Chapter 16 Easton
EASTON
“We’re leaving in thirty minutes,” Elijah barks when I stumble into the kitchen the next morning, “so get your suit on.”
This feels...deeply unfair. Was it crazy to expect a little more downtime during this unscheduled layover in Key West?
“Leaving for where?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“I don’t like surprises,” I grumble.
“That’s because most of the surprises you’ve gotten in your life have sucked.”
This is very possible. Growing up, the words “it’s a surprise” meant people had forgotten.
No birthday cake or gifts? “It’s a surprise,” my mother would say, and then a day later I’d get some used perfume wrapped in newspaper or a vague promise made about a trip to Disney or New York City that never materialized.
Or there was the thirteenth birthday when my mother “surprised” me by trying to make me blonde like her.
We wound up in a screaming fight in front of a hair salon one town over before she drove off and left me to walk home alone.
So yeah, most of the surprises I’ve experienced in my life were underwhelming, but I have no reason to think that Elijah’s surprise won’t be underwhelming too.
“You say that as if your surprises aren’t particularly unpleasant.”
“When have I ever unpleasantly surprised you?”
“You really want me to answer that?” I ask with a brow raised.
“Never mind,” he says. “Just be ready to go.”
Thirty minutes later I’m back in the kitchen with a bikini on under my clothes and a beach bag over my shoulder.
He slides me a thermos full of coffee and grabs the one he made for himself, and I follow him to the car.
In the GPS, he plugs in the directions for the airport.
I don’t have my luggage, but I’d gladly jump on a flight out of here anyway.
Mrs. Cabot’s hatred of me is too over-the-top to be taken seriously—it would be like getting your feelings hurt when Cruella de Vil screams at you for not giving her your puppies—but that doesn’t mean I want to listen to it, either.
“Why are we going to the airport?” I demand. “If the surprise is that you’re letting me fly ahead to the wedding, I’ll take back everything I said about expecting little of you.”
“If you keep being such a pain in the ass about the surprise, I’m going to wish that I was flying you ahead to the wedding, but no, that is not the surprise.”
“Keep-being-pain-in-the-ass,” I say aloud, pretending to type it in my phone. Laughter rumbles in his chest and I can’t help but grin, victorious.
Fifteen minutes later we arrive and pull over to a little shack. Beside it sit several tiny, retro planes, each set atop what look like blown-up water skis.
“They’re seaplanes,” Elijah says. “We’re going out to the Dry Tortugas, about seventy miles away.”
I fight a smile. “This isn’t as unpleasant as I expected.”
“I still might invite my grandma,” he says. “So don’t give me too much credit yet.”
I follow him inside a small building where he goes up to the counter and has a chat with the guy behind it.
A minute later, one of the employees walks out, carrying several bags. “You guys ready?” he asks. “You’re gonna love this. I’ve got snorkel gear for both of you and a cooler of drinks.”
I groan quietly. I can’t snorkel without fucking up my hair and I already know I’m going to crave diving into the water so much that I’ll be sick with the way I want it.
“How much was this?” I whisper to Elijah as we follow the pilot across the tarmac.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “I live with my mom, remember?”
I smile. “Just because you said it about yourself doesn’t mean that I don’t get to say it about you at least once today.”
“I’d expect nothing less,” he says with a quiet laugh.
We buckle in and are given headphones, and no sooner has the propeller started spinning than we are rolling along the tarmac and my face is glued to the window.
It’s one of my favorite things about flying into Boston—the glimpses of islands below as we near Massachusetts. I spend that time quietly guessing at what I see: is it Block Island? The Hamptons? Is it Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard?
This is entirely different and a million times better.
The Keys become distant squiggles of pale, white sand, looking more like desert islands than places where you can get a thirty-two-ounce daiquiri in a plastic crossbody bag.
The water rests below us in pools of varying jewel tones, one abutting the next: aquamarine next to clear emerald green next to the deepest sapphire.
Elijah lifts one side of the headphones off his ear and I do the same. “How’s my surprise so far?” he calls over the wind and the roar of the propeller. His eyes twinkle.
He did this for me, to make me happy, to show me something I’d probably never see otherwise when he very easily could have left me at the pool and gone off to enjoy his day.
