Page 24

Everett sat across from me at Holy Mackerel, his shoulders sharp and his face in a permanent, albeit subtle, smile.

I knew that smile. I wore the same one. I hoped he liked my new tank top, my wavy hair from last night’s braids, the new shade of blush I was trying out on top of the sun’s.

He smelled of what I imagined was expensive cologne swiped from Hank’s dresser. He’d ironed his tee shirt. Styled his hair to look different than usual—wild and free, like how it looked the day at the beach when I told him where coquinas got their holes. That summer, I felt the first stirrings of this feeling that had yet to let go.

But things were finally different. I’d finally taken control, even if I was murdering my straw wrapper in my fidgety hands.

A few days after Everett and I snuck out for the moonlit ocean, I went to a movie with him. The whole time, I was glowing from the magnetic tension between us. At the dinner table later, Hadley asked if Everett was my boyfriend. I almost choked on my pizza, but managed to tell her I was working on it. There was only so much I could do at once, but I was trying. While Hadley wasn’t old enough to understand the hold-up, she understood bravery. She told me so over ice cream dessert, how she’d finally faced her fears and conquered the big slide at Pirate’s Bounty earlier that day. It wasn’t close to the same thing, but it was enough encouragement to text Everett after she went to bed.

That put us here, eight o’ clock at Holy Mackerel on the Sapphire Beach Boardwalk, picking away at the last crunchy French fries. We met here four summers ago, which was not lost on either of us.

The sun was still with us, peeking in from a window out back. Sometimes I thought the sun set so late in the summer because it wanted to stay out past curfew, stay at the beach forever. Maybe it was just like me, and it wanted to sit across from Everett, confused about what to call him but almost positive this was a date.

My whatever-he-was smiled at me, deaf to the wrestling in my head. A couple on the karaoke stage in the corner finished a duet of “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League. We joined the applause.

Everett looked at me with a playful grin. “Sing with me?”

I considered conquering my fears, but when I looked at the stage, I pictured myself standing there. The microphone shook in my hand, my voice cracked, eyes from the crowd drilled a hole into me and strung me onto a necklace. The thought made my skin crawl, but I didn’t want the fun to end. I had to find a middle ground.

“Sing to me?” My voice raised with my eyebrows. I hoped Everett wouldn’t be able to resist.

He nodded, didn’t take even a moment to process, and stood up to stretch. He sipped from his freshly refilled virgin pi?a colada, cracked his knuckles, dramatically exhaled, and walked to the DJ.

I shook my head at the nobody at the table beside us, rolled my eyes at the nobody in the corner. I’m with him, I told the nobody sitting at the bar.

From thirty feet away, I tried to read his face for any indication of what song he would pick. He nodded, whispered something to the DJ, and walked on stage.

“Ladies and gentleman, give it up for Everett,” the DJ said.

The crowd roared. It wasn’t enough people for Everett to back out, but enough to justify the loud gulp made audible thanks to the microphone. My heart roared for him. I leaned forward, elbows on the table, and held my hands over my mouth in anticipation.

He swallowed what appeared to be the rest of his fear, speaking with the same confidence he gave me. “This is for a special someone in the crowd.” He winked at me while the first notes of “Escape (The Pi?a Colada Song)” filled the room.

“Oh my God!” I mouthed at my own special someone. My lips pressed hard into a smile. I shook my head, a blush working its way to my cheeks. Even if I wanted to hide my face in my hands, I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

He rocked back and forth, grabbed the microphone, and began.

He sounded so off key that Rupert Holmes himself would have told him to give up singing forever. He didn’t care, so nobody else did either. He wasn’t up there to sound good. He was up there for me, his lady, who I hoped he wasn’t tired of, who I hoped he never had to write the newspapers to escape from.

He was having fun. People like him did.

He delivered the first chorus, singing of pi?a coladas, getting caught in the rain, and yoga. Singing of infidelity that was okay because it was mutual. Ironic, even. A couple who fell back in love. A couple who stoked dead flames with sex in the dunes of a midnight cape.

I felt hot all over, my heart flipping on a hot griddle.

A long pause followed the final word of the first chorus—escape. He looked at me with a knowing smile, and just like that, all I wanted to do was escape. I wanted to jump out of my worries, my past, and my fears. I pictured two figures holding hands, running for the horizon like it was something attainable, like they could actually reach the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

I wanted to escape real life the way Everett was right now.

For a split second, jealousy consumed me. A thick green toxin slithered through my bloodstream. I wished I could be like Everett, who left his skin at the table and walked on a stage a famous, washed up singer.

I shook the thoughts, watched Everett perform his heart out. I couldn’t contain my laughter. He sucked at singing, dancing, and anything else involving a stage, but still, the crowd was enamored.

After the final notes, he thanked the crowd and stepped away from the microphone for a bow. The applause surpassed the sounds of summer. The static was loud enough for people on top of the Ferris wheel to hear.

I was the only one who stood, but he deserved a standing ovation. I clapped until he sat back down and I sat down after him. “I wish I could say I expected anything less from you.”

