Chapter Forty
I am completely rethinking my plan.
Plan A was Plan Obvious. I was going to write a poem, just like Gilbert’s poem in the box.
Congratulations! You have found
Cam and Ivy’s Bonus Round
That’s about as far as I got before realizing I was diving headfirst into a pool of cringe and would be in grave danger of never seeming cool again.
But despite the cringe factor, the poem would have information!
It would contain clarity! By the end of it, even if I did look like a total dweeb, at least Cam would know exactly where to find me now, one week later.
Instead, I went with yet another plan B. Plan Say Little and Look Smooth Doing It.
I left exactly one line in the box for Cam to find. Written in plain English—though it does have to be held up in front of a mirror to be read—is a day and a time. This day. This time.
And that was it. The hope, when I first wrote it, was that Cam would figure out the place on his own. Then he could decide, without me right next to him, without our hands touching or hearts racing, if he wanted to come out and finish what we started two years ago.
The minitruck comes bumbling up the road.
As it gets closer, it somehow looks even smaller. The truck pulls into a spot along the side street, trembling and chugging in place until the driver kills the engine.
The same Recreation and Park official with the long thick braid—Ranger Merilyn, I’ve since learned—steps out.
“Morning, Ivy.”
“Good morning, Merilyn,” I say.
“He here yet?”
I grip the handle of my roller bag tight, then let it go. “No. Not yet.”
She slams the door and walks over, hands jammed into her pockets against the cool ocean air coming in from the west.
“Loved your application,” she says as she walks. “That’s exactly the kind of thing I was hoping we could put on display in the lodge. Tells a story, you know? About what the parks meant to the queer community of San Francisco in the seventies and eighties.”
“Right,” I say.
A sharp wind whips through the street, rustling my hair and making me clutch at my jacket.
Ranger Merilyn tamps down her bangs and looks up toward the top of the dune.
That’s the main part of Grandview Park. Right now we’re standing to one side of it, where the neighborhood clusters together in strange, wavy lines, mimicking the dune’s topography.
But even from here, through a slice between the houses, I can see the fine red lines of the Golden Gate Bridge just over Strawberry Hill.
I did a little research on this place last week.
Apparently, it not only offers the best views in all of San Francisco but is also probably the oldest remaining sand dune in the entire Bay Area.
One historian called it “the last window into San Francisco’s earliest past,” which is, well… pretty fitting.
I check the time again and sigh. “I definitely appreciate you meeting me here. But like I said in the email—”
Ranger Merilyn stops me. “I know, I know. No dig unless the boy shows up.”
“What boy?”
We look up to see Cam striding around the last block of houses. He’s wearing a white T-shirt, no jacket, and has his shovel swung over one shoulder. I can’t stop smiling as he marches the rest of the way to us.
“You made it,” I say, oozing unbridled joy like the disgusting little creature I am.
Cam stops just short of me. “Yeah, I did. Holy hell, what a ride. Those opera glasses?”
“Right?”
“Grand. View. Grandview! Totally genius.”
“Totally,” I say, grinning.
Ranger Merilyn looks at the two of us, slightly amused.
“As I told Ivy before, this is a highly specialized permit request. We can’t normally grant access to historical parks like Grandview.
But, given the information Ivy shared with us, we are allowing a one-time, one-hole dig.
This is it, folks. You have an hour once the first shovel goes in.
” She claps her hands. “So, where are we going? Up to the top?”
I look at Cam, waiting.
“No,” he says. He looks back at me. “We’re digging here.”
He points to the northern tip of the dune beside us.
“So you got that too,” I say.
Cam nods. “If the aerial of Grandview Park is a person, then right here is the chest, yes? Exactly where the locket fell on the woman in the scroll. But more importantly…”
He takes out a sheet of paper from his pocket and shows it to me. It’s his own version of the poem from the box, this time transcribed in his writing.
“If you seek the lock and key,” Cam reads aloud. “So we need both the locket and the key. But the key on the necklace is useless, right? It’s not the real key.”
“It isn’t,” I say in agreement. “You’re right.”
Cam holds up the poem again. “And look, here it says, ‘No added ciphers.’ Which means preexisting cipher keys are fair game. You and I had it from the very beginning.”
He walks to the tip of the dune, right next to a street sign. One side for Fourteenth Avenue, the other for Fifteenth Avenue. They converge at this exact point.
“A giant between streets,” I say, walking next to him.
“Grandview’s the giant. And right here is the only point where a person can be between Fourteenth and Fifteenth.” Cam spins his shovel around and drives the tip into the ground. “So, let’s dig.”
Ranger Merilyn settles into her camp chair to watch us dig. I unzip my bag and pull out my gardening trowel from last time. We lay a tarp next to us and begin to move the dirt.
The soil is soft at first and moves easily. Then, once we reach twelve inches down, the ground becomes thick and densely packed. Cam’s turns get shorter and mine get longer, with me putting every bit of strength I have into chipping away at the earth before he hauls the freed dirt away.
“Twenty more minutes!” Ranger Merilyn calls.
My chest deflates. This is starting to feel like last time. But everything is supposed to be different now. Cam and I, we’re supposed to be getting things right, finally. We need to get this right.
“Let’s switch,” Cam says. “I’ll poke around, then you clean up.”
He offers a hand to help me out of the hole, then jumps in with his shovel.
“You want this?” I ask, holding out my trowel.
“Nah,” he says. He takes his shovel in both hands and plunges it into the ground with all his strength. Then, as if he were removing Excalibur from its rock, he pulls the shovel back out again.
On the third plunge, we each hear it.
A distinctive, delicate crack.
Cam freezes and looks up at me. He tosses his shovel out of the hole and pulls me into it alongside him. We drop into the dirt, arms and legs overlapping as we dig with our bare hands.
“I’ve got something!” I scream.
“Me too!” Cam yells.
Slowly, shakily, we both rise, each holding a piece of an ornately sculpted casque.
It’s painted in beautiful, glimmering colors, shimmering with every shade of the rainbow.
There are figures carved in bas-relief on the outside.
I recognize some of them. Harvey Milk. Marsha P.
Johnson. Judy Garland dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.
Each figure is so delicate, so beautiful, that instantly I know I could see a piece like this in a museum.
It reminds me of the ancient bowls and vases found from hundreds of years ago.
I think Gilbert Baker did that on purpose.
He wanted people to know that gay history is nothing new—it’s as ancient as humankind itself.
Ranger Merilyn leaps out of her chair and bounds over.
“You found it!” She runs until she’s standing just outside the hole. “Oh shoot. It’s broken.”
Cam twists his piece to see the damage. “Yeah…that was my fault.”
“It’s okay,” I say quickly. “I already know how we can fix it.”
I assess the clean break between each of our pieces. I can already imagine the resin filling in the cracks. The gold-leaf kintsugi being painted over the fracture. It’s a celebration of brokenness, of resilience, of things coming together again.
Ranger Merilyn brings an empty bin and two clean towels from the truck. We wrap each piece and set them gently inside the bin. As she loads the bin back into the cab, I step next to Cam and touch his hand.
He looks down at my palm, then lifts it and places it flat on his chest. I take his other hand and place it flat on mine.
We study each other for what feels like ages—seeing all our past versions, all the ways we’ve changed in knowing each other.
Cam nods slightly, as if I’ve asked him a question and he’s only now said yes.
He leans into me and parts his lips. I lean up to meet him in the middle.
If our first kiss marked a fracture in the friendship, and our second a total split between us…then this third kiss is the one that puts us back together.
This one is pure gold.