Chapter 11
“I think I’m in love”—Nelle lifts her face to the sun, her freckles like flakes of pyrite—“with the sea.”
Sand hardens in the cracks between James’s toes.
The water retreats, sighs, then races back up the shore, soaking his rolled-up jeans, cold on his ankles.
Sunrise pierces through cotton-candy clouds the color of apricots.
He catches himself smiling at Nelle, jealous of the wind playing with her hair.
His foremost reason for coming here was to show her the ocean, but he clenches his phone to remind himself of his other reason.
Since his mom surprised him with a clamshell phone in middle school, he has been dependent on one.
He checks it like clockwork every few minutes, scrolls for hours when he could be reading or writing or talking to another person in person.
He looks at it now. Above him, the clouds are purple, red, and yellow.
In the phone’s reflection, they are black and white.
James flips it in his hand three times, spinning a yarn ball of courage, a batter rocking back and forth, ready to swing.
Then he chucks it. It slides from his hand too easily.
Nelle laughs, clinging to his shirtsleeve. She throws her hand up in farewell as his phone flies like a silver bird, far out into blue water. It disappears with a splash, an anticlimactic plop, then it’s gone.
James watches the spot where it vanished until the wind dries his salty lips and a white boat appears on the horizon, breaking his stare.
Nelle tugs his sleeve. “How do you feel?”
He inhales the sharp brine. A hundred pounds slide off his shoulders. He feels, for the first time in years, weightless. Birdlike.
He exhales and spreads his arms. “I feel fucking great.”
Nelle and James roam the pastel streets of Charleston until morning breaks into afternoon and they have to seek refuge from the boiling heat inside an ice cream shop.
The AC hums, and the green and white tile clicks under their shoes.
The place is lined with vinyl booths and smells like sugar.
Nelle orders strawberry, James orders salted caramel, and they take their cones to a tree-filled park overlooking the harbor.
“Father used to tell me horror stories about cavities.” The pink ice cream coating Nelle’s tongue satisfies more than her sugar craving.
Father tried to keep her healthy and pure, yet he punished her with violence.
Vengeance, she thinks, is best served in a waffle cone.
“Keeping me from this was his worst crime.” A dribble of melted ice cream falls from her cone to the cobbles underfoot.
“One time he caught me eating a peppermint and told me that my teeth would rot and crumble out of my mouth. I had nightmares for years. Look at me now, Father!”
She thrusts her ice cream to the sky like a middle finger.
“Why do you call him that?” James crunches the last bite of his cone.
Nelle shrugs. “Habit. When I call him Quill, it feels like I’m talking about someone else. A stranger.”
Clouds pass overhead, graying out the park. Talking about Father makes even the sun want to hide.
“But he was no stranger to me. He showed me at a very young age just how violent a man he could be. But Father, well, that’s just what I’ve always called him.”
“It’s too endearing a term for someone so horrible.” James rolls up his sleeves, revealing the pre-notepad scribbles he has yet to scrub off.
Nelle leans against a metal railing and breathes in the harbor. As a kid, she wondered if the ocean had a scent. Now she knows; it is warm and sour, fish and sulfur.
“Does it bother you that you have to write for me all the time?” she asks, not sure where the question comes from, only that it has built momentum since they left Lincoln.
Behind them, a little boy in the park opens his hand and lets his red balloon float up in the tree branches.
It gets caught among the leaves, but it doesn’t pop.
Nelle is careful not to look at James, not until he answers.
“No,” he says. “Of course not.”
She isn’t sure she believes him.
After lunch at an Italian restaurant, they pass a gift shop where Nelle stops and shields her face against the window.
Beyond a rack of Charleston T-shirts and shelves of historic local books sits a display of leather-bound journals and a set of fountain pens, the old-fashioned sort with refillable ink barrels.
“Can I borrow a twenty?”
James digs out his wallet and hands over the money, no questions asked.
She almost reminds him that she needs his permission to enter the shop, but he is already unscrewing the vial at his neck, dabbing his fingertip against the ink, and smudging a message in the legal pad.
Once the ink is set, Nelle ducks into the store and dives for the journals.
Immediately, one stands out. Black and not too tall, and when she holds it, the pages fall open in her hands like the spine has been broken for years.
She tucks it under her arm, along with one of the pens, and takes them both to the counter.
After she pays, her legs carry her outside like they know where they’re going, paper gift bag swinging in her hand, and she finds James leaning against a lamppost, a 1930s movie star with his sharp chin dimple, sleeves rolled back to his elbows, ankles crossed, brown hair curling behind his ears.
“What do we have here?” He pushes off the tree and peeks into the bag.
“I’ll show you.”
She cracks open the journal to its first blank page, the paper speckled with leaf-shaped shadows.
She passes it to James before unscrewing the pen’s glass barrel.
Wincing, she digs the tip of the pen into her palm until she draws blood.
Then, with the nib wedged between folds of her flesh, she presses the plunger down and begins the process of extracting blood from her hand.
It tickles in a horrible way. Like someone pulling a sheet beneath her skin, tugging toward that incision in her palm.
Within a minute, the pen is full. A part of her hates that James has to see this, but she refuses to feel shameful about what she is.
Who she is. She gets one shot now, and if she has to live afraid of herself, she won’t be living at all.
In the car, Nelle flips through the new journal.
The road is dotted with red brake lights and gray puddles.
She runs her finger over the half-filled first page.