He’s literally impossible to stay mad at, which I already knew, but this moment seals it—whatever he did to me that day on the beach, it shouldn’t define him.
He’s a good man who’s only hurt me once. He deserves a pass.
“Better than I expected, that’s for sure.”
He laughs. “I’m not sure that’s a compliment.”
I grin. “Allow me to confirm that it wasn’t.”
Through the headphones, the pilot points things out to us—the Marquesa Islands, pops of heavy forest right in the middle of the sea; a massive shark, clear as day in the crystal waters below.
It should give me pause, provide some consolation about the fact that I can’t go snorkeling with Elijah, but it sort of does the opposite.
With every change in color below us, with every sea turtle or shark or dolphin I spy.
..I just want it more. I crave it the way the Titanic survivors craved land, the way a man in the desert craves an oasis.
As if I’ll die if I can’t sink deep in that clear water at least once.
We’ve been in the air for about an hour when, ahead of us, a road made of pure white sand leading to a massive brick fort seems to appear out of the middle of the ocean.
“Up ahead is Garden Key, where we’re setting down,” says Jed, our pilot. “That’s Fort Jefferson—the largest all-masonry fort in the United States. Thirty years and sixteen million bricks, but they never finished it.”
He begins to descend, lower and lower, until the plane is gliding over the surface of the water and coming to a stop where it’s shallow.
Elijah hops out and reaches up for my hand.
I kick off my flip-flops and land in ankle-deep water, so clear we can see our toes.
We hand Jed our headphones and get snorkel gear and a cooler in exchange.
Elijah and I trudge through the water and climb up onto the moat that surrounds the fort.
I look out over the wide expanse of blue sea with my jaw clenched tight. This moment sort of sums up my life over the past few years: this feeling of wanting something that is the least responsible choice. Wanting the precise thing I know is bad for me.
Craving freedom when it’s responsibility that gets you what you want in life.
“They used this place as a prison during the Civil War,” Elijah says. “Dr. Samuel Mudd, one of the guys who conspired with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Lincoln, was held here.”
“I wish you’d brought your grandmother so I could ask if she knew him.”
He laughs wearily. “That would be funnier if I didn’t think you’d really do it.”
We wander farther down along the moat while he points stuff out.
“You’ve been here before, I guess?” I ask.
He nods. “My dad grew up in Key West. He brought me and Campbell here a couple times. We camped out once, which I would not recommend.”
His smile is forced and bittersweet. Kelsey has almost no memories of their father and brother, and there are times, like now, when I think she might have gotten the easier end of the deal. Elijah remembers everything, and each of those memories sort of hurts.
He elbows me. “Stop making your sad face. I got twelve years with a decent father. You got none.”
I smile. “I got the freedom that comes from no parenting whatsoever.” I step up to the very edge of the moat wall before I glance over my shoulder. “So I guess you’re snorkeling?”
There’s frustration and sympathy in his gaze at the same time. I don’t know why he cares so much about me not swimming anymore. There are certainly bigger deprivations.
“There are ranger-led tours of the fort if you’d prefer.”
“Ugh,” I say with a smile. “You know how I feel about learning.”
“Sure, Harvard,” he grins. “Let’s just walk around the moat and you can figure it out.”
We continue on the brick wall that encircles the fort, the breeze whipping my hair, the water morphing from pale aqua to a dense, navy-crayon blue as it gets deeper. With every step my desire to jump in grows until it’s pulsing just at the surface of my skin.
I don’t notice the things I’ve given up when I’m at school.
Sure, there are times when I’d like to abandon my orderly life—drinking my greens powder, treadmill for an hour, and on to the lab—and instead run barefoot to the ocean or get towed off the back of my older brother’s car while I ride my skateboard, an activity that put me in the hospital not once but twice.
In Boston, though, I just notice it less.
It’s sort of like tucking Halloween candy away in a distant cupboard—you can almost forget when it’s not in your face.
And I thought it all required no restraint from me at all, but God, suddenly I resent it.
I resent all the years I’ve had to spend not jumping in the ocean and I resent the way I’ve spent my mornings in a dark, sterile gym instead of outside, and I even resent the lab, which might prove an incredibly awkward place to work next year if Thomas and I aren’t back together.
I resent the way I’ve avoided the sun between the hours of ten and three and the way I gave up chips and how much time I now spend on my hair and—