A Million Junes

“Me too,” Saul answers.

  Nate claps and rubs his hands together. “All right, let’s get going. Nature waits for no man.” He looks to Hannah. “No matter how beautiful.”

  She rolls her eyes. Saul glances at me, smirking, and the four of us pile into the car and head out. “So where exactly are we going?” I ask.

  “Back to where it all began—where this beautiful woman fell in love with me.”

  “I don’t think we can camp in the Fry Shack, Nate.”

  He eyes me earnestly in the rearview mirror. “Not the Fry Shack, Junior—the falls.”

  He doesn’t notice the expression on my face or the way my body goes rigid; I guess it’s hard to see on the outside that all my organs just set off simultaneous alarm bells. But Saul knows, and Hannah definitely knows, this is the one of two rules I’ve ever had to follow.

  “Did you know about this?” I ask Saul. He shakes his head uneasily.

  “Please don’t be mad, Junie,” Hannah says. “No one’s going to make you get in the water if you don’t want to.”

  “Hannah,” I snap.

  “June,” Hannah pleads. “This is a town tradition we literally might never have another chance to take part in. I swear nothing’s going to happen to you. We’ll all be right here with you. You’re going to be so glad you did it. Remember the last rule you didn’t want to break? Total B.S.”

  This feels different. What does it mean that both Saul and I are forbidden from the falls?

  His gaze is as warm and tangible as if his hands were on me. “If you want, we can drop them off,” he says softly. “Then I’ll take you home.”

  “Sure,” Nate agrees from the front. Hannah crosses her arms and slumps aggressively in her seat. He reaches over and tugs her elbow.

  “Fine,” she sighs. “If you really don’t want to go.”

  “What do you want to do?” I ask Saul.

  The dark and silence between us are heavy and warm. Finally, the corner of his mouth twists up. “That last rule was total B.S.”

  I feel my smile mirroring his. His hand finds mine on the seat between us, his fingers rough and careful. “True,” I agree.

  And what about the memories I’ve seen there? The stories I’ve heard secondhand? Dad hadn’t been allowed there either, but he’d gone. Everyone I know has been to the falls—camping there is the senior tradition. I don’t want to miss out on that because of a rule Dad himself didn’t follow.

  I meet Hannah’s eyes in the rearview mirror once more.

  “I’ll go.”

  “Yes!” Hannah gasps.

  “Yeah you will, Junior,” Nate says. “You’re no wimp.”

  Saul’s smile glows in the dark. I want to touch his teeth. Maybe climb inside his mouth.

  Something Dad said floats into my mind. It shows us the things that hurt us. Over and over again. And then it takes the thing we love most.

  Tomorrow, I think. Tomorrow I’ll keep working on the curse.

  Twenty-Seven

  WE park on the side of the dirt road that runs up to a few formerly beautiful houses that now have shattered windows and lawns covered in old baby toys and broken appliances. This really might be our last chance to do what thousands of Five Fingers kids have done before us—Toddy’s always saying it’s only a matter of time until these houses are bulldozed to make room for condos. Then there will be some kind of gate blocking all the cars that park here in summer.

  We pull our stuff from the trunk and climb the bank beyond the road, into the forest. It’s two miles to the water, and following the single-track path with flashlights that catch creatures’ eyes and mysterious shapes within hollowed nooks has me on edge. I’m beginning to suspect the hike will never end when finally we find ourselves on a cliff overlooking the falls and the deep pool below them.

  One by one we come to stand at the ledge, turn our flashlights off, and stare into the water. There are some things that leave even Nate Baars speechless.

  The surface looks dark, an oily blue, and in it millions of stars twinkle—the whole sky duplicated in one still basin, the churning strip where the falls hit seeming to suck up and pump out more constellations all the time.

  No one says the word beautiful.

