Chapter 5
This was an excellent idea,” Russell said as he looked over at me from where we were sitting across from each other, sprawled in the very center of the football field. It hadn’t been very far to Jesse High—just a few blocks over from the parking lot. I’d thought that maybe we could eat on the benches by the front entrance—but then I’d seen the goalposts and had had a better idea.
The football field was AstroTurf, with the white lines of the gridiron spray-painted on. It wasn’t a stadium or anything, just the field and some bleachers set up on either side. And right now, we had it all to ourselves.
“Why, thank you,” I said. “I’m glad it’s not offensive.” Russell groaned, but in a way that seemed appreciative. I set the bag down between us and opened it up, unpacking our dinner and spreading out our football field picnic.
There were lights at all four corners of the field, turned off at the moment. It wasn’t dark out yet, but the sun was thinking about setting. The moon was already rising, and a neon sign I could see beyond the football field was just beginning to glow. So even though the light was fading, I could still see everything I needed to—our tacos, the scoreboard, Russell’s face.
“What do you think happened there?” I asked, nodding toward the scoreboard. It was an older kind, nonelectronic. Right now the score was Home: 69 and Visitor: 0.
Russell looked at it and then laughed. “I think some kids were having fun.”
A second later, I got it and felt myself blush. “Oh, right. Anyway. Thanks again for dinner. I will pay you back.”
“There’s really no need. I was happy to do it.”
“You’re missing an opportunity here. You could really hike up the prices.”
“You’re unstoppable.”
“I’m done now. I promise.”
“Not on my account. I’m impressed. You must have loved the chapter with all the rejected names for the bakery.”
“Yes!” I unwrapped the foil around my taco. “That’s one of my favorite sections.” We’d done this on the whole walk over to the high school—talked about Theseus’s Sailboat, our favorite chapters, our favorite lines, our theories about the characters. Just finding anyone else who loved this pretty obscure book and getting to talk to them about it would have been miracle enough. But here, in the middle of nowhere, for this boy to pull it from his bag like a magic trick?
It meant something. It had to.
I breathed in the taco aroma for just a moment before taking a bite. “Okay,” I said around a mouthful of carne asada. “That’s good.”
“As good as Leo’s?”
“Not quite. But what is?”
“So,” Russell started, then he bit into his own taco, and his eyes widened. “Uh-huh. Okay. Yep.”
“Good, right?”
“Excellent. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was.”
I nodded and took another bite. It was better than anything I’d had at the festival, both food-wise and experience-wise—no waiting with crowds of people for overpriced, mediocre food that I was going to eat alone. “Okay,” I said as I took a paper napkin from the bag, glad Russell had thought to grab a handful. “Explain to me your camp theory. You think the kids don’t exist?”
“They exist. They’re just in a different timeline than the rest of the story. It’s Will, when he was a kid. He’s the camper everyone calls Billy, the last summer that the whales were there.”
“I don’t know…”
“Think about it. It’s too random otherwise, right? And this way, the whole thing comes full circle.” Russell stopped to take a breath and shook his head. “I just can’t believe I have someone to talk about this with.”
“I know! Even if some of your theories are unsound.”
“Unsound?”
I laughed as I lifted the top paper plate from my quesadilla, broke off one of the triangles, and offered it to him. “Want some?”
“You sure?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you.” He took the quesadilla triangle from me, our hands brushing again, sending another thrill all the way through me. “So where do you fall with the whole Ship of Theseus thing?”
Theseus’s Sailboatwas a reference to the thought puzzle of the Ship of Theseus—which I hadn’t ever heard of before I read the book (and I had a theory that the book would have done better if it had a different title). The puzzle describes a ship that’s been rebuilt over the years, plank by plank, until none of the first ship remains. And the question was if that ship could still be considered the Ship of Theseus even though none of the original components were there.
“You mean do I think it’s still the same ship? Even though every part of it has changed?” Russell nodded. I’d never had to think about it before—but then again, I’d never had anyone to talk about my favorite book with before. “I think so,” I said slowly. “I mean, the essence still remains, right? It’s more than the sum of its parts.”
