Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Hmmm hm hmmm,” I hum to myself as I hold up a T-shirt from the dollar bin and discard it due to collar stretching.
“Hmmmmmm hmm,” Ainsley chimes in, resolving the melody of the decade-old pop song that’s been stuck in my head. She tosses aside a purple T-shirt in lieu of a yellow one.
“I really didn’t think you were going to be so picky,” Miles says with a frown. He’s been standing with his hands in his pockets for twenty minutes while Ainsley and I make a determined effort to visually scan every single T-shirt in this resale shop.
“Rude! I am extremely picky about what I wear,” I lie.
His brow furrows. “You have a T-shirt that claims you’re a part of a Frisbee golf league in St. Paul.”
“You need a hobby,” I decide, turning around to scan him from head to toe. “You pay too much attention to me.”
“I think I’m ready to try on,” Ainsley says from behind a pile of T-shirts so tall I can only see the static’d pieces of her hair.
“Excellent.” I hand over my bag and phone to Miles and cart a truly ridiculous number of T-shirts back to the changing area.
We make a deal to show each other every shirt, no matter how heinous. I whittle my pile down to two, an orange baby tee with an inexplicable cob of corn on it, and a gigantic dark blue T-shirt featuring Schroeder tickling the ivories. Ainsley is far more discerning than I am and chooses only one: a gray long-sleeve with Baby Spice on it.
She whips back the curtain of the dressing room to reveal Miles standing ten feet away, my bag over his shoulder, looking down at his phone.
“Look!” Ainsley holds up her prize.
“Are you familiar with the Spice Girls?” he asks in surprise.
“Are you familiar with the Spice Girls?” I ask in even more surprise.
“I was alive in the nineties. So, yes.”
“PopPop left me his record collection,” Ainsley says by way of explanation. “Should we return these to the dollar bin?”
I signal to the bored employee scrolling TikTok behind the register and he shoots me a thumbs-up. We cart the piles of unselected shirts back to the bin.
“So, your pop-pop was into the Spice Girls?” I ask Ainsley.
“He was into all kinds of music,” she says.
“I didn’t know that,” Miles says. He hands over a five-dollar bill and it covers our three T-shirts and a horrific green thermal hoodie thing that he hands to me on the way out.
“What’s this?”
“You need more coats.”
My stomach swoops and I stop to watch while he and Ainsley walk on ahead of me, my backpack still slung over one of his shoulders. Upon further inspection, I actually love this ugly hoodie.
We walk Ainsley home and she disappears with a book. Miles and I left kind of a mess from our after-school snack, so he washes the dishes and I dry them.
“Is that your phone?” I ask. There’s been an off-and-on buzzing for the last few minutes.
“Hm? No, mine’s set to ring.”
“Well, then what the hell is vibrating in your pants?”
“What? Oh, I forgot you handed me your phone in the store.” He digs into his back pocket, which he apparently can’t feel, and hands over my phone.
My stomach drops. I missed another call from my mom. And then she left a voicemail. And sent a text.
I fear that my Everything’s fine, I’m just really busy, I swear! excuse is wearing thin. She smells a rat. Her assertion that I need to come over and submit to a motherly inspection is growing more and more insistent.
“It’s gonna be warm this weekend,” Miles says. “For the camping trip.”
“Hm?” I pull myself out of my phone and focus on him. “Oh. Really? How warm?”
“It’ll hit eighty on Friday.”
“Wow, I thought fall was gonna stick this time.”
“One last heat wave, I guess.”
It’s been two weeks since we got our tattoos. Two weeks since we promised a camping trip to our new friends.
Here’s our text thread from last week:
Jericho: When are we camping?? Next weekend work for everybody?
Miles: Yeah, perfect. I was thinking Blue Creek Campground. It’s only three hours from the city and there’s a river where we can swim if it’s warm enough. I saw their best campsite is open Friday around lunch until Saturday afternoon. Does that work for everyone?