On their way from the park to the twelve-hour garage where they left the truck, they detoured at a coffee shop and an independent bookstore filled with putrid cats.
James loved them and scratched each one between the ears.
Nelle thought they were cute until a long-haired orange one hissed at her.
She hissed back, which made James laugh.
The last line in the journal fuzzies up her stomach. Nelle rides in the car. With the road ahead of her, she can go anywhere.
She shuts the leather cover, slides it into the inner pocket of James’s denim jacket, and reclines her seat until she’s staring at the ceiling of the cab.
“Where’s the next stop?” she asks.
“We can stop wherever you want. Whenever you want.”
She studies the slope of his nose. The bags under his eyes, how his cheekbones sluice down his face. The brown curl tickling his brow.
“Thank you.”
His head ticks. “Why do you say that?”
“I thought I’d be stuck in that house with Quill forever. I never imagined . . .” Her throat closes up, and she laughs at her own emotions. “I never thought I’d be here, in the car with someone like you, driving aimlessly.”
“Welcome to freedom,” James says.
So much beauty in the natural world. Craggy trees, wispy clouds, rain, stars, and seas. Cats and fireflies and rats. And the architecture. The art. The people, too. Random pedestrians, a shop owner, James—she falls in love with them just for being human.
“What do you want to see?” he asks. “I’d like to visit New York eventually, but we can go anywhere you want.”
Anywhere I want. Nelle pulls her legs to her chest. “Paris. London. Scotland. Madrid, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Moscow, New York, Alaska, Boston, Vegas, Salt Lake City—”
“So . . . everywhere?”
She grins into her knees. “Oh, and Africa. I’ve always wanted to see a lion.”
“We can go to a zoo.”
“Not a lion in a cage,” she says. “And not just in a book, either.”
Tires roar on the interstate, eighty miles per hour breaking into ninety.
James blinks salt, his caffeine and adrenaline stores long depleted. “Shall we pull off?”
He takes the next exit. Nelle leans out the window, her hair a fiery blond tangle. The road curves into a forest, which opens up onto fields of sleeping cows and horses.
“This is amazing!” she yells, tasting summer’s breath.
James pulls onto the side of the road in a stretch of grass by the tree line. “Aren’t you exhausted?”
He cuts the truck off, and the headlights die, leaving them stranded in darkness.
Nelle gasps for air through her laughter, skin buzzing as her heart rate slows. “What are we doing?”
“Sleeping. You do sleep, right?” He grabs two rolled quilts from the back seat. At her nod, he says, “You all right with sharing the truck bed?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” she says, though the thought of sleeping beside him makes her want to choke. She sits, still buckled. Is he going to leave me in here?
James pulls the pen out of his pocket, and her stress dissipates. He writes in the journal: Nelle goes to the bed of James’s truck.
Her bones release.
In the back, he makes a bed. One quilt to lie on, the other to cover up with. She crawls between the heavy fabric, folds her arms behind her head, and stares at the stars. A ceiling of diamond teardrops, prettier than the popcorn paint of her bedroom.
“I’m so lucky,” she says with a sigh. She notices him staring at her. “What are you looking at?”
“You,” he says. “I’m thinking.”
She laughs. “About what?”
He touches her nose with the tip of his finger. His hand snakes to the side of her face, across her cheek, and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. Her mouth dries out. She feels the urge to vanish into his long body. She fights it.
James’s thumb brushes the curve of her cheekbone. “That I’m so lucky, too.”
All breath abandons Nelle’s lungs.
“I was trapped,” he says. “School and summer both leading toward a future I don’t want.
” He points to a star brighter than all the rest. “I didn’t know it was killing me.
You called me brave the night we met, but I’m not.
Never have been. Until now. I finally feel like I’m doing what I want. I feel . . . weightless.”
“Like you could float away?”
“Yeah.” The corner of his mouth creases. “Just like that.”
“Can you wish on any star, or only shooting ones?” She stares where he pointed.
He smirks. “I think any star is worthy.”
“What about the moon?”
“Oh, of course, the moon.” His voice is wood. Scratchy shell, soft heart. “What’s your wish?”
She inhales and thinks, I wish to feel this way forever.
Instead she says, “If I tell you, it won’t come true.”
Nelle wakes up confused, sweaty, shaking, her body damp with a layer of early-morning dew. The trees along the road shiver with life. In a nearby field, a cow moans.
Father’s voice rings out from her nightmare. He was following them, revolver in hand, murder etched in the hard line of his mouth.
She nudges James awake. He blinks at the cloud-streaked sky, his hair a tousled mess.
“Good morning.” He smiles sleepily, then, seeing her, his expression drops. “What’s wrong?”
Nelle’s fingers curl around the cold quilt. “I think Father’s following us.”
“W-what?” James sputters. “Impossible. Even if he’s alive, he can’t know where we—”
“In my dream, he was trailing us. He will kill you if he finds you, James.”
The thought of James dead kick-starts her tears, but she steels herself.
He starts folding one of the quilts. “You really think this was a . . . premonition? Not just a dream?”
Nelle helps him with the second quilt. She trusts her subconscious, especially when it comes to Father. Living alone with him for twenty-one years, never getting a break from his presence, formed a unique bond. And in a very literal sense, she is a part of him. She came from him alone.
Still, Father would have to be psychic and able to teleport to reach them, and no one followed them off the interstate last night.
“I think you’re right,” she says when they are back inside the truck. She watches the rearview mirror. “It was just a dream.”