She chews for a minute, thinking. “Simple. From here on out, I want honesty.”
I don’t need to think about it. “It’s yours.”
“And, you have to share your most embarrassing moment. It’s only fair.”
I contemplate for a moment. “Probably my first Valentine’s Day date.”
She wipes a drip of syrup from her chin. “That bad?”
“The stuff of nightmares.”
“Well, what happened? Did you puke on her? Get your braces locked together?” She swallows again and waves her fork at me. “Spill the beans, Mister.”
I sigh, resigned. “I was thirteen. Her name was Emily Moore and by eighth grade standards, she was way out of my league.”
“I don’t buy that.”
“Buy it,” I say, taking a sip from my coffee cup. “Emily was lead girl—you know the kind of girl who walks around school with a posse of petite blonds in tow.”
“So, like a walking, talking bubblegum commercial?”
“That’s right.” I laugh, picturing Emily Moore. She was a lot like a bubblegum commercial. “So, I traveled a lot for surf competitions but the week before Valentine’s Day, Emily came right up to me in the hallway, popped a hand on her hip and asked me if I liked her.”
Gemma’s eyebrows go up. “Ballsy.”
“You’re telling me,” I say, leaning into the booth. I haven’t thought about this in a while. “I had no idea how to handle it so I mumbled nonsense until she rolled her eyes and told me that I could take her out for Valentine’s Day if I wanted to as long as I bought her flowers and took her someplace nice.”
“Though I admire her gumption, this girl is starting to sound a little scary.”
“She was,” I agree.
“And you took her out anyway?”
“It was eighth grade. Of course I took her out,” I say. “I was going to be at an invitational that whole next week. So, in all my thirteen-year-old wisdom, I begged Claudia, who incidentally hated both Emily Moore and Valentine’s Day, to help me come up with a plan for an amazing date.”
Gemma asks, “And did she help?”
“Oh, she helped,” I say, my tone indicating that the story is about to take an ill-fated turn. “Being Claudia, she suggested a play.”
She nods along. “Very cool and different.”
“Says the actress.”
“Former actress,” she reminds me, taking another bite of waffle.
“Right.” I chuckle. “Obviously, being thirteen, I didn’t have a car.”
“Obviously.”
“So, when Valentine’s Day rolls around, Emily’s dad drove us all the way out to La Jolla to this little boutique playhouse and dropped us off and—”
“Did you get dressed up?” she interrupts.
I nod. “I churched it up, which for me, meant wearing pants instead of board shorts and brushing my hair out.”
“Nice.”
“Anyway,” I say, lightly shaking my head. “I got my first indication that something was off when Emily and I were walking up to the box office to pick up the tickets Claudia said would be waiting for us.”
“What was it?”
“I noticed that there were no dudes around.”
“None?” she asks.
“None,” I answer. “And when I finally got the tickets, I realized why.”
Now her curiosity is piqued. She’s leaning in with her elbows on either side of her plate. “Why?”
“Because my sister had arranged for us to see a special Valentine’s Day performance of The Vagina Monologues.”
“The Vagina Monologues?”
“Yeah, it’s a play comprised of monologues about female empowerment and—”
“I know what it is,” Gemma says, sitting back, her eyes pulling wide. “But, Claudia did not do that to you.”
“Yes.” I nod in confirmation. “She did. She thought it would be funny and eye-opening.”
She laughs, and I go on. “Do you know how awkward it is for a thirteen-year-old boy to hear the word vagina two hundred times? And on a date?”
Her laughter only gets louder.
“Emily Moore never talked to me again and I didn’t go on another date for a year.”
This makes Gemma crack up even more.
I lean against the booth and watch her. She’s clutching a napkin to her chest and her face is going pink, folding into laughter.
Do you feel it?
She’s still lost in it when the bill arrives.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Landon
A little while later, I walk her down to the bridge near the pier. We dangle our legs over the side and in the orange afternoon light, I tell her how when I was a kid, I used to sit up here and pretend I was snacking on cars.
“How do you snack on cars?” she asks, grinning as she pushes a loose hair from her face.
I show her how, if you open your mouth and lean your head just right, it looks like you’re swallowing the oncoming cars driving on the freeway.
Jeep Wrangler.
Red convertible.
Delivery van.
Between cars, she says, “You know how I used to want to be an actress?”
White BMW. “Mmm-hmm.”
“Have I told you why I stopped wanting it?”
I shake my head.
“Well, when I was graduating from high school, I earned a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon and I had a whole path planned out. It was like a map in my head of what the next five years would look like. But halfway through my freshman year, I got bored with the map and school,” she says. “Julie wanted me to stick it out but I didn’t listen to her. And one morning, I packed up my dorm room, put all of my stuff into the car, and I started driving back west. I was sick of waiting around for the dream. I wanted it to happen and I wanted it right then.” A pause. “That whole drive out to California, I felt like a girl at the end of a movie. It was awesome and freeing and then…”
“Not so much?” I venture, happy that she’s talking to me, telling me things about her past.