  It doesn’t feel right to give something so marvelous, so dizzyingly wild, a compliment. That’d be claiming that we have the right to look at this water and decide whether it’s beautiful. And looking at the pool is the opposite of that: It’s feeling very small, both incidental and fortuitous, like maybe the star-matted water would look at us and say, I think they’re pretty, and the moon and the cave and the falls would nod: You always did have good taste. How could you not? You’re the center of the universe.

  Nate whips his shirt off, kicks his shoes to the side, and drops his pants and boxers, letting out a whoop as he flings his bare body into the water. When he crashes back up to the surface, we watch the warbling starlight to find him. “Warm,” he calls. “Good.”

  Beside me, Hannah starts scrambling out of her clothes, hesitating when she gets to her underwear. Determinedly, she looks away and takes those off too. Her squeal and her bare butt arc up toward the sky then down. The water shouts when she hits it, and her laughter bounces back as she resurfaces. Saul and I smile tentatively at each other from a couple of yards apart.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Hi.”

  “Do you want to get in the water?”

  “Yes,” I admit.

  “Are you going to?”

  “Are you?”

  “It depends on your answer.”

  “I shouldn’t,” I say. He nods to himself, then flicks the fluorescent lantern on and fumbles over some pieces of the tent. He holds up a post and scratches his head. “Clearly an outdoorsman.”

  “You love to mock me.”

  “You’re an easy target.” I spread out the bright blue tarp, staking down its corners.

  He crouches beside me. “Hey, we okay?”

  It’s still hard to be close to him and think about anything but his mouth, but somehow my conversation with Ms. deGeest keeps intruding. I pull the posts out of his hand and snap them together. “Yeah?”

  I finish with the tent frame, and he brings me the cover to slide over it. We work in silence, and when we finish, we set up the other tent too, Hannah’s and Nate’s voices and laughter rising up to us, then finally falling suspiciously quiet. “Hey, how long did you and Ms.—Allison—deGeest, like, date?”

  Saul laughs. “I wouldn’t call it dating. I would say we had about three encounters.” I toss the sleeping bags inside the tents. “Why? Is that what’s been bothering you?”

  “No,” I say. “So what did you mean when you said you’re over art?”

  My tone sounds more mocking than I mean it to. Saul stares at me for a couple of seconds before he walks away and sits at the edge of the cliff. I follow and sit beside him, leaving some space between us. Hannah and Nate are nowhere in sight, meaning they’re probably in the same cave where Saul and I first saw the strawberry-haired girl and dark-haired boy.

  “Saul,” I begin after a moment. “I spend a lot of time thinking about you. A ridiculous amount, if you consider all the more pressing things I have to think about right now.”

  He smiles, murmurs quietly, “Feeling’s mutual, Jack.”

  “And I love hanging out with you.”

  “Life-threatening curse notwithstanding,” he says, “it’s the best.”

  “But there’s a lot you don’t talk about. Like what’s happening with your dad, or school—whether you plan to go back, and what happens then.” My chest aches, and I focus on the starlit water below. “If I’m just a distraction from everything terrible you’re going through, I get it, but—”

  “June.” He catches my hand and draws me toward him. I let him pull me across his lap and sink into him
when he wraps his arms tight around me. He buries his face into the side of my neck, his breath drawing chills there. “Please don’t think that,” he whispers.

  I fold my hands into his shirt, and he pulls back to look into my eyes, his own serious and intent under pitched eyebrows. He smooths the hair back from my face. I feel too teary and sensitive to say anything. I just nod.

  “I want to know you, June,” he says. “Not just who you are now, or who you were in a handful of memories, but all of you. And if you want to know me like that, I want that too.”

  “I do,” I manage.

  He’s quiet for a long moment as he thinks. Finally he nods to himself. “Okay,” he says quietly. “Did you know Bekah was a youth archery champion?”

  I shake my head.

  “She was tough,” he says. “And brilliant. I mean, she could tell you the name of any tree in this forest. She and my dad used to take these trips. Do things Mom and I had no interest in. She went through a partial remission when she was fourteen, and they took a dogsled trip in Montana.”

  “Wow. Intense.”

