by Jenn Bennett
Too late. Guess he’s not anxious.
But all of the sudden I am. So, so anxious. Why?
I glance down at myself and see all my hives on display. That doesn’t help. I hope it’s dark enough that he can’t see them, too, and quickly move my arm to cover my stomach.
“Hey,” Lennon says in a soft voice, pulling my hand away from my stomach and threading his fingers through mine. “It’s only me.”
“Only?” I shake my head. “That’s the problem. It’s you. And me. And I just got you back. We don’t even have a plan yet for what’s going to happen when we go home. Everything could fall apart. My parents could divorce. I could be forced to move in with my dad—”
“Or things could work out just fine.”
“That’s the problem, though. Life is unpredictable, which is the worst part about it. I need dependable. I need something I can count on. And if this is terrible or weird, then—”
“Then what? How terrible could it be? I’m pretty sure I understand the basics.”
“It’s easier for you. You’re a guy. Your body isn’t a mystery.”
He considers this for a moment. “I like mysteries. I’m very good at solving mysteries.”
I hesitate. “How good?”
“Very, very good. I will not rest until a mystery is solved. I’m Nancy fucking Drew.”
My chuckle is breathy. “Oh?”
“Remember Mr. Henry’s missing tabby? Who figured out it had been catnapped by the white supremacist at the end of the cul-de-sac?”
“You did. Stop making me laugh.”
Eyes merry, he opens a camp towel and crooks a finger. I lean forward and let him dry my hair. “And who discovered that the hair salon was siphoning electricity off of the Jitterbug after the manager kept complaining about her electricity bill?”
“You did,” I murmur, head bowed. His hands feel good on my hair, and it’s giving me a really good view of his chest and arms. “Wait, we both solved that mystery. I’m the one who first said someone could be stealing their electricity.”
“But who looked up online how to do it and traced it back to the salon? Who made you sit in the alley and be my lookout while I checked the meters, and then you yelled at me because I wouldn’t let you get coffee until we were finished?”
“I didn’t yell at you.”
“You totally did,” he says, pulling the towel away and quickly rubbing it over his own wet hair until it stands up. “And it made me furious. And that was the first time I really wanted to kiss you.”
“Wait, no. That couldn’t be. We were . . .”
“Fourteen.”
“You wanted to kiss me when we were fourteen?”
“I wanted to do lots of things to you when we were fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. By the time you kissed me, I’d built a Zorie vault of sexual fantasies bigger than Fort Knox. I thought you’d never catch up to me.”
My voice fails. I’m stunned, trying to fit all of these confessions into my memories of what we were.
What we are now.
“And I know you hate my parents’ shop, and sometimes I do too,” he says, tossing the towel into the corner of the tent. “But other times, it has its advantages.”
“Besides the free condoms?”
“Besides that,” he says, a sly smile lifting his lips. “You’d be surprised what I’ve learned. Customers are surprisingly specific, and you would not believe the shit they tell you. Anything you can imagine that could go wrong—or right—someone else has probably had that happen to them, too.”
“Um . . .”
“What I’m saying is, all bodies are weird. Throw whatever mystery you have at me. Let me help you solve it.”
“It’s not that I can’t solve it by myself. I just want to make that clear.”
“This is the best conversation we’ve ever had, by the way. And I’m definitely adding an image of you solving your own mysteries to the ol’ vault for later—”
“Oh my God,” I murmur, mildly horrified.
“But right now, wouldn’t it be more fun to team up and solve crime together?”
“I’m worried it could be bad or awkward,” I say in a small voice.
“I’ve worried about that too,” he says, running the backs of his fingers along my shoulder, down my arm, following the path he’s tracing with his eyes. “This isn’t nothing. This isn’t not serious. It’s big. It’s epic.”
“It’s you and me,” I say.
He nods. “But after last night out on that hill, and then just now, out there?”
“We’re so good together,” I agree, opening my hand when he runs his finger over my knuckles. “Right?”
“We are goddamn amazing. We’re a rocket ship filled with potential. Either we die in a fiery blaze before we leave the Earth’s atmosphere, or we make it through and orbit the moon.”
“If you’re trying to seduce me with space stuff, it’s totally working.”
His smile is divine. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to try?”
I nod slowly. “I think so.”
“You sure?”
Yeah. I actually am. “Fly me to the moon.”
Rain drums against the tent as he pulls me closer, and we sink into the sleeping bags. Mouth on mouth, hip on hip, heartbeat on heartbeat. We’re less desperate than we were outside, more aware of each other. It’s a fervent awareness, both nervous and thrilling, and when we remove the last layers of our clothes, he steadily talks to me in a calm, low voice, and I follow it like a lighthouse beacon.
He guides. Assures. Makes sure I don’t veer off into dark waters and crash.
Then it’s my turn to navigate. He listens. Follows directions. Uses my instructions to create a new path.