She shakes her head. “Once I got to L.A., the reality started to hit. I ended up in these huge lines of girls as good or better than me and there was so much pressure and eventually, I just caved in on myself. I stopped believing I could do it. I stopped wanting anything at all. I stopped… fighting.”
“What did your parents think about you dropping out of school?” I ask, gulping back a silver minivan.
“Well, they were already disappointed in me for wanting to go into acting in the first place. They think it’s fine for a hobby, but they would be much happier if I joined The Peace Corps.” She chomps on a navy blue Chrysler.
I laugh.
“My parents met in college while they were both getting degrees in agroecology.”
Agroecology? “That sounds made up.”
Gemma smiles. “Right? But it’s not. It’s a real thing. When I was growing up, they were part of this big sustainability project in Sacramento and now they’re are in Tanzania helping villagers learn how to grow crops.”
Black SUV. Blue sedan. “That’s very cool.”
“It is cool,” Gemma says, but there’s something about her voice that makes me think she doesn’t think it’s all that cool. I stop playing the game so that I can look at her properly.
“Before Tanzania, they were in Mozambique for six months and before that it was Angola. They work with this organization that goes all over Africa planting food-producing crops and teaching the people how to care for them.” She works her mouth around a white two-door with tinted windows. “They’re out changing the world.”
“Do you guys still get to talk a lot? I assume they have satellite phones everywhere.”
“They do but actually, no, we don’t talk much. We used to be close when I was younger but everything is different now.” Her eyes are riding out over the freeway on the roofs of the cars. I want to grab her face and tip her chin up so that I can see what’s moving around
in there.
Even before I ask the question, I know that the answer is going to be a bad one. “Why is everything different?”
“My brother.”
I think she mentioned a brother before but she never said whether he was older or younger. “Yeah?”
“I never talk about this—but, he died,” she says it fast, the way you plunge under, quick and all at once, when the water is so cold that your toes want to curl back into your body. “God, it’s hard to say that out loud. Every time I do, I feel like I’m making it happen all over again.” She hugs her arms around herself and chews her cheek. “Andrew had cancer.”
“I… shit.”
“Ewing Sarcoma that started in his bones and went on from there, which basically means that it was fast and horrific and painful and he spent the entire last part of his life wasting away in a hospital bed.” She shakes her head like she needs to throw off the painful memory. “He was only ten.”
“Shit,” I say again, the whole time wishing I could come up with something a hell of a lot better, but that seems to be all I’ve got in me right now. Shit.
“It was almost five years ago and I’m—well, I’m okay now.” She pauses to think about what she wants to say. “I guess ‘okay’ is the wrong word to use, isn’t it? It will never ever be okay. It’s always going to hurt. It’s always going to be this big… thing inside of me. Like a mass that the doctors can’t operate on because it’s attached to my brain stem or spinal column or something.”
My stomach twists and understanding dawns. It’s no wonder Gemma is drawn so tight inside. She’s lost so much already—her brother, her parents, her career, and then her trust. I’m rocked with turmoil. How can I expect her open her heart to me after everything she’s been through? Especially considering I’ve been less than honest with her.
Hell.
I want to kiss her so badly that it’s making my chest pound, but I settle for tucking her hair behind her ear and taking her hand in mine.
“He was so young, you know? One day he was this kid who loved animals and learning about space and then all of a sudden, he was dying. Just like that.” She jerks her head back. “I hate that he missed out on so much. I hate that he’ll never ride on a gondola in Venice or go to Machu Picchu or get stung by a jellyfish or complain about jury duty or learn to drive a car or have a bad first kiss. He’ll never go skydiving or go on a road trip with his friends or discover coffee or become a dad. He won’t go running with bulls in Pamplona or learn to scuba dive. He’s not going to get old. He’ll never read another book or see another movie that he loves. He’s never going to have the chance to love anything or anyone ever again and that is so unfair. Some days it feels so epic that I don’t understand how the world can manage to go on without him.”
“Gemma.”
She looks down at where our fingers are woven together and lets go of a little sigh. “It’s harder for my parents because Andrew was their kid.”
“But doesn’t it suck for you that they aren’t around? Aren’t you their kid too?”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“They didn’t want to dwell on it—at least not the way that I did. When it happened, I wanted to talk about him and they wanted to meditate on the meaning of the universe. I wanted to plant Andrew a tree or have a star named after him or something, and they wanted to move to Africa,” she says. “I think I’m just another reminder to my mom and dad of everything they lost. And that’s no good. They don’t want to miss him or be sad, and I make them sad. They want to go forward, one Birkenstock in front of the other. And if that’s what they need, I can accept that.” Her watery eyes meet mine. “If they want to be off in the world because it’s all they can manage, then that’s exactly what they should be doing. Even if it does make me feel…”
“Alone?” I offer.
“Lost,” is what she finally says.
My stomach seizes up. I wish that I could make this go away for her. I wish I could say the right thing to wipe everything clean and fill in the cracks, like an incoming wave polishes the shore.
