ‘We emailed,’ I tell her, and she says he hardly ever checks his emails. ‘I keep the database up to date, though, so if it’s online that we have one, it’ll be in the poetry section.’
I walk towards it, and start looking through. ‘I don’t think it’s here,’ I say, searching in the Ws. Rachel’s kneeling at my feet, pulling out books, checking the titles, reading the backs. She looks inside them too, flicking through to check for notes, for history. She looks up and catches me staring, so I quickly pull out some books and act like I’m searching. She goes back to her searching too.
She stands after a while. I take out books, showing her the titles I love, and she looks through them, carefully. ‘You’re a word convert,’ I say.
‘Maybe,’ she says, and I notice a blue bathing suit strap showing next to the neck of her dress. I touch it without thinking.
‘Will you swim with me?’ she asks.
‘I’m unprepared,’ I say.
‘I’ve seen you in your underwear before,’ she says.
‘You’ve seen me naked,’ I point out.
She stares at me, right at me, in a way that nearly knocks me over. ‘You have very large eyes,’ I tell her. I’ve always known it, but never known it before.
‘All the better to blink at you,’ she says.
We’re standing very close, and if I hadn’t kissed Amy, if I were single now, I know I would ask Rachel if I could kiss her again. I don’t believe she did kiss me to make Amy jealous. I don’t know why I believed it then. I know Rachel. As much as she’s changed. I still know her. And if she didn’t want to kiss me, she wouldn’t have.
‘What?’ she asks.
‘What what?’ I ask.
‘You’re smiling.’
‘Am I? I don’t know. I guess I just worked something out.’
Before I can speak, she points and says with wonder in her voice, ‘You’re holding a Walcott.’
I hadn’t even noticed it was in my hands.
We eat at a café in town. We order and stare at the Walcott. ‘I feel like it’s a sign,’ I say.
‘I do, too,’ Rachel says, but neither of us says what we think it’s a sign of. We keep smiling at each other and smiling at the book and I can’t stop thinking about kissing her.
‘We should ask questions we always wanted to ask,’ I say while we’re eating.
‘About?’ she asks.
‘About each other.’
‘I know everything about you,’ she says.
‘Impossible. There are always more things to be known. I’ll prove it. I will ask questions of myself, and you will answer them, and we’ll see if you get them right.’
‘And shall we call the game Narcissism?’
‘We shall call the game Henry. Question one: Who was my first kiss?’
‘Amy,’ she says.
‘Incorrect.’
‘Who?’
‘You. I kissed you on the mouth in Year 4.’
‘Really?’
‘Kiss-chasey. You don’t remember?’
‘I have no recollection,’ she says. ‘But trauma will do that to a person.’
‘Question two: What is my favourite colour?’
‘Red. The colour of Amy’s hair.’
‘Incorrect. It was red, and now it’s blue,’ I say, looking at her eyes. Closely followed by lemon. She looks right back at me. It doesn’t get weird. It doesn’t get awkward. This is Rachel. She throws a piece of bread at me when it’s time to stop staring.
‘Should we play the game of Rachel?’ I ask.
She looks out of the window, in the direction of the ocean. She says, yes. But the game of Rachel really needs to be played on a beach.
Rachel
holding the dead here with their stories
I keep telling myself that there’s some other way to interpret the game that Henry’s playing with me, some other way to read the way he looked at me in the bookstore. But it’s my eyes that are blue. My dress that is lemon. Me who was his first kiss. It’s the last night of the world and Amy is far, far away. The Walcott, both of us are thinking, is some kind of sign.
‘Should we play the game of Rachel?’ he says, and when I think about that game, I know that it really needs to be played on a beach.
We’re on the peninsula, less than two hours out of the city, the opposite direction from Sea Ridge. The ocean will look different