  He nods. “I always wanted to be a writer. I was never interested in the hunting and fishing stuff like she and my dad were. Writing seemed like a good way to connect with him, I guess, so I started writing stories, and then when Bekah got sick, it was practically all I did, and then she died, and I went away to school.”

  He glances at me then back to the falls. “I’d be fine for a couple of weeks. Stretches where it wouldn’t seem so bad. And then something would happen—or nothing would—and I’d really remember she was gone. And I’d plummet and write and plummet some more. I wanted to move on, to stop being sad, but I wasn’t ready. So I crammed my schedule, stayed on campus to take classes over my first two summers, applied for a residency for this past one. I didn’t expect to get in, and when I did, I felt terrible.”

  “You didn’t want to go?”

  “I didn’t deserve to,” he says. “I was—am—twenty years old, and all I do is imitate other writers. I mean, you know how some people are excellent at standardized testing and some people—no matter how smart—just bomb?”

  “I’m aware of the second group,” I say. “I refuse to believe in the first.”

  He forces a smile. “Yeah, well, I’m part of the first. I’m not any smarter than anyone else. I work hard and pay attention and I copy. I either got into the York residency because of who my dad is or because I studied until I could write like someone else. I burned out fast. A week in, I stopped writing altogether. I’d sold this book of essays—a lot of stuff about growing up in Five Fingers, about Bekah—but it turned out my editor wanted more of an intimate look at Eli Angert, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make myself write a word about him. When Bekah died—I don’t know. Writing was the only thing I could focus on. When I wasn’t doing it, every minute was terrible, and all I could do was wait for enough time to pass that I could go back to sleep.

  “When I wrote, things sort of came into focus for a while, and I could find pieces of my sister; I knew what I wanted to say, and I could pass the time saying it. When I found out about my dad’s Alzheimer’s, it was completely different. Even before Bekah died, things were complicated with Dad, and I think I’d always kind of written for him?” He says it like a question, like he’s asking himself. “To prove I was like him. And then knowing that soon he’d be gone, it just felt like a pointless exercise.”

  I take Saul’s hand, and his other tightens around my waist. “I didn’t want to go to that residency. But I was scared to come back to Five Fingers. I didn’t want to see what was happening to him. Or remember everything that happened here. And at the same time, ever since I saw those memories of Bekah, the past is all I think about. Except you.”

  I stare up at him until his molten eyes dip to me. “All I ever wanted was to be like my dad,” I tell him. “I didn’t want to forget. But now, with everything I’ve seen in the Whites—I don’t know. Everything was different than I thought it was. He was different.” I glance at Saul, moonlight slanting across his face. “When I’m with you, I remember there’s such a thing as a present, and a future. It feels almost okay that he wasn’t who I thought he was. Because now there are all these other things I never considered being or having, and I want them. And I feel like it’s okay to want them.”

  Saul cups my face in his hands, his thumbs drawing circles on my jaw. He kisses me softly, and I thread my hands through his hair. He eases me back toward the cool earth, and I draw him with me. His rough hands slide to my waist beneath my shirt; his touch is light and potent. It wakes up my skin, drips heat into me. He kisses me again, his jaw gently grating mine, and the lines in his back tighten and soften in rhythm with our breaths.

  His mouth slides down my neck, the side of his face settling over my heartbeat. “I hear you,” he whispers, kissing my collarbone. “I can hear all of you, rushing around in there. A million Jacks and Juniors and Junes, a city of them.”

  I pull him back to me and lift myself against him. His knee slides between mine, and his stomach presses into me as he lowers himself, his warm mouth nestling into my throat. He moves down the length of me, kisses the center of my chest and stomach, my hips. My skin buzzes everywhere he touches and pulses where he doesn’t.

  “Go in the water with me,” I say.

  He grins. “Now?”

