the binoculars, and I do. Then she tells me she wants down and the second her feet touch the ground she runs off again with Josie and Jenny to get ice cream.
Alone again, I stand staring at the faraway glow of the volcano. It feels like I’m waiting for something. A disaster? A sign? I don’t know.
Then I become aware of Nick standing next to me, the orange light accentuating the sharpness of his small, upturned nose. It’s like a ski jump, Nick’s nose.
My breath seizes. Oh my god, I asked him to have sex with me, and now what?
Am I really going to go with option one?
“Nice evening to see a volcano, don’t you think?” He turns to me. “Apparently there’s a tour where you can hike down to a spot where the lava is going into the ocean. That would have been pretty awesome. And there’s a boat tour, too. This is still cool, though,” he says.
“Actually, it’s hot,” I say.
He makes a sound that’s a cross between a snort and a laugh. Then silence. In the far, far distance, the volcano lets out a spray of hot, liquid rock. “So,” Nick says finally.
Which is how I know we’re going to talk about it. It. What I said.
“So . . . ,” I reply.
“I have a question about what happened earlier.”
“At the restaurant?” Of course he means the restaurant.
“Yes,” he confirms.
“So, what’s your question?”
“My question is, why?”
“Why?”
“Why did you ask me to have sex with you?”
My heart bangs into my ribs. “I—uh—I’m kind of going through something right now.”
“I noticed. But like what, exactly?”
For all of three seconds, I’m tempted to tell him. It would be so good to tell somebody. Get it off my chest. This stuff feels like it’s sitting there like a stack of weights. “Well, my parents, you see . . . and then I just broke up with my—” I start, but I don’t want to get into it. “I didn’t—and then I saw—” Oh god, I’m going with option two, which is, I realize, even worse than option one. “I’ve had a lapse of sanity, I think.”
He nods quietly. “So you didn’t mean it.”
But here’s the thing: I did.
Having sex with Nick would probably be a mistake. But maybe I want to make a mistake. A huge mistake. A mind-bending, colossal, unmistakable mistake, a mistake that means I’m alive and I am a human teenage girl and I am fallible and back off, everyone. I am not a fucking square!
“I did mean it,” I say, louder than I mean to. “I’m sixteen, and I feel like I’ve never done anything remotely risky or exciting, and it feels like everyone around me is doing things, and—well, I won’t get into the details of what they’re doing, but—I want to do things. I want to feel something besides guilt, I guess, and what do I have to even be so guilty about? Nothing. I refuse to feel guilty about the things other people do. I want to do things. I want to feel things. Yes. Yes, I meant it. I do. Mean it. Yes.”
“Wow. That’s a lot to unpack,” Nick says. “But I agree.”
I glance over at him. “You do?”
“Well, I didn’t understand all of that, but what I did get, I agree with. My life is super boring, if I’m being honest. I keep thinking, is this it? Seriously? This is my life?”
I start nodding compulsively. “Exactly.”
“I want to do things!” he says.
“So you want to have sex,” I confirm.
It’s dark, but I get the sense that he’s turning red. “Yes,” he says. “I meant it, too. At first I said yes because that’s what came out of my mouth the second you asked—knee-jerk reaction, or whatnot. But I’ve been thinking about it for the past hour, and yeah. Yes. That’s an affirmative.”
Now it’s my turn. “Why?”
“I’m a sixteen-year-old boy,” he explains.
“Happy birthday, by the way.”
“Thanks. Anyway, sex occupies like seventy-eight percent of my thoughts these days.” He sees my expression and adds, “But it should be special, right? With the right girl. At the right place. And what could be better than Hawaii?”
There it is again, that word. Special. But I feel fluttery inside, actual physical arousal, all my lady parts revving up just talking about having sex. This sort of thing is obviously not restricted to boys. I want to have sex. With Nick Kelly, the runaway beanpole kid.
And here I thought Leo was the miracle.
“And you think I’m the right