Page 23 of Everything All at Once

“Seriously? You are so unobservant.”

“Are we going to the Nautilus?”

“We are nowhere near the Nautilus,” she said, sighing. “I worry about you. If your phone died and you woke up in the middle of nowhere, you would literally never find your way home. You would end up in Tibet.”

“Tibet?”

“Yes. I am absolutely certain that you would end upin Tibet. And then you would ask to borrow a stranger’s phone and you would try and call me, but we both know you haven’t looked at my phone number since the day you saved it to your phone. That’s the problem with all of us.”

“That we don’t memorize phone numbers anymore?”

“No. Yes. Well—that isoneof the problems with all of us.”

“Someday I’d love to hear your breakdown of all the things that are wrong with people nowadays.”

“It’s a long list.”

“And really, where the hell are we?”

Em didn’t answer but pulled her car into a dirt parking lot. She chose a spot in the shade and turned to look at me.

“Do you remember that place your aunt used to take us swimming? We were young, you know, I hadn’t even come out yet, but my mom knew, and she was already convinced I was going to the special hell they have for people who like people with the same genitalia as them. Because it’s so important, you know? What our genitalia looks like. It’s, like, a very big deal to the big guy.”

It made me uncomfortable when Em got like this, so down on her mom, but I couldn’t really blame her. Her mom really did think like that. It was so sad.

“I remember.”

“Well,” she said, and swept her arm in front of her.

“You want to go swimming? That’s not really that reckless.”

“No, I don’t want to go swimming,” Em said. “Just follow me.”

We got out of the car. It was hot and a little muggy, and I thought we were heading down to the beach, but Em led me up a little path that led to the top of a cliff that overlooked the water. We got sweaty and out of breath almost immediately. We passed a few people coming down, but when we finally got up there, we were alone.

Em took a bathing suit out of her backpack and handed it to me.

She smiled her special kind of smile, the one where her face got darker and her eyes got very bright and you were suddenly absolutely terrified of whatever it was she was planning.

Then it dawned on me.

“Absolutely not!” I shrieked, backing away from the cliff’s edge, throwing my bathing suit at her.

She caught it with one hand and said, “Get naked, Lottie. We’re doing this.”

“We are not doing this, Em. If you think I’m jumping off this cliff...”

“Iknowyou’re jumping off this cliff, Lottie. I can see the future, and it very much consists of you and me jumping off this cliff.”

“You’re insane. We will literally break our entire bodies.”

“Oh, relax. I’ve done it before. Abe did it when he wastwelve. Don’t tell your parents that. Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“That water isfreezing. And very, very far away.”

“Trust me, Lottie. You will be perfectly fine. All we have to do is jump far enough to clear the rocks that stick out—”

“Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.”