“Here.” Lane frowns as she hands Willa a towel.
“Oh, I’m allowed to use the white towels here?” Willa says, pressing it to her cheek.
Lane’s mouth twitches. “Yeah. It’s fine. So. What were you doing out there?”
The answer to that is complicated and doesn’t paint Willa in the best light, so Willa gives the easy answer, “I was walking and got caught in the rain.”
Lane’s eyebrows raise. “Walking… with a sleeping bag?”
Willa glances at her sleeping bag. It’s splotched with wet spots and unfurled in a heap on the floor. “Well, I—” Was off to a slumber party, her brain supplies, but she isn’t ten so that’s probably not going to work. Was going to meet Bodhi; we’re camping. Love that great outdoors! But she doesn’t love the great outdoors and she doesn’t really want to talk about Bodhi with Lane anymore or ever again. So she’s left with nothing but the truth. “My grandparents own the beach cottage I live in. They rent it out in the summer and this year they decided to rent it out for spring break too.” Willa loops the towel over her head like a headscarf. “And I sort of have nowhere to stay at the moment.”
“Hmm.” Lane sets her hands on her hips, scans Willa’s face, then unzips her coat and pulls off her boots. “You can stay here, if you want.”
“I—” The towel slips off Willa’s head and onto the floor. “Really?”
“Sure. Unless you’d rather sleep out on the porch?”
“Not really, no.”
Lane nods, as though that’s that. No big deal. Willa can just… sleep in her home. See Lane’s bed and shower and what she looks like first thing in the morning, soft and rumpled with sleep and— “The couch pulls out. Bathroom’s down there.” Lane pads over to the kitchen. “And pick up that towel, please. Are you hungry?”
Willa can only blink in surprise and nod her head.
“Great, I was just about to make pancakes.” Lane smiles, throwing Willa off even more. How is this happening? And why is she letting it? Is this a dream? Hasn’t she had this dream? Wasn’t Lane wearing— “Willa?”
“Yes?” It comes out as a croak, breathy and strained.
“The towel.”
Ch. 17
Lane putters around the small, though well-equipped, kitchen, and Willa sits at the little round table. Rain thrashes against the glass door and down past the dunes, where frothy waves hurl themselves against the dark sand. Willa hunches in on herself, damp still from getting caught in the sudden downpour and cold from a draft coming through a nearby vent.
“Here you go.” Lane sets down a plate of steaming pancakes with a pat of butter beginning to ooze on top, a bottle of real maple syrup, and silverware dropped in a pile as she retrieves her own plate.
“Why?” Willa says, because she’s cold and confused and not entirely sure how she ended up here, in Lane’s house, eating pancakes with real maple syrup and a pat of melting butter.
Lane glances at her quizzically and sits in the chair across the table. “Why pancakes? Is that a philosophical question or?
“No, not—” Willa pulls a fork from the pile of silverware and stabs the air with it. “Not the pancakes. Why are you being so nice to me? Why let me stay here? I didn’t think you even liked me.” She twirls the fork around nothing, not sure why she can’t just accept Lane’s kindness at face value, except for the fact that is feels an awful lot like charity, as though Willa is some street urchin that Lane rescued, which she isn’t, even though she sort of was— “I don’t need your pity. I can find somewhere to stay.”
Instead of the argument Willa braces for, Lane shrugs and says, “Okay.”
Lane sets three pancakes in a circle around her plate, smooths the butter across each, and then cuts one pancake into neat, evenly divided triangles. She spears one triangle onto her fork and then squeezes one drop of syrup onto it. Who eats pancakes like that, Willa wonders, and why is it kind of cute? Willa flops out her own pancakes carelessly, pours syrup in an oozing puddle, and leaves the butter to curl and mingle with the syrup in whatever haphazard way it chooses. It feels like spite, the messiness of it in the face of Lane’s orderliness, and maybe it is.
“I didn’t,” Lane says, after a stretch of silence.
“Didn’t what?”