Lenny: Hey, Miles, can you check and see if there are any axe murderers at that campsite? Because if there are, then I’m gonna change my rsvp to maybe.
Rica: I can handle axe murderers but I’m a hard no on skunks. Miles, check for skunks.
Jeffy: Ignoring these two. Miles, do we need any of these things? (list attached)
Jericho: Good lord, Jeffy. I’ve been scrolling for two and a half minutes and I’m still not to the bottom of that list.
Miles: Good list, Jeffy! You obviously did some research. I have all the camping equipment we’ll need for cooking and relaxing. You will need to get your hands on a tent and sleeping bags.
Jericho: I can borrow a tent for us. It fits three in a pinch.
Miles: I’ve got a two-man. So someone can share with me.
Lenny: What do people eat in the wilderness? I’m thinking wings. Let’s bring buffalo wings.
Jericho: Ooh! And donuts for dessert. And we should have quiche for breakfast in the morning.
Rica: Isn’t camping food made when you add hot water to powder and call it scrambled eggs?
Jeffy: They definitely sell that at REI.
Miles: Just double checking here: have any of you ever actually been camping?
Lenny: Nope.
Jericho: Nah.
Jeffy: No.
Rica: What part of this conversation makes you think I have?
Miles: Cool. I’ll take care of food.
It only deteriorated from there, but Miles has since somehow cobbled together a camping trip for us. Jeffy is driving him and Rica from Queens, and Miles is driving Jericho and me from uptown.
“You can drive this?” I demand when he walks me to the long-term parking lot where he rents a space and reveals a ten-year-old Jeep.
“Yes, Lenny.”
“ What? ”
“It’s just a car.”
“Jeeps are a lifestyle. For people who ford rivers, et cetera! You should know this! You own one!”
Jericho and I flip a coin, ensuring him the front seat. Setting off at nine a.m. , we play Twenty Questions and listen to 5Night for three hours straight. I would have assumed Miles would have demanded we play the silent game by now, but there’s a little smile in his eyes when our gazes clash in the rearview mirror.
He pulls up to the campsite and five minutes later, Jeffy and Rica arrive as well. We all stand outside the cars, absorbing our surroundings.
“Haaaaa-aaaaa-aaahhhhh-hhhhh-. Smell that nature?” I ask, throwing my arms wide.
“Haaaaa-aaaaa-aahhhhhhh.” Jericho immediately imitates both my stance and my smelling vigor. “Smells like an Old Spice commercial out here.”
“Oh, you poor deprived city kid.” Rica pats Jericho on one shoulder. “But yeah. Dang. These trees are really tree-ing.”
“Cardinal! Cardinal, right, Miles? Ooh! Squirrel!” Jeffy is frenetically snapping photos on his iPhone and has been since the second we got out of the car. He’s wearing a beanie, dungarees, and a button-down flannel, even though it’s seventy-five degrees outside. As jaded as he seems when he’s in the city, put this kid in the wilderness and suddenly he’s wholeheartedly eager.
“We have squirrels in the city, Jeffy,” Jericho says with a laugh, watching his friend pat a tree with awe.
Jeffy doesn’t care. He’s just discovered the river through the trees and he’s already down the path, shucking his shoes off, rolling up his pants legs, knee deep in the water, hooting at the cold and snapping pictures of the riverbed.
Miles, meanwhile, sets up camp with the tenacity of a Marine. Two tents, camp chairs around a firepit, and a picnic table set up with a cooler and drinks and sandwiches. And…
“A hammock!” I sprint to the far side of the campsite and gracelessly attempt to hoist myself into the hammock. My face presses fabric, my feet dangle, the world tips, but then—phew—I’m flat on my back and watching the green-red-golden canopy open its hands toward the sky.
A sparrow flits between two leaves, pauses on a branch, and then a second one arrives. They both launch themselves into the unknown, one after the other.
My view is eclipsed by a big, frowning forehead.
“I had thought you might like this amenity.”