But I know it doesn’t work like that. Not really. Pain doesn’t really go away because someone kisses it better. Sadness doesn’t recede because a person posts an inspiring quote on your Facebook wall. Grief doesn’t sink into the shadows the moment the sun comes up. You can’t sleep your way through misery. There are some hurts that become a part of you, like your blood or your eyes or your teeth. Those are the ones that need to be lived over and over again.
“I wanted to tell you because… well, what you told me today—it means something.” She’s quiet for a moment. Then, she says, “In the end, life is just a string of memories, isn’t it?” She opens her mouth and swallows a green hatchback. “Maybe the truth is that nothing real lasts forever.”
“I don’t know about that,” I tell her. Gemma turns back to me and now our foreheads are almost touching. We’re so close that it’s a little disorienting. “I think there are still things that last.”
***
“In the beginning there was only water,” she says quietly.
“What are you talking about?” I ask her. We’re on our backs, our stomachs to the night sky. Our bare heels are in the sand, our toes just above the fringe of the tide. Beside us, our shoes are in a pile, making a lumpy shadow in the darkness.
Neither one of us has felt like going home, so a few hours ago, I called Claudia and asked her to let Wyatt out. Gemma and I wandered the city. We caught the tail end of Singin’ in the Rain in Balboa Park. We walked through the Japanese Gardens, perused the small shops and galleries in Hillcrest, and ate fish tacos from a food truck on Ray Street. We ended up at the beach over an hour ago, just as the setting sun was making bright red and orange gouges in the sky.
“Never mind, it was a weird thing to say.”
I turn onto my side, my hand coming up to prop my cheek. Gemma stays where she is. God, she’s beautiful right now. Her hair looks almost black. It swirls around her head, twisting in the damp sand. Her mouth is half open and I see the faint shine of her white teeth. Starlight paints her eyelids pewter and gives her lashes a metallic glow.
I almost can’t believe she didn’t run away after I told her the truth about my past. It feels almost too good to be real.
“Don’t pull a never mind,” I tell her, running a finger across her body, along her collarbone from shoulder to shoulder. “What did you mean?”
“Well, in all the fables about how the earth was made. It always starts with the water, doesn’t it?”
I’m a little fuzzy on where she’s headed with this, but that’s okay. I’ve discovered that Gemma’s brain works differently than most brains. She skips around a lot—bouncing from idea to idea the way other people scan through the radio stations, trying out different songs until they find one that fits their mood.
It’s like she’s got all these words and images up there—a mosaic of fascinating and beautiful thoughts that move in and out of her mouth like oxygen. Out of the blue, she’ll start up a conversation that ended two days ago, or she’ll suddenly describe a book she read three years ago, or tell you a random fact about chinchillas.
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you ever think that maybe we’re like that?” she asks me.
I smile into the dark. How many times have I thought of myself as the ocean? “You think we’re like water?”
Gemma sits up. The salty wind coming off the water snaps her hair around her shoulders. With one hand in the middle of my chest, she tries to push me into the sand. I’m strong enough to hold her off, but I don’t want to. I willingly collapse back and she crawls over me. Holding a smile on her face, she slips her legs on either side of my hips and settles her weight on me.
In a voice thin as smoke, she says, “Well, maybe that’s how we start. Maybe, in the beginning, we’re nothing but a theoretical vast and empty sea with this huge open sky above us.”
Her hands press down on my st
omach and her fingers pull at the bottom of my shirt. She leans forward until her breasts are rubbing against me and her mouth is almost touching the skin of my neck.
“Then slowly,” she continues, “over time, the currents change and we build up these continents inside our bodies.” Now her fingers walk a path from my bellybutton to my sternum. “And eventually, we have canyons and deserts and trees and beaches and all sorts of places where we can go and live.”
I suck in a breath as Gemma flattens her hand on the skin just above my heart and kisses me just below my ear. Then she turns her face, fitting the crown of her head beneath my jaw and says, “Most of the time we’re safe on the land, but sometimes we get sucked out to sea. What do you think happens then?”
I think about everything we’ve shared today. I think about Gemma and me. And how it feels like the geography inside of my own body is changing, how it’s been changing from the moment I met her. Maybe even before that.
And I think about the continents we’re building between us. The bridges of land moving from her fingers to mine and the valleys and mountains formed by her lips on my skin and her words in my head.
I use both of my hands to cup her face and pull her to my mouth. I press my lips to hers, parting her mouth and drinking in her breath. “I think you’d have to start swimming.”
A minute of silence ticks by.
Over the low drone of the waves on the beach, she whispers, “And what if you can’t swim very well?”
I think for a minute. “Then you fly.”
Gemma
Gemma?”
“Hmmm?” Through the transparent veil of a shallow sleep, I crack open one eye.
Landon and I are in his bed facing each other. We’re so close that I notice the rumble of his heart beating steadily in his chest. And each time his lungs contract, I can taste his breath on my lips.
His hand is a warm weight on my hip. Our bare legs are threaded and I can feel the gentle scrap of his toenails against my ankle. He’s watching my face with a careful expression.
“Yeah?” I murmur sluggishly.