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The Spark

The studio’s stationary camera slowly zooms in on Marsh as the lights dim. Talia is still sitting across the table, but Marsh feels that she might as well be on an island, alone in the middle of an ocean. The music softens; the corners grow fuzzy.

Marsh looks down.

“Dylan, Dylan, Dylan,” she says to herself, and shakes her head. “Even after everything that’s happened, I still get butterflies when I think back to the first moment I saw him.”

The Bubble reacts, and a soft glow begins to gently throb around them. This is why they do the recap, Marsh knows. To customize the Bubble to the star. But to feel it happening around her in real time is like magic.

The glow sharpens, until a forest scene comes into view on the flatscreen in front of her. Lush, crisp pine, the sound of rushing wind, and a helpful caption.

It was twenty-five years ago, on a camping trip Marsh’s sophomore year of college at Arizona State. A bunch of her classmates had driven four hours north to the woods of Flagstaff during break.

Marsh stares at her memories as they manifest, spellbound.

“Are you ready for this?” Mateo cries on the screen, clearly more excited than almost anyone else about this. They’re all on the cold, clear shore of a lake, ready to attempt kayaking in several of the little boats some of the guys had brought strapped to the roofs of their cars. The sun is high and white, and Marsh has put too much sunscreen on.

“You bet,” a younger, even shyer version of her replies beside him, trying to sound convincing.

She and her best friend Jo knew Mateo from a class their first semester of college, before he changed to another dormitory. He’d invited the two of them on this camping trip because, in his words, prelaw students were more fun than physics majors. Marsh knew that he really meant that Jo was more fun than physics majors, but that the two of them came as a package deal, they’d been inseparable since they’d first met in Intro to Constitutional Law, and so if he invited Jo, he had to invite Marsh, too.

A lot of things in Marsh’s life had been like that. By that point in univer sity, she’d started turning down some of the offers and letting Jo go alone, because it was just too embarrassing. But this is one time she’ll always be grateful that she let Jo talk her into coming on the trip.

Because it was this day that she met Dylan.

“Hey, there you are!” Mateo is shouting, waving at someone across the crowded, rocky beach.

There he is.

On-screen, their eyes meet. For a moment, her younger self forgets to breathe or blink. Marsh watches the moment with equal intensity.

“We’ve been waiting on you for half an hour! How long does it take to put on a bathing suit?” Mateo continues to tease, oblivious. Somehow, he doesn’t notice that Marsh and Dylan are just staring at each other, and not listening to him at all.

“Hi,” Dylan finally says.

He’s a little taller than Marsh, with dark skin and a jock-ish, cool buzzed head. He’s so handsome, he looks like he could have been a high school quarterback, or a prom king.

“Holy mackerel,” Talia whispers as a character insight bubble appears on the flatscreen, in exactly the same adorable tone she used whenever something fantastic happened her own season—two little words that became her beloved signature catchphrase by the finale. “That guy’s a scientist?”

DYLAN LEE: Mischievous, full of life, and a physics geek through and through, even if he’s quite a looker! Everyone always said that Dylan was a little out of Marsh’s league when they started dating, but the two lovebirds proved the world wrong and got married! For years, things were absolutely perfect. But somewhere along the way, something happened...

“I’m Dylan. Mateo’s roommate,” recap-Dylan finally says.

Young Marsh is trying not to melt, and mostly failing. “I’m—” she starts to reply.

“This is Marsh!” Jo cries before she can finish, appearing in a burst of laughter and thundering of giant yellow life jackets. She’s a ball of energy, short yet still gangly, almost like a little spider, with skin even darker than Dylan’s and a spiky black pixie cut. She drapes an arm over Marsh’s shoulder and offers one of the vests looped in her fingers to Dylan.

“Marsh?” Dylan asks, taking the life jacket from Jo, but his eyes never leave Marsh’s.

“It’s short for Marshmallow,” Jo explains to him as Marsh—both of them, young and old—wince inwardly. “Because you’ll never meet anyone sweeter. She’s the best person we know.”

“Marsh,” Dylan repeats, as if considering the word, as Jo slides a vest over Marsh’s head, winks, and then spins off again toward another circle of classmates.

“It’s an old joke,” Marsh says as soon as she’s gone.

“I like it,” he replies.

“It’s dumb,” Marsh says.

“It’s not,” he insists. “It’s a good thing to be known for.” He smiles. “Hardly anyone is kind anymore. Especially lawyers.”

Hearing him say it like that again—so quietly and intensely, while staring deep into young Marsh’s eyes—makes older Marsh soften. It was the first time she’d ever felt like, for once, being herself was actually kind of cool. Like she didn’t have to try to be edgier, or tougher, or more fashionable, or any of that. She could just be herself. And someone might like that self.

Marsh ends up in Mateo’s kayak, so she spends the afternoon paddling around with him right next to Dylan and another friend of theirs from the physics department, who’s much better than Dylan at kayaking and the only reason the two of them stay upright and dry. But even though Dylan is a terrible oarsman, he’s having the time of his life. He spends the whole outing playing jokes, or pretending to fall or drop his paddle, and Marsh and his friends laugh so hard that she cries.