“I think so too. It’s just like us, actually—”
“Wait.” I held up my hands. “I think I sense a fun fact coming. A football field fun fact!”
“Darcy.”
“Friday Night Facts! Sunday Night Factball? I’m done now.”
“Are you?”
“Probably not. But I do want to know the fact.”
“Well—it was just that we’re like the ship too. Our whole systems change over every seven years. So you’re physically not the same person you were when you were a kid. But you’re still you, right?”
I nodded, turning this over in my mind.
“It’s actually why—” He stopped short and shook his head. “Sorry, that was about to be an un-fun fact.”
“Well, now I have to hear it.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“So.” Russell cleared his throat. “It’s, um, where the phrase the seven-year itch comes from. Because back in the day, when you had scabies—”
“Scabies?” I paused, a bite of quesadilla halfway to my mouth.
“Yeah, they’re um, skin mites? And before people had antibiotics, they would have them for seven years.”
I looked down at my quesadilla—I no longer had much of an appetite. I put it back on the plate and pushed it a little ways away from me.
“See? I told you it was un-fun. Not romantic at all.” As soon as he said this, his eyes widened, like he’d just realized what he’d done.
I smiled down at the AstroTurf. Now that he’d said it out loud, it was just confirmation that we were on the same page—that maybe he liked me as much as I liked him.
You don’t actually know him,the Didi in my head piped up.
She’sgetting to know him, Katy admonished her. Leave Darce alone.
A breeze blew across the football field, not as warm as the one in the parking lot had been. It was definitely starting to get colder, and I reached for my canvas bag. I dug out my Nighthawks sweatshirt and pulled it on.
“Oh,” Russell said as he looked at my sweatshirt, eyebrows raised.
I looked down at it and laughed. I was used to it now, the image of Wylie Sanders, leather jacket open over his bare chest, staring soulfully at the camera. I would sometimes get double-takes when I wore it out and about, but I didn’t care. It almost became like a shibboleth—people I didn’t even know would nod at me, and random strangers would smile and give me a thumbs-up. Like a secret code among Nighthawks fans. “I know. It was my dad’s. It’s a lot, but fun, right?”
“I guess you’re a big fan?” Russell was still blinking at Wylie staring out at him.
“I mean, my dad is.”
“He did name you after one of their songs.”
“This is the truth. I suppose a casual fan wouldn’t have done that.”
“So you’re a fan too?”
I picked up my quesadilla again, thinking about it as I took a bite. The Nighthawks had always just been the soundtrack in our home. I would know the second I stepped into the house or got into the car what kind of mood my dad was in based on which song was playing.
He played me other stuff besides the Nighthawks, of course—we always had music on, our system connected so that you could go from room to room and not lose a note. But the Nighthawks were his favorite, the thing he always came back to the most, his touchstone.
“I don’t know,” I said slowly, realizing I’d never had to put this into words before. “They were basically the sound of my whole childhood. Like I knew the songs before I remembered ever learning them. They were just part of me—the way you don’t remember learning your name.”
“He played you Nighthawks songs when you were a kid?” I nodded, and Russell frowned. “Even ‘South of the Border’?”
I laughed, impressed that he could pull that one out, when it seemed like he hadn’t even been familiar with “Darcy.” “That’s a deep cut.”
“I just can’t imagine playing it for a little kid. I don’t think I even heard it until I was thirteen or something.”
“My dad didn’t believe in the concept of kid music. He played me everything, so I learned these songs while having no idea what they were about. I sang ‘Ecstasy Nights’ for a first-grade talent show.”
Russell stared at me, taco forgotten, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “You did not.”
“My dad got called into a meeting with my teacher about it. But I think secretly he was proud.” Russell laughed. “But… I actually don’t know if I would have liked them if I’d just heard them on my own, you know? Like, the Nighthawks are my dad. Do I love them because of the music? Or because I love my dad, and he loves them?” I shook my head and ran my hand over the fake grass. “I’ll never know, I guess.”
“I can see that.”
“Did you see their set?” I flashed back to it—the way that when Wylie Sanders had run out onstage, everything that had gone wrong with Romy and the festival had melted away. I’d heard the first notes of “Saturday Night Falls” and been transported.
“Just the beginning.”