“I’m good, right?” His breath ran ragged, but he was still floating from the applause. He drank the rest of his pi?a colada.

“Ev, I’m telling you this because I don’t lie to my friends. You’re probably the worst singer I’ve ever heard.” There was irony in my words. I was lying about not lying. I hoped I wasn’t his friend. I hoped he picked up on my flirting.

“The crowd loved it!”

“The crowd’s drunk.” I raised one eyebrow.

“You’re not, and I saw you bobbing your head.” He read between the lines, nudged my foot with his under the table.

“It’s a catchy song.” I sipped from my drink to hide the curl of my lips. My cheeks had been on fire for the last five minutes, but I was confident the lighting was dim enough in there that Everett couldn’t tell.

When we stepped out onto the Boardwalk, the summer sun had finally gone back home, trading places with the moon. The moon was bright tonight, a waxing gibbous only a few nights from full.

Hadley once told me that she thought the sun and the moon liked each other, but I swore they were mortal enemies. Why else did they avoid each other like clockwork? Their entire existence revolved around opposing each other.

Although opposites attracted, the sun and the moon didn’t count.

But if Everett was the sun, then I was the moon, and that would make us impossible. So I imagined us both as suns, holding still together as the world moved in slow motion around us. Two suns who walked on the Boardwalk, admiring the stars around us, staying out well past curfew, together.

We were even better at breaking curfew than the sun was.

The Boardwalk smelled like freshly buttered popcorn and stamped out cigarette butts. The next time Hadley burned a bag of popcorn before movie night, I could count on it to send me right back to flashy storefronts, greasy food, and the whispers from the butterflies in my stomach: grab Everett’s hand.

Not yet.

Despite the warm summer night, I felt like I’d jumped into a cold swimming pool, shocked and exhilarated all at the same time. Pure happiness washed across my face like the Ferris wheel protruded into the night sky. It was impossible to feel sad on the Boardwalk. I needed my own personal Boardwalk.

Everett and I walked into the carousel line.

“Do you think the sun has a curfew?” I asked when we reached our spot in line.

“Of course, but it changes every night. The sunset is based on solstices and our location on Earth,” Everett said like he had Hadley on the other end of an earpiece, spouting out everything she knew about the Earth’s rotation around the sun.

“Nerd.” I smirked.

He shook his head, then opened his phone, tapped on his screen a few times, and turned it to me. The weather app was open on his phone. “Today, the sun’s curfew was 8:15pm.”

“You ever think maybe the sun wants to stay out a little longer?” I leaned against the railing. It was cold on my arm, but it felt good on a hot night like this. I turned so both arms touched it.

Everett faced me, his arms against the railing parallel to mine. The lights from the carousel flashed a whole rainbow of colors onto his face. The entire universe drowned out his eyes. “I think it gets bored of us. Do you miss the sun already or something?”

“I mean, you can’t have summer without the sun. The moon doesn’t really do much.” Summer and sun were so synonymous that even in the dead of winter, when I glanced at a patch of sunny grass the right way, I teleported to summer in Piper Island. The sun was strong enough to fool me sometimes, but the moon didn’t have that magic.

“You can always have the sun if you expand your definition of sun.” He looked at me again. It felt like I was looking at him through a telescope, close enough to count the stars glimmering in his brown eyes.

I gulped. “What would your definition be?”

“Something that brings light to every day.”

“Have you found your sunlight yet?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I tried to read his face. The carousel lights didn’t help me detect anything in his expression.

“Have you?” he asked.

I shrugged. There was a lot in my life that I could consider my sunlight, but what if sunlight actually wasn’t for me?

Maybe life was easier if Everett and I were moonlight instead—soft, bright, and reliable, like how the moon churned the tides.

Soon, it was our turn to board. The carousel horses we rode last time were occupied, but this was a night for new memories, even if they were cast in the shadows of the past. I pulled myself onto a green and blue horse. Everett was on the yellow and white one next to me. The carousel belonged in the night, its glow a perfect contrast to the indigo sky.

The butterflies in my stomach shouted from somewhere within: Hold his hand!

Who was I to clip a butterfly’s wings? This was a new night. I was happening to my own life. I wish for a rollercoaster. I could do this.

I waited for the carousel to start dancing. The twinkling music sang of days and nights of endless wonder. Music was a form of time travel. The adolescent jingle sent me back to my early adolescence: my temple pressed to the cold bar, thirteen-year-old Quinn making sense of Everett—his hair, his beauty mark, his boyish charm.

Seventeen-year-old Quinn knew the score. Seventeen-year-old Quinn was different.

I did not walk life afraid.

I held my hand out in the space between us. My arm weighed two tons, but my chest was even heavier. Everett looked between my hand and my face, his eyebrow furrowed, until he finally took my hand in his.

There was everything before this, then everything after. The last and only time we’d held hands was at the aquarium—a guiding hand from the whale—but this was something else entirely. This had weight. This was real, two people holding hands because the space between them was too great. Because people with history like ours should have held hands the first time they rode this carousel. My first tinge of rosy cheeks—my first taste of romance—should have been enough for me, but life was a sticky thing sometimes.