“You’re wrong. I hate it.” It’s the kind of hammock that the fabric sort of wraps around you, so I’m a lying, grinning cannoli. “I think my blood pressure has dropped about seventy points.”
“That sounds like a major health emergency. Here. Sit up.” I follow his directions and then there’s room for two if we sit perpendicular to the hammock. It dips considerably and I tumble into Miles’s space as we recline like an easy chair, legs over the side. He hands me a sandwich. I try to get back into my own space but just end up rolling into his gravity. I give up and settle into him. Head on his shoulder and sort of spooning into his side. For a moment he’s stiff, clearing his throat, and then he takes a bite of his sandwich and relaxes. I do the same.
“PB my heart is beating all the way out to my toes, my lips, my scalp.
And then he tosses my hand to the side, hoists my leg away from him, and stands all at once. The hammock rebounds and the fabric cocoons around me.
By the time I extricate myself from the hammock, the others are in various states of dress and undress around the campsite. Miles has already changed into swimming trunks and a T-shirt. Jericho is shirt off and hopping his feet back into hiking boots, a towel slung around his shoulders. Jeffy’s changing underneath a gigantic towel, and Rica unzips from the tent and emerges in a bright yellow sundress and sneakers with big white socks.
I grab my bag from the car, unzip my towel, and then toss everything else into the tent.
“You’re not changing?” Miles asks me.
I shrug. “No bathing suit. I’ll swim in my skivvies.”
“Swimming!” Jericho is confidently leading us in the wrong direction.
Miles turns us around and leads the way toward the swimming hole. Jeffy and I take turns schlepping the gigantic backpack he’s packed with chips and drinks and sunscreen and bug spray and Mad Libs. He is taking this extremely seriously.
We’re surrounded by layers of gray-green rock and stately, swaying trees. The shallow river slides swiftly over sheet rock as smooth as a dance floor. The water gathers and swells at a great blue hole that seems to have no bottom. Jericho wades directly into it and dunks himself, Jeffy tests the water, and Rica has set up a bed of towels and lounges like a cat, eating chips.
Miles motions me up the side of a rocky outcropping. We get to the top, fifteen feet above everyone else. “If I had a list,” he says, “this would be on it.”
“What?”
He nods toward the little cliff. “Cannonball.”
“Me? Now?” I look down at the seven-thousand-foot drop, the hole in the water that clearly opens up into the underworld. “I respectfully, eternally, decline.”
He shrugs and shucks his shirt off. Our wolf howls from his back and I get the momentary urge to wrap my arms around his sturdy rib cage, to keep him from doing what I know he’s about to do. But then his feet are at the edge of the mini cliff, turning to face me. He bends, and his arms go up-around and carry the rest with him. He spins into the air, hangs there, rotates cleanly, and whoosh the splash reaches the canopy.
And Rica.
“Show-off!” she calls in a friendly way, sloughing water off her toned legs.
“I told you Jeep was a lifestyle!” I shout down to him again as he treads water and grins.
I grab his shirt, climb down the sane way, and go about stripping myself nude. Well, not nude. But bra and undies. Good thing I wore a sports bra today. Good thing my undies are black. I hobble into the water and ascend gorgeously into a transcendent doggie paddle.
Jeffy and Jericho are laughing hysterically at me, and Miles is shaking his head. “How you’ve managed to survive the last three decades is a real mystery to me.”
“What?” I demand, my mouth and eyebrows pretty much the only part of me managing to stay afloat.
“You call this swimming? This is called slowly perishing.” He swims fiercely across the swimming hole and plants a knee under my butt, his palm between my shoulder blades. “At least back float, okay?”
I follow directions while he treads next to me, his brow furrowed. When I’m tired, I reach out to him and he plants my two hands onto his two shoulders, swimming me to the edge of the drop-off. His shoulder muscles whisper secret things to the palms of my hands. I try very hard not to listen.
“Stay on shore,” he instructs me.