“Oh man, you missed out. It was so great. He’s so fantastic, and to just be there with all those other people… and he played ‘Darcy,’ which he usually doesn’t do in concert anymore, and there was a moment in ‘Fair Weather’ where he held the mic out to the crowd, and we all sang the chorus, and…” I shook my head, the words spilling out fast. “And I know this isn’t an original thought at all. But at one point I looked around, at this moment we were all experiencing, this magic that was happening for just the people right then. And you could listen to a recording of it, but the experience was only if you were there. The one we were all sharing.” I stopped and took a breath, knowing that I wasn’t even getting close to capturing how it had felt.
Russell smiled at me in the slowly falling darkness. “That sounds—really amazing. It’s too bad your dad couldn’t see it.”
“Oh, I recorded the whole thing for him. Which is basically why my phone is dead.”
“He’ll appreciate it when you get home, though.”
“I hope so. He’s practically Wylie’s biggest fan.” I paused, considering. “Of the music, at any rate.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know.”
Russell just shook his head. But even if he wasn’t a huge fan, he had to know about Wylie Sanders’s personal life. It was just… out there, in the supermarket aisle on the cover of People, fodder for late-night hosts’ jokes, memes on social media.
“Just… how it’s kind of a train wreck. He’s been married a million times, he has all these kids with different women, and his last wife was basically a teenager, right? And he and Candace Young are always in court.…” This was the most prominent of his breakups, mostly because it involved a movie star, someone as famous as him. They’d never gotten married, but had a son and, judging by the articles in Us Weekly, hadn’t stopped fighting since. This was the only one of Wylie’s kids who was in the press—the rest were pretty much out of public view, unless one of them behaved badly on social media. I seemed to remember a few years ago, his daughter—was it Dakota?—had been photographed skinny-dipping off a yacht. A yacht she’d borrowed without permission.
Russell shrugged. “I don’t really know.”
“Really? There was just a thing in DitesMoi. He and his child bride fighting over custody of their twins…” I reached for my bag to show him on my phone.
“Dead Ameche,” Russell reminded me.
“Right. That is hard to remember.”
“You like DitesMoi?” There wasn’t judgment in Russell’s tone, exactly—more like surprise.
“I mean, it’s not like I read it a lot. Just for entertainment, you know?”
Russell nodded, his head bent as he stuffed his trash in the paper bag. I was about to ask him if he ever read it—when I looked up and caught my breath. And what was happening in front of me drove away all thoughts of Instagram gossip sites. There was a glorious sunset streaked across the horizon—apparently, while we’d been eating tacos, we’d missed the sky turning into a Van Gogh painting, purple and pink and orange mixing together across the huge canvas of the desert sky. The mountains were silhouetted and huge, and the whole thing was just breathtaking.
Needing to get a better view, I lay back, tipping my chin up, trying to take it all in. More than anything, I wanted to freeze this moment. So that when I needed to, I could call it back—the Technicolor sunset, the AstroTurf under my bare legs, the faint breeze blowing, Russell’s profile as he finished his Jarritos. The feeling of pieces snapping, at long last, into place.
Russell set his empty bottle down, then he lay back too and looked up. “Wow.”
“I know. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one like this.”
We just lay there next to each other for a moment, looking up, the silence easy and comfortable between us. I turned my head to look at him—he was so close to me. I could have reached out and touched him without even having to extend my arm all the way.
“Have you ever seen the Sistine Chapel?” Russell asked.
“The—what? In Italy?”
“Yeah.”
“Not in person. I’ve seen pictures, though.”
“Well—when you go and see it, there are all these signs everywhere saying you’re not allowed to lie down. Like in every different language, and with pictures and everything.”
“Okay.”
“So I was there with my family, we were all together, seeing it as a group with a guide. And after they’d told us all about it, the rest of my family started to leave. And I saw my moment.”
“You lay down?”
“I had to do it! I wanted to see it from that perspective—like Michelangelo would have.”
“And?”
“It was incredible. Truly. It’s almost too much to take in. Overwhelming, but in a good way.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“Oh yeah,” he said immediately, and I laughed. “I only had a few moments before the guards were running toward me yelling in Italian and our guide was admonishing me.” He turned back to look at the sky, folding his arms behind his head. “But I hadn’t seen anything else that felt like that—until now.”