A triangle of pancake, a dollop of syrup. “Like you. At first.” She chews and considers this with a tilt of her head. “I thought you were annoying and lazy and irresponsible and just messing with me for fun.”
“Ah,” Willa says, because what else can she say to that?
Lane continues her methodical pancake eating. “Even up until we got on the boat that first time, I thought you were just screwing with me. And I’d wind up on your YouTube pranking channel—”
“I’m not twelve,” Willa interrupts. A YouTube pranking channel, come on.
Lane waves her fork in Willa’s direction. “Right, so, it wasn’t until you fell in and almost drowned that I realized you were serious. That you’d really gotten yourself into this situation with the race. And that you really, really didn’t know what you were doing.”
“And you thought it was hilarious,” Willa points out.
“No— Well, yeah a little. But then I thought—” She chews slowly, as if working up to something. “I get it, you know? Feeling like you have something to prove. Like if you can achieve this one thing, everyone will give you the respect and love you deserve. They won’t, for the record. But I get it.”
“Oh,” Willa says.
They finish eating, and Lane clears the table, insisting on washing the dishes while Willa finds a place to stash away her backpack and sleeping bag. The rainstorm moves out nearly as suddenly as it came in, and sunlight soon crowds into the small space of Lane’s condo.
Lane comes out of the kitchen drying her hands on a dish towel; her silhouette is set aglow by the streaming sunlight. “Hey, can I take you somewhere?”
* * *
“Somewhere” turns out to be a mystery journey by boat, and, instead of taking her, Lane instructs Willa where and how to sail them there, wherever there is, launching again from the dock behind Lane’s parents’ massive, empty home. They travel up the sound through the peaceful, shallow waters. It’s windy enough that they don’t need to raise the mainsail, and navigating through the low-lying salt marshes seems less intimidating to Willa than the open water. She knows the landscape of these islands placed in a chain like the extended string of an archer’s bow. She knows the swish of the long grasses and the odd grace of long-legged blue herons and the taste of the sea and the wild green brush that passes by. It’s home. And sailing it, confidently, competently, with Lane placidly staring out at the sun-speckled water, is like a missing puzzle piece finally finding its place in Willa’s life.
They head north and northeast and due north. They don’t speak save for Lane’s instructions and tips and warnings, and once she tells Willa that any boat with more than a six-foot draft couldn’t make it through the sound, and, depending on the tide, sometimes even small boats find themselves stuck. Much later, after they’ve passed Kitty Hawk, Willa breaks the serenity to tell Lane that she’s never been this far north, only coming up to Kill Devil Hills once on a school field trip in fifth grade to see the Wright Brothers memorial.
Lane makes a noise in response that sounds like disappointment but says, “Well, it’s pretty far.”
When they finally pull ashore and dock, Willa is stiff and sore and badly in need of a bathroom. They’ve stopped at one of the barely developed islands, reachable only by boat and only navigable by four-wheel-drive off-road vehicles. The beach is wild and almost unchanged from the way it would have looked to the sailors who came ashore centuries ago. Willa is lucky to find a ranger station with a bathroom, and even then it’s an outbuilding without running water. She’s careful not to touch anything.
Lane waits nearby, turned away with
her hands at her side and face tilted toward the sun. She’s at ease out here, Willa can see, free out in the coastal wilderness just as Bodhi is. Willa pushes back at the twinge of jealousy that rises, small and ugly, at yet another thing Bodhi and Lane share.
“We can’t get too close,” Lane explains, though not too close to what. “If we carefully go up the dunes, that’s probably best.”
Willa’s shoes fill with sand as they climb the dunes. Lane scans the beach, and they wait and wait and wait. Willa uses both hands to push her hair out her face and says, “What—” Lane lifts a hand to silence her. And they wait.
“There.” Lane points. Willa squints to see blobs of something moving along the shore, just shadows hidden by more shadowing beneath the dunes. And then they come closer.
She’s heard of them of course, the wild horses on this island that are believed to have originally been brought on exploring ships that likely wrecked in the shallow sandbar-prone waters in the 1500s. Somehow, the horses made it to shore and then made themselves at home. The herd meandering up the beach toward them are direct descendants of those horses: stocky and rust-colored with scattered patches of white, who have been left alone to live as free as they wish, never ridden, never tamed, never used by people for their own purposes, never forced to be something they aren’t or don’t want to be.
“Wow,” Willa says under her breath. She lets her hair go to fly loose in the wind. “Wow.”
Ch. 18
“How close can I get without scaring them?” Willa is already slide-running down the soft dune, phone out and camera ready.
“Legally, you can’t go closer than fifty feet.” Lane trails after, cautiously picking her way down to the beach. The horses, still a ways down, don’t seem to notice their approach. There are ten of them, Willa thinks, but as they’re clustered in a wandering clump and partly hidden by dunes, it’s hard to say exactly how many horses are in the herd. There are two smaller ones—foals, she can tell as she gets closer—both with sandy blond manes and swishing blond tails and little white diamonds stamped on their foreheads. Willa sets her sights on them.
“Fifty feet,” Lane says again, a warning. But who is really out here measuring that carefully? Who is out here to even notice— “Willa, the ranger station.”
Willa skids to a stop in the sand. Right. Well, with the right angle and zoom… “I can make it look like I got closer, no problem.” She takes dozens of pictures, rapid-fire, until she finally gets it just right, a close-in shot of the two foals, one with its head lifted and seeming to look right at the camera with something knowing and wise in its eyes. The horse was actually looking at two seagulls who had started squawking and carrying on nearby, but no one needs to know that. Willa selects a subtle filter to make the blue sky look bluer, the sea grass greener, the copper color of the foal’s coat shinier—just a little. She captions it: What an incredible moment with these beautiful wild horses! Never know what a sailing adventure will bring!
Lane glances over Willa’s shoulder as she’s hashtagging. “Why do you do that?”
“Oh,” Willa says, distracted. “It helps people find your posts. Some people follow certain hashtags or search for them.” She should really give Lane an Instagram tutorial if she doesn’t even know what hashtags are.
“No, I mean. Why do you make things seem like something else? Why embellish?”
Willa rolls her eyes and hits post. “Everyone embellishes.” Lane’s eyebrows furrow, and she frowns, seemingly unsatisfied with that answer. Willa sighs, petulant even to her own ears as she says, “Are you gonna give me a speech about the evils of social media and how it’s turning kids these days into vain, vapid, digital zombies? Cuz I’ve heard it before.”
“No…” Lane says, weakly. “I just—” She turns to look back at the herd, which is wandering farther away now, meandering toward the water way down the beach. “I just think that if you were honest—if you were yourself—that people would like you just as much.”
“You’re wrong,” Willa says. “They wouldn’t.” Willa strides back to the dunes, intending to stomp away decisively, but the rolling hills of shifting soft sand are nearly impossible to climb, so instead she stumbles and curses and loses her footing.
“You haven’t even tried.”
“I don’t need to.”
“But how can you know—”
“I just do!” Willa loses her balance completely. She slides down and falls backward, only able to stop by dropping down and sprawling out in the sand. “I just do,” she repeats, holding on to fistfuls of shifting sand. Lane sits next to her. Why does she even care? Lane certainly didn’t like her, not until she nearly drowned and made her feel bad and after she set her up with Bodhi. She doesn’t like her at all in the way Willa wants her to. Willa glances at the dune that looms impassable above her. What was the point of this trip anyway? Some avant-garde training technique meant to teach her patience and how being her true self is the real accomplishment or something cheesy like that?
They sit together in irritated silence; the horses have long since disappeared and just a gang of noisy seagulls strut in and out of the tide to keep them company.
“We should probably get ba—” Willa starts, as Lane interrupts, “It was my first—first date in…” She pushes her hair out her face and lets the sentence hang unfinished. “I haven’t…”
“Haven’t… What?” Willa looks over, but Lane is staring at the ocean. Willa is just about to give up on her and again suggest they leave; she’s sure that Lane will pretend she said nothing, when Lane takes a deep breath.
“The date you followed me to.”
“I didn’t—” Willa starts, but Lane lifts an eyebrow, and she snaps her mouth shut.
“That was…” Lane full lips quirk for a just a second, then flatten. “I told myself it was because I was busy being a world champion and all, but the truth is, I was afraid. Afraid of who I was and what I wanted, so I didn’t date. Not that I haven’t been with anyone… Just not who I…” She doesn’t look at Willa to gauge her reaction, to see if she’s understating what Lane is trying to say, she just stares ahead. “I spent my whole life convinced that I was happy to be this illusion of a person. My identity was so tied up in what other people expected of me and by the time I realized that I had no idea what I wanted or who I really was it felt like it was too late to even try. Trust me, you’re much better off just being honest. Because now it’s like, have I ever been happy? Do I even know what that feels like? Did I love sailing because I like it, or was I just always expected to like it so I forced it? How can I tell?”
Willa scoops up handfuls of sand and creates a little soft pile between her sneakers. “I think you just know,” she finally says, sure that being “into sailing” is code for something else. “Haven’t you tried doing, like, other types of— boating? By now?” Meaning Bodhi. Meaning sleeping with Bodhi. Surely that would have clarified some things for her.
Lane shakes her head. “Not yet, no.”
“Oh.” Apparently Lane and Bodhi have been moving much slower than Willa realized. Bodhi is sweet and laid-back and patient, but she’s also easily distracted and pretty much into Hunter, for now anyway. Willa hates to think that Lane is waiting for Bodhi to make some major move that may never happen. “Well, sometimes you just have to put yourself out there. Don’t overthink it. Take your moment when it comes, you know. Or it might never.” The advice seems vague and useless even as she says it, but Willa has mixed feelings about helping Lane and Bodhi’s relationship grow stronger—mixed as in, she doesn’t want to, but feels bad about that.
Lane nods, then stands, brushing sand from her pants and hands. “Okay. We should get back then.”
They take a path around the dunes and walk in silence back to the weathered dock. Willa thinks about what Lane said, about being authentic and about the years that she lost by not being honest with herself. Does Willa wa
nt to keep pushing her luck, waiting until the house of cards comes tumbling down and she has to start all over? Wait fourteen more years to figure out who she is, at Lane’s age? But if she becomes the person she so badly wants to be, by winning this race, by carefully framing and filtering her life, then she never has to worry about that.
Lane unties the boat and readies the sails, letting Willa relax as she takes over the journey home. Once on a steady course though the sound, Lane tucks herself next to Willa. The sun is orange and low in the sky, and Willa turns to Lane to tell her that it’s beautiful but she’s not going to take a picture, just enjoy the moment—see, she’s not addicted to social media at all—but Lane twists her torso and leans close.
She licks her lips, glances at Willa’s mouth, and says, husky and breathless and shaking, “Can I kiss you?”
Ch. 19
Her heart in her throat, lips parted in surprise, Willow can only stare in shock. Lane’s dark eyes are hopeful; her face is already tipped close. Willow has to summon the strength of every bullshit lie she’s ever told, every fabrication, every embellishment, in order to shake her head and say, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She does. Oh, how she does.
Lane takes in a shocked little breath. “Oh. Okay.” She moves away, though away in the tiny boat is a matter of inches. Lane’s face shifts from disappointment to indifference. “Yeah. I don’t know what I was…” She flicks her head, as if shaking the very idea of kissing Willa off and away.
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” Willa blurts before she can stop herself. God, does she want to. “It’s just, Bodhi…” If Lane is hung up on Bodhi, waiting for Bodhi to validate her attraction to women, then wanting to kiss Willa can only be because she’s there and Bodhi isn’t. It wouldn’t even be Bodhi’s sloppy seconds; it’s Willa as a consolation prize. Worse than that even, she’s a participation certificate, no meaning or connection, just a way for Lane to say she finally did it.
Tack & Jibe Page 8