The afternoon tumbles on. There’s more swimming, a little bit of drinking, kayakers who slice down the river with a shout and a wave. The boys engage in water games. It devolves quickly into Jericho and Jeffy doing everything they can to dunk Miles, and Miles finally succumbing gruesomely. Later, Jericho, Rica, and I amble down the shoreline and back, finding pretty rocks and shells and talking about nothing at all. When we get back, Miles is lying on his back, two arms behind his head. I like his armpit hair, but that’s not really something you mention aloud. I plunk down next to him. “Are you sleeping?” I stage-whisper.
“Not anymore,” he stage-whispers back, and opens one eye.
“Oh! Great!” I cock my head and warily eye his naked chest. Water droplets and chest hair and shadows and ribs and flushed skin and—
“You know, you’re pretty hot without clothes on.”
He’s got his head tipped up toward the sun. He answers without opening his eyes. “Thanks.”
“Hey, here’s an idea.” I fold up my legs and turn to him. “How about we have a super passionate affair for like two years. And then a really horrific breakup. Oooh! I know, we’ll make our friends and family choose sides!”
He still hasn’t opened his eyes. “Sure. Sounds good.”
“What? Why would you agree to that?”
He finally opens his eyes. “Why would you suggest it?”
“Because I just discovered how hot you look with no clothes on. Duh.”
He yawns. “I need a nap.”
“How about some of that ice cream from the cooler instead? I’ll smear it in my cleavage and you can forgo the cone.”
He laughs. “My abs broke you, huh?”
My eyes drop down against my will. “It’s the happy trail for me, actually.”
He snaps his fingers up near his eyeline and I reluctantly return to the world of eye contact. “One of these days I’m going to take you at your word for one of the utterly absurd things that you say.”
“And then what?”
“Then I’ll just be someone who’s eaten ice cream from between your boobs.”
“What are you two chatting about?” Rica asks, sauntering over and wagging two beers in our direction.
“Abs,” I say. We gratefully take the beers and they pop and foam, briefly catapulting us into a Coors Light commercial circa 1998.
“A favored topic of mine, that’s for sure.” Rica sits down on Miles’s other side with a sigh. She tips her head back and her long black hair starts drying in beachy waves. “No sirens, no horns, no garbage trucks.”
“Just axe murderers and skunks,” I agree with a luxurious sigh.
“So,” Rica says with a smile for both of us. “Matching tattoos, huh?”
Miles rolls, trying to see his own back. “I keep forgetting it’s back there.”
“They were a whim,” I admit. “I wanted to do something reckless. That I’d regret.” I frown and run a hand over the wolf on my side. “It didn’t work, though.”
“What?” Miles is furrowing his brow at me, like, Are you telling me I got this damn tattoo for nothing?
“Yeah,” I say with a shrug. “I don’t regret it. So it didn’t serve its purpose.”
“Was it part of the bring-you-back-to-life bucket list?” Rica asks.
Miles’s eyes shoot over to me. “You two talked about the list?”
“A little,” I admit. “When I told her about Lou.”
“What sort of things are on the list?” Rica asks.
“Oh,” I sigh. “The usual. Acting out romantic scenes from movies. K-pop concerts. Finding a firefighter and having gold-medal sex.”
“I believe it says ‘firefighter or something,’?” Miles corrects.
“Quite a list,” Rica observes.
“Lou was quite a gal.”
Rica is exceptionally intelligent because she immediately senses my mood change and jumps to distract me.
“Well, if you don’t regret the tattoo, then I guess you’ll have to do something else you’ll regret,” Rica decides. “Let’s brainstorm.”
“I could invest in real estate. I’d probably regret that.”
“What about unprotected sex with a stranger? That one’s sure-fire.”
“Please don’t give her ideas,” Miles growls.
“Miles would like to keep my regrets family friendly,” I say.
“You could always sell everything you own and go live on a boat,” Rica suggests.
“Veto,” Miles grumbles. He hates this game. “I get seasick.”
This answer makes Rica catch my eye with a grin. “Dr. Frankenstein does Nantucket.”
I burst out laughing. Miles is still frowning. “Am I Dr. Frankenstein in this scenario?”