I looked away from him to catch a glimpse of myself in the oval mirror. I couldn’t keep my smile from splitting across my face, but why stop it? I wish for a rollercoaster. I leaned my head against the bar, looking back at seventeen-year-old Everett Bishop.

Sometimes that was all I knew how to do.

I was carrying a bag of cotton candy so large that it bounced off my kneecaps as I walked. There was no better place to wander aimlessly than here. We walked through the sounds and colors until something spoke to us. This time around, we were headed to a vendor with rows of freshly spun cotton candy. The woman inside must have finished a new batch because the pink vanilla scent pulled us in all the way from the back of the bumper cars.

Everett and I got the thought at the same time, both of us hungry from arcade games and two rounds of bumper cars. We needed something even sweeter than the Boardwalk. He took my hand and dragged us to the opening in a huge glass structure.

“You want some?” I asked Everett, a nod to the day we met.

He looked at the bag with disgust, like he did then. “I’d rather not.”

“Are you kidding?” I fit half a clump in my mouth and talked as it dissolved on my tongue. “Fresh cotton candy is one of the greatest pleasures in life. If you’ve never tasted this, you’ve never tasted summer.”

“I don’t know that I want to taste a season.”

“It’s your loss; summer happens to be the best tasting season.”

Everett laughed at me. “But don’t coconuts taste like summer?”

I wiped my sticky hands on my shorts. “Not my summer.”

Life was sticky and sweet. There was peace in the balance.

“Not your summer?” His eyebrows raised. “That’s not how it works.”

“Here, please have some summer.” I turned to him with pink cotton pinched between two fingers, waving it in front of his face. “Open wide!”

I thought he might object, but he opened his mouth, rewriting the end of the story of us. I wedged it between his lips, watched it melt on his tongue. It was gone in a moment, a smile left in its place.

“You love summer,” I whispered and brushed the stray sugar from his cheek with my knuckle. I grabbed another wisp and held it out for him.

“Your tongue is pink.” He grabbed my wrist and moved my hand to my own mouth, not breaking eye contact.

“Thank you,” I said, stealing the last bit of summer with my tongue.

We walked toward the end of the Boardwalk, caught up in the fantastical version of life that it cast upon us. This soft rainbow fluorescent haze spotlighted the world around us. Everything was beautiful: the rigged clank of metal rings on milk jugs, the adolescent jingle of the carousel, the exhaust smell from the go-karts. An indescribable level of happiness escaped me in breathless giggles and skips in my otherwise steady steps.

Look how carefree I am!

Look how relaxed I am!

Look how happy I am!

This time, I knew he saw me. He was looking when I looked back.

I promised myself in the mirror earlier that I would do it. I wish for a rollercoaster, I told myself as I brushed sense into my braided curls. I hadn’t planned on grabbing his hand on the carousel, but I knew I would do this. Only one bar protected us from falling into the ocean, but my nerves settled when I inched closer to Everett.

We were one of the first carts to board, so the Ferris wheel moved slowly as the rest of the line boarded. On the slow incline, we nearly mapped out the whole place with I Spy, but on the top, braked in dark solitude, silence was the only thing we spied.

I’d never seen the world from hundreds of feet in the air.

A mosaic of lights stippled the shape of the Boardwalk. On the ground, each light was its own individual being, visible filament threaded through them. Up here, with Everett next to me, I saw how beautifully each bulb worked together to create one solid unit.

Above all the commotion, the moon illuminated the ocean’s white-capped waves. The shy stars still showed themselves despite the moon taking center stage. I was beginning to understand the allure of the moon’s glow. Moonlight was harmless, comfortable, dark enough for the glowing lights of the Boardwalk but bright enough to see Everett’s hands folded together between his knees.

To see the shape of his face against the night sky.

In the silence, Everett’s bouncing legs did his bidding. When he thought of me, was there a chapter in his head or just an ellipsis? Was he thinking of me? Could there be enough between us for a real story? Were we the forlorn couple who escaped from each other with each other?

“This is beautiful,” Everett said, but it wasn’t the answer I wanted.

“It is,” I said.

“I think you’re beautiful, too.”

I darted my eyes at him. His words were light striking across the dull sky. My eyes were hungry stargazers. “You are, too. Very nice looking, I mean.” Shit.

“I’m good with beautiful.”

“Good.” I took this as permission to grab his hand. That ship had sailed. “What else are you thinking?”

His eyebrows knitted together, then he looked at me with a smirk. “I’m thinking that the invention of the Ferris wheel is kind of wild, if you really think about it. I mean, 1893 in Chicago—”

“No, really,” I challenged, squeezing his hand in mine. The only way to be more obvious was to just say it, but I wasn’t that bold. “What are you really thinking?”

We stared at each other in the breeze, toying with each other’s hands.

He cleared his throat. “I’m thinking I want to kiss you.”

My face crackled into a smile. This feeling was its own wild invention.

Thank God.