It’s a brave new world.
And an all-consuming one. I’m ready to chuck everything I’ve learned out the window, because he can’t find the condoms, and I don’t even care, and I definitely should, but I’m willing to give up my entire civilized existence and live in this tent like homeless hippies if he will just—
“They were right here!” He’s about to have a panic attack.
“Wait, what’s this?” I pull something out from under my back.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he murmurs.
“Hurry.”
“No, don’t say that. Believe me, I’m hanging on by a thread here.”
“Please?” I whisper.
“You’re killing me, Zorie.”
Every time he says my name in that rumbling voice of his, I think I might die myself. I’m in pleasure overload, here, on the verge of something great, and I really, really don’t want him to stop. But then . . . it’s happening. It’s actually happening. It’s good, and a little awkward, and sometimes funny, because wow, human bodies are weird. But it’s also more than I expected—than I even hoped.
It’s all of him and all of me, and most of all, it’s us, it’s us, it’s us.
24
* * *
“Told you I’d solve that mystery,” Lennon says after we’ve been tangled up in each other’s arms for a while, listening to the slowing rain outside. “Twice.”
I smile against his chest. “I never doubted. You’re Nancy goddamn Drew, after all.”
“And you’re Sherlock fucking Holmes.”
“If we start our own detective agency, I want both of those names painted on the door, just like that.”
“My parents should have named their shop ‘The Detective Agency.’ ”
I chuckle and he pretends to bite my neck, and that makes me squeal. He just holds me tighter. Fine by me, because I can’t stop touching him. The stubble on his jaw. His heavy eyebrows. The curving ridge of muscle above his hips. I’ve never been so close to him, and there’s so much begging to be explored.
But when my stomach growls, we both realize how late it is. Not exactly how late, because both our phones are dead, and Lennon’s fancy compass—our only source of time�
��is currently sitting inside the pocket of his jeans, buried in mud outside the tent. But we’ve been at this detectiving for a while now, and I’m in need of things that are stashed in the other tent. Like food. Wet wipes. Dry clothes. Okay, maybe I’m not in a hurry for those, but when Lennon volunteers to crawl beneath the canopy to the smaller tent, I add that to the list, and he bravely extricates himself from our sleeping bag.
The other tent is only a few feet away, and it’s silly, but I hate for him to go that far. As I tie back the mesh flaps of our door to open it up, the sight of him crawling naked into the second tent’s entrance has my complete attention. “That’s an interesting view,” I tell him from the open door of our tent.
“I aim to please,” he calls back.
He has to make two trips, and between them, ducks outside into the rain for a couple of minutes. Naked Lennon in the woods. Now would be a good time for a photo. But when he comes back, he has one of our water bottles, which he hands to me through the door, shivering, and dives back into the other tent. This time, he emerges wearing boxers and tosses me a T-shirt. He’s also raided our food stash, hallelujah!
Lying on our stomachs with our heads sticking outside the door flap, we set up the one-burner camping stove under the canopy. The stove is just a tiny bottle of fuel with four prongs that unfold above it to hold a pan. We heat up water for hot cocoa, which is inside two brown packs of military MREs that Lennon brought. There are also a million other things in each ration bag: a pastry bar, crackers, dried fruit, and holiest of holies, a packet of peanut butter.
“I thought you might like that,” Lennon says with a smile as we look through the contents of the meal packs. There are spoons, napkins, matches, and even a tiny bottle of Tabasco and some candy. The entrée gets heated up inside a flameless heater bag that needs to be filled with a little water to activate the heating element. It doesn’t taste quite as good as Reagan’s gourmet freeze-dried camp meals, but I’m starving, and the peanut butter and crackers make up for everything.
After we’ve eaten and cleaned up, Lennon breaks out his journal and maps, and I lie on my side, watching him recalculate the last leg of our trip to Condor Peak. “Six hours of walking,” he says. “Maybe seven with long breaks.”
“That’s not too bad.”
“Nope.”
“Huh. I thought it would be farther.” We both look at the map that’s unfolded atop his journal. “You sure you want to go to the star party with me?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“It’ll be a lot of people I don’t know, and some people I see at club meetings every month.”
“And Avani.”
“I’ll need to use her telescope to take decent photos, and setting them up takes a lot of time. It could be boring for you, just standing around while the rest of us star nerds look through lenses and try to get face time with Sandra Faber.”
“I don’t know who that is, but I’m assuming from that quiver in your voice that she’s someone important.”
“She only has an astronomical law named after her and figured out how to estimate the distance between galaxies. No big deal.”
He grins. “Impressive.”
“Anyway, I’m just saying that you might hate the star party.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t be bored. I’ll be with you. Besides, I’m interested in whatever you like.”
“Yeah?”
“Meteor showers are cool. You can take lots of cool pictures and talk galaxies,” he says. “And whenever you’re ready to leave, we head back to civilization. Avani’s not our only option for transportation.”