Before she can answer, Rica’s attention snags on Jericho, who’s sitting on top of the mini cliff and badly botching some sunscreen application. “These boys wouldn’t last a day without me.” She waves to us and goes to rescue her friend.
Miles watches her go and then turns his head to me, bringing me into focus. I can see the clouds and blue sky reflected in the clear of his eye. “You talked about Lou to Rica. You talked about the list. Casually.” He reaches up and brushes sand from my cheek. “And you didn’t cry.”
“Believe it or not, historically I’m not a crier.” I say it dryly, but internally I’m quaking. It’s equal parts lovely and terrible, this revelation. Lou is not a topic of conversation. She’s the love of my life, goddammit.
“It’s good to bring her up. People like to hear about the things other people love.”
I drop my chin. “Nobody wants to hear about dead friends.”
He takes me by that very same chin. “Don’t talk about your grief like that.” He lets my chin free and softens it with a tug at my hair. “Have a little respect.”
I’m shook but covering it all. Covering everything. “I don’t respect anything. Except that which elicits genuine awe. Then I’m nothing but respect. I bow down in the face of genuine awe.”
“What elicits genuine awe for you?” He’s one hundred percent skepticism.
“Mmmm.” I consider the question thoroughly. Just to win. Just to vex him. “Waterfalls? Shooting stars? Men shedding the bonds of masculinity? A truly killer sax solo? Pants that actually fit? Tulips! Croissants! Fresh cherries! Mmph!”
He covers my mouth with two fingers. “I get it. Enough. Let’s be quiet now.”
Producing a book from nowhere, he reclines and is immediately the picture of someone who can entertain themself with nothing but their own intellect. It’s irritating. In an attractive way.
I toss my head back and absorb the sunshine. The leaves shimmy and talk to one another and don’t give a fuck that winter is the grim reaper around the corner. The river babbles and smooths out every pebble. New friends shriek. Everyone loves one another in a new and special way. I’m falling but for the first time in a long time I’m not terrified of the concrete. Maybe there is no concrete. Maybe there’s just all this brilliant color in messy strokes. Leaves and sky and air and water water water, rushing by. Maybe I’ve been wrong this whole time and the entire world is not through my eyes. Maybe I’ve been trapped in a painting all along. Smeared and brilliantly applied. Every color is from the eye of someone who knows exactly what the hell they’re doing.
I’m uncontainable. I’ve just cracked the code. How to live a perfect existence: just embrace it all, every lovely/excruciating color. I’m so glad Miles is here.
I throw my arms out to the sides. “Let’s be oil paintings, you beautiful bitch!”
He lowers his book and eyes me over top of it. “It must be truly exhausting to live in your brain.”
“You have no idea.” I turn and collapse onto him and throw his book as far as I can. It lands with a thock on a nearby boulder.
“Hey!”
“I’ll buy you another!” I shout. “A million, if you want!”
“A million copies of the same book? Pass.” He eyes me, splayed across his bare chest, my heart racing hard against his. “What the hell is happening to you down there?”
“I talked about Lou without crying,” I say into his chest hair.
I feel his shoulders rotate; a shadow crosses my eyes and pauses. And then, there are his arms around me. He’s holding me tight. Too tight. His arms pulse against me. One, two, three tight squeezes.
“You’re doing great,” he says. I draw every single nutrient out of that statement. “But try not to be too weird in front of our new friends.”
It makes me burst out laughing. Because he’s right. You have to teaspoon out the weirdness.
“Point taken.”
“You know what you need?” he asks, his arms still tight around me and the sunlight kissing all our skin.
“What’s that?”
“Campfire,” he lists. “Hot dinner. Stars. Sleeping bag. Hard ground. Night sounds. Cool air. Everyone sleeping at once.”
“Oh.” My eyes grow round. “Yeah. Yeah. That sounds like exactly the ticket.”
He untangles us and stands up, stretching, reaching a hand down to me. “Let’s go get it.”