I looked back at the sky. “I know. It’s so beautiful.”
“Yeah,” Russell said. But I turned and saw that he was no longer looking up at the sky—he was looking at me.
My breath caught in my throat. I felt like we were on the border of an undiscovered country. At a threshold we’d been moving toward since the moment we first spoke. And it was scary and exciting—but right. Like every step had been in the right direction—and led us here.
I smiled at Russell, even though my heart was beating so wildly I was pretty sure he could probably hear it.
He looked at me for a moment longer, his eyes searching mine. Then he rolled over so that he was on his side, leaning on his elbow. He reached out and touched my face gently with the back of his hand, tracing the curve of my cheek and making me shiver. “Darcy,” he said. A second later, he shook his head. “I honestly can’t believe that’s your name.”
“What about it?”
“It’s…” He hesitated. “Nothing. It suits you. You’ll be what I think of when I hear the name from now on.”
“And you’re the first Russell I’ve met. I’ve never known another one.”
“Most people say the kid from Up.”
“That kid was awesome! Great Russell representation. You should be proud.” He gave a half laugh, and then we lapsed back into silence again, but it wasn’t simply comfortable now—it was charged, with everything we were on the verge of. I was all too aware that it would take just a single step for us to cross over. Like a line of dominos a breath away from tipping over and causing a cascade.
I summoned my courage and did what I’d been wanting to do since I first saw him bent over our favorite book at the bus station—I stretched my hand up and ran my fingers through his hair, tangling them in his curls.
Russell caught my hand in his, threading his fingers through mine, and even though his hand was a lot bigger, I couldn’t help but notice how nicely our hands fit together, how good my hand felt in his.
He played with my Silverspun bracelets, and then kissed the back of my hand. When he did this, I felt a thrill that extended through me all the way to my toes. Then Russell turned my hand over and traced the inside of my palm with his index finger, slow spirals and lazy figure eights, making my breath come more shallowly. It was all amazing, just like I’d known it would be. We hadn’t even kissed yet, and it felt like I was on the verge of exploding.
He ran two fingers around my palm in a slow circle, then bent his head, kissed my palm, and traced his mouth down my hand to the inside of my wrist.
I had never thought much about this particular part of my hand before. When Katy got a tattoo there on her eighteenth birthday, she cried through the whole thing, and afterward the tattoo artist told her she’d picked a particularly tricky spot for a first tattoo—the inside of your wrist is all nerve endings.
I understood that now. With Russell’s lips, feathery and soft, tracing the inside of my wrist, suddenly I was feeling everything a lot more than usual, like every nerve in my body was suddenly awake. He kissed the inside of my wrist, and I gasped when I felt his tongue on my skin, his teeth scraping lightly over it.
He raised his head up and kissed my palm again, and then the back of my hand, like we had all the time in the world—and like he knew just what he was doing.
He traced his hand down my cheek again, and looked at me like he was drinking me in. “Hi.”
“Hi,” I said, slightly breathless, feeling very certain I was not going to be able to wait more than a few more seconds before kissing him. It was actually not going to be physically possible.
We hovered there for just a moment, in the space between, the anticipation building and stretching out—and then he tilted his head down, we both closed our eyes, and Russell kissed me.
I stretched up to kiss him back, our lips lightly brushing at first—but then it was like we both took a breath at the same time and started kissing for real.
And he was really good—and we were good together, finding a rhythm right away, our lips and breath fitting together as easily as our hands had.
Russell lifted my hand—he hadn’t stopped holding it this whole time—and placed it above me in the grass, then traced his fingertips down my arm, all while continuing to kiss me. Which was good, because I didn’t want him to stop. We were kissing in waves, almost—first fast and breathless, then slowing down, taking our time, exploring. But then he’d give a shuddering breath or lightly bite the inside of my bottom lip, and that would be all I’d need to start kissing him quickly again. My arms were around him, my hands running through his hair, trying to pull him even closer to me.