Marsh wants to stay right by Dylan, to spend every moment of the rest of the weekend together, but she loses track of him while climbing out of the kayaks and dragging them up onto the gravelly beach. And then, she gets roped into helping set up the plastic folding chairs in front of the campfire, and then into putting out all the supplies for the group dinner around the flames, and then...

By the time she’s done, people are ready to start cooking and eating, and then Marsh is cooking and eating, too, and trying to look like she’s paying attention and laughing at Jo’s jokes instead of letting her gaze desperately wander the crowd, searching for Dylan like a pathetic, lost child.

She’d been so sure that there had been a spark, the moment the two of them met. It was there in how his eyes locked on her, in how close he stood when they had been talking. It was electric. A finger in a socket, a lightning storm.

But then where was he?

Marsh and Talia watch the party feast on hot dogs, corn on the cob, and beer when dusk falls. Afterward, young Marsh moves from group to group with Jo, letting the chatter distract her until it’s dark and people start to settle into smaller, quieter conversations for the night. Eventually, she finds herself standing alone by the fire for a moment, watching the orange light dance as she soaks in the warm glow.

“Well, hello there,” Dylan says as he sidles up beside Marsh. “Enjoying the fire?”

At the sound of his voice, everything else falls away from the recap for a second. The forest, the flickering flames, the laughter coming from all around the campsite.

“It’s nice,” young Marsh finally manages, once she looks sure that she’s in control of her heart rate again. “I heard there will be s’mores, later.”

“I heard that, too,” he agrees.

In the background of the scene, Jo begins to head back toward Marsh from the cluster of girls she’d been talking to, slows as she recognizes Dylan, and then smoothly re-angles her direction toward another group of friends with a subtle, cheeky nod to Marsh.

“Did you have a fun afternoon, after the lake?” Marsh adds to him, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Nope,” Dylan replies. He hesitates, then drops his voice. “I just wanted to be hanging out with you.”

Marsh blinks, surprised and thrilled at the same time.

“But—but I didn’t see you after the kayaks,” she stammers.

“Yeah, I know.” He rubs the back of his head sheepishly. “I was trying to play it cool.”

Marsh turns and locks eyes with him at last.

“Pretty dumb, huh?” he asks, laughing. “I just didn’t want to blow my chances with you by seeming overeager.”

Marsh is now blushing so hard that she’s lost the upper hand, but she can’t help it. “I don’t think you have to worry about blowing your chances,” she finally says.

At that, Dylan’s nervous grin gets a little less nervous, and a little more playful. He reaches behind himself, to where he must have already set some supplies down on a folding chair before he made his move.

“This is for you,” he continues, and offers Marsh a thin, straight stick for roasting s’mores.

“Thank you,” she replies shyly, taking it from him.

“And so’s this.”

Both Marshes look down. In his other hand is a little, puffy white shape.

“A marshmallow.” He winks. “For Marsh.”

He’s leaning in, so close that the soft exhale of his breath stirs a loose curl of her hair.

“It’s a dumb name,” Marsh says again, too nervous to think of anything else.

“I like it,” he insists again, as well. “I really do.”

“That makes one of us,” she tries to joke.

Dylan scoots even closer. “What if I secretly call you Mallow, then?” he asks, barely a whisper.

“Mallow?” Marsh repeats.

“You know. Marsh. Mallow. Same name, but different. It could be our thing.”

Our thing. Her heart thrills.

Marsh manages to nod just before he kisses her.

Marsh watches, mesmerized, as she and Dylan talk about everything that night, huddled together at the edge of the campfire. Childhoods, hobbies, travel, future dreams. Long after everyone has gone to bed—even Jo, who was always the last one up—the two of them are still there, knees pressed together, whispering and giggling. At one point, a corner of the marshmallow Marsh has skewered over the fire catches the flame and begins to burn, which makes her shriek. She tries to save it, but Dylan just laughs, grabs her hands on her stick, and thrusts them a little farther forward, so the marshmallow is pushed straight back into the blaze.

The poor little white puff goes up in a glorious, bubbling explosion of sugar and flames as he kisses her again—just like her heart.

“I was so young then. My whole life ahead of me,” Marsh says to Talia, and her young self. “It was like anything could happen.”

A few years later, on a walk through Central Park in New York one balmy April morning, it even still felt that way when she turned around from studying the flowers at Azalea Pond and saw Dylan not standing behind her, but rather down on one knee, holding a little velvet box.

In fact, it felt even more like that. Like her life had only expanded, not narrowed. Like it would go on expanding forever, as long as she and Dylan stayed together.

“Congratulations, Marshy!” Jo screams with glee as she bursts from the foliage on-screen—Dylan had planted her in the bushes ahead of time with her camera and a bottle of champagne, to capture the moment for them. She practically throws the bottle at him so he can pour for them all. “I already have ideas for the bachelorette party!”

“Do you still have that picture that Jo took?” Talia asks her. “That perfect day?”

“I do,” Marsh says.

What she does not say is that it’s no longer in its gold frame on the mantel above the fireplace, next to the other pictures of her and Dylan, or the candids of the whole family together—everyone midlaugh because their black Lab, Pickle, messed up the shot by bounding into the frame just before the shutter clicked.

She took it down and put it in the box that she then shoved at the back of her closet, after Dylan had finished packing his things and left for the last time.