  “Now. While we’re not afraid.” There are things I want to say and do that are scarier than the pool lit up with galaxies, and it makes me feel reckless and unstoppable. I want to be in the water, where our boundaries will lose their firmness. I want to do something I never would have done two months ago, and I want to do it with Saul Angert. “Let’s go in,” I whisper as his face lifts toward mine.

  “Are you sure?”

  I touch his nose, cheeks, jaw, cataloguing him. This is a moment I’ll want to relive. “You were scared to come back. I was scared to leave. The last thing we’re scared of is down in that water, and we can swim through it, and if we make it, we’re done being scared.”

  He lets out a particularly gravelly laugh. “That’s it? We go in the water and then we’re fearless, June?”

  “That’s it. Nothing can stop us.” Not even curses.

  “Okay, Jack. Let’s be fearless.” He stands and pulls me up. He peels his sweatshirt and shirt off, and it’s hilarious how exaggeratedly I am not watching.

  Saul notices my sudden shyness and turns, leaving me to undress in semiprivate. “Do you want me to jump first?”

  I look out over the ledge.

  “Hello? We’re coming down now,” I shout. When I hear no answer, I say, “Let’s jump together.” Saul turns around slowly, and we both try to Not Look at each other too much or too long, but it turns out those things don’t exist. I like having him look at me as much as I like looking at him—his luminous skin and gleaming hair and narrow smile. The real obstacle is the freezing cold air.

  “You’re beautiful, June O’Donnell,” he says.

  “Is that a surprise?”

  He shakes his head once. “It shouldn’t be, and it is.”

  “For me too.” It is a surprise to see him and realize he’s just a person, a handsome boy with all the same parts and pieces and lines I know to expect, and somehow everything is different too, because it’s him. He holds out a hand, and I twist my fingers into his, step into him so close I feel the warmth of his body though only our hands are touching.

  Together we step to the edge of the world and throw ourselves into the outstretched arms of the glittering sky.

  We fall as one, and the world is nothing but strands of light and dark zooming past us. Air that’s cold-hot-cold again, and Saul’s hand, always Saul’s hand. We hit the blanket of warmth—yes, the water is, like everyone says, impossibly warm—and it folds around us, dragging us down.

  Even after eighteen years of stories about the wa
rmth of the falls, I’m still so surprised, my eyes snap open beneath the surface.

  That’s how I find out that the stars in the water weren’t just a reflection.

  At first they look like jellyfish: fragile spheres of glowing purples and blues, swimming down-down-down toward the sandy floor we can’t see. Many are pebble-small, others the size of snow globes. I catch one of the delicate orbs, and it turns foggy white, as if I’m holding a tiny cloud. Saul jerks his chin toward the surface, and we kick back up, the cloud-thing still in my hand.

  We break through the water, gasping for breath. The air is as frigid as ever, and our teeth immediately start chattering.

  I rub the water from my eyes and find that something’s changed. Night is gone. The pool is cloaked in the gray that comes when the sun has begun to lift enough to pierce the trees and bring color to the earth. Everything’s a richer, darker version of itself, and fog coils around our shoulders and speckles our faces.

  “It happened,” Saul whispers, because when the rest of the world is this quiet, it feels like you have to whisper. “We’re not where we were.” He points to where our tents and lantern should be. There’s nothing but fog rolling over a patch of blue-green brush.

  “Hannah? Nate?” I hiss, treading water. He’s right—they’re gone. Or we are.

  “What does it mean?” Saul murmurs. “We’re not in a memory—is this a thin place too?” He slicks his hair back and swims closer to examine the orb in my fingers. Crooked in my palm, it looks different than in the water: soft, feathery.

  “A Window White,” I breathe. “I’ve only ever seen them by my house before.” The White skirts off my hand and drops into the water with an almost inaudible plop!

  “The one place we’re not allowed to go,” Saul says, “and yet multiple memories have brought us here. And there are Whites here. June, this place has something to do with us.”

  In the gray morning, the water appears opaque, the sparks of colorful light dulled to look like rocks catching enough sun to glitter. I think of Toddy’s story, how he thought he saw gold in the water.