Russell broke away and kissed my neck. He started in the hollow of my collarbone, the little indentation there, then traveled slowly upward, finally stopping just under my chin, where I could feel my pulse thundering wildly. He rolled over a little closer to me, one of his legs tangling in between mine, and we were kissing again, faster now, like even that brief break had been more than either of us could handle.
I don’t know how much time passed. I was just living in the moment—the AstroTurf tickling my bare legs and our lips and our breath and his heartbeat and our fingers twining together and Russell rolling me on top of him so I could look down, seeing him below me in the growing darkness, tracing his freckles with my lips the way I’d wanted to when I first saw them. It was like nothing existed except his lips and my lips and my hands tangling in his hair—when Russell pulled away.
“Sorry.”
“About what?” I asked, pushing myself up to sit up with arms that felt wobbly. I knew, without a doubt, that if I tried to stand right now, I’d go crashing to the ground. I blinked, trying to focus. I felt flushed and kiss-drunk, like everything else had gone fuzzy around the edges.
He tugged at the hem of my sweatshirt, rubbing the fabric between his fingers. “I was just wondering if maybe we could do something about this?”
“Um,” I said, looking down at my sweatshirt.
“Like turn it around or something?” He gestured to Wylie Sanders’s circa 2002 pout. “It’s just… kind of distracting? And,” he said as he leaned closer to me, tucking my hair behind my ear and then untucking it so he could play with it, turning it between his fingers, “I really, really don’t want to be distracted right now.”
I laughed as I looked down at my sweatshirt. From his perspective, I could understand why it really might have been a little off-putting to see a shirtless, pouting rock star in this particular moment. “I could definitely turn it around. Or… I could take it off.” I didn’t let myself look away from him as I said it.
“That sounds really good,” he said, smiling at me, and even in the darkness, which was falling fast, I could see his cheeks had gone pink. He reached over, cupped my head in his hands, and kissed me again—was that ever not going to feel miraculous?
He slipped his hands under my sweatshirt and started pulling it up, sliding up my rib cage. I raised my arms and he pulled it over my head. He didn’t just toss it aside, though—he shook it out and then folded it neatly, setting it near my bag on the grass, like he somehow knew, without me having to tell him, that it was important to me. “There,” he said, turning to me with a smile. “Much better.”
I laughed and leaned over to kiss him, running my hands down his arms, bare except for his watch. “We don’t want you to be distracted.”
“That’s the last thing we want,” he said between kisses. He was sitting up now too, and pulled me into his lap, so that my legs were around either side of him and I was sitting just a little taller than him, looking down.
I kissed his cheek, his temple—he closed his eyes when I did that and kind of sighed—his neck, his lips again—but then I drew back.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, even as I untangled myself from him and looked around. “Do you think that the bathrooms here would be unlocked?” All at once, I was cursing myself for not going into the cowgirl bathroom back at the bus station. Why hadn’t I anticipated that it might be the last one I was going to see for a while? I was suddenly regretting my Sprite.
He laughed, and I could see relief in his eyes—that I wasn’t pushing him away, that this was literally just nature calling. “That’s a very good question. And now that you mention it, one that I could also use the answer to.”
He pushed himself up to standing and squinted over at the area behind the home bleachers, where there was what looked like a locked concession counter, and on either side of it, the bathrooms. “I’m going to go check.” He bent down to kiss me once, quickly, before starting to jog over to them. “Be right back!”
I lay back against the grass. Like Russell had felt, lying on a floor in Rome and looking up at a painting on the ceiling, I felt overwhelmed—but in a good way—by everything that had just happened. While we’d been kissing, the sunset had almost totally faded out, and the first stars were starting to appear. I looked around the football field—the goalposts, the scoreboard. It didn’t seem possible that these things were the same, but absolutely everything else had changed.
“All right,” Russell said as he jogged back onto the field, and I sat up. “So, good news and bad news.”
“Bad news first?”
He smiled. “Okay. So these bathrooms are locked. But! I walked to the top of the bleachers, and I think I saw somewhere we can go.”
“Oh yeah?”
He nodded, and I pushed myself up to standing—and sure enough, my legs felt wobbly. Russell reached out his hand to steady me, and I gave it a squeeze. “In that case, lead on.”