“A regular bus runs up there several times a day,” I confirm. “I know from my research.”
“I’ve got a park bus schedule in here somewhere,” he says, rummaging through a pile of papers stuck between the pages of his journal. “It’s from last year, but I doubt much has changed.”
As he’s looking for it, something catches my eye in his journal, and I stick my fingers on the corner of the page to stop him from flipping. “What’s this?”
“Ugh, don’t look,” he says, covering it with his hand.
“Why?”
“Because it’s embarrassing.”
“Well, now I’m going to just forget it,” I tease, tugging his fingertips. “Show me.”
He groans, but releases the page. I peer over his arm and see drawings of people. They look like anime characters, a bit stylized, with simple, clean lines and big eyes. It takes me a moment to realize they’re all girls. The same girl. Repeated over and over, from different viewpoints. Sitting at a desk, bent over schoolwork. Eating at a picnic table. Reading on the stairs. Drinking coffee at a café. They’re mostly drawn from behind her, so there’s only a partial view of her face, but . . .
But . . .
She has dark, curly hair and glasses, and she’s wearing plaid.
I slowly turn the page to find more drawings. The same girl, drawn dozens of times. Each one is dated in Lennon’s careful, neat handwriting. They go back to last fall. Last spring. Early this summer.
The newest one is from last week. The girl is standing on a balcony, looking down with a telescope.
The drawings are flattering. The drawings are sad. The drawings are filled with longing. Lennon’s heart on the page.
Tenderness and pain rise to my throat. It’s a bittersweet pain, one that’s tarnished by how awful this year has been for both of us. I tried so hard and for so long to push all my feelings for him away, to tamp them down into a tiny box and hide it somewhere dark in my mind. I did everything I could to forget.
And Lennon did all he could to remember.
Tears drop off my cheek onto the page, splattering. I try to wipe it away with my finger, but the ink bleeds.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “They’re beautiful and I ruined them.”
He shuts the journal and tugs me closer to swipe tears from my cheek with his thumb. “It’s okay,” he murmurs, kissing my eyelids. “I don’t need them anymore. I have you.”
* * *
The next day, I beg him for one more day in our sequoia cathedral. We’ll have plenty of time to get to the star party’s final night, which is the best time to see the meteor shower anyway. Our phones are dead, so I can’t tell Avani to expect us a day late, but what does it matter? She’ll still be there. And likely she’ll be so busy enjoying the star party, she won’t even notice. The only thing I see as a potential problem is Mom, because I did promise I’d text when I arrived at the star party. But I also told her we’d be getting there late tonight, and what difference would one day make? Besides, I’m hiking, not taking a scheduled bus. Surely, she’ll understand that this isn’t an exact science. I can call her from Avani’s phone the minute we get to Condor Peak tomorrow.
I argue all of this to Lennon, but frankly, I didn’t need to convince him. He is completely agreeable, and we stay put.
The storm has passed, so we spend the day doing practical things. Washing mud out of our clothes in the river. Collecting firewood and putting it in the sun to dry. Finding my glasses. We also spend it doing impractical things. Bathing in the river together. (Less bathing, more touching.) Reading the manga book Lennon brought in his backpack. (Less reading, more touching.) Taking a nap. (Less sleeping, more sex that nearly permanently blinds Lennon when a tent pole snaps.)
My hives are still there, but I’m not clawing at my arms as much. Partly because I’m keeping up with medicating, and partly because I caved and let Lennon slather me in Miss Angela’s stinky sativa salve. I don’t think I’ve ever been so relaxed—sexlaxation, Lennon dubs it, and says he’ll make a fortune marketing it as a cure for allergies and stress.
But all good things must come to an end, and when we run out of condoms, we know it’s time to go.
Goodbye, sex camp.
As we’re packing everything up, I check to make sure my camera is still working, and it strikes me that I haven’t taken one single photo on this trip. It’s no
t just that. I haven’t obsessively checked my messages or my social media feeds. I don’t know what’s trending, and I haven’t posted anything. I can’t check views or likes or favorites or reblogs. And I have no idea what’s going on in the news.
“We disconnected,” I tell Lennon.
“I know. Isn’t it great?”
It actually is. Maybe I wouldn’t want to do it forever, but I didn’t die, either.
We’ve waited as long as we can, leaving well after lunch. My pack feels heavier, somehow, even though there’s exactly the same amount of things inside. I think it’s as reluctant to leave as I am.
But it’s time to go.
We walk through a string of meadows all afternoon and have dinner near a lake that’s one of the largest alpine bodies of water in the state. We’re well above five thousand feet, so the water’s too cold for swimming, but it’s a calming view. Not as calming as sexlaxation, I point out. Lennon triple-checks: We’re definitely out of condoms.
When we’re back on the trail again, my mind starts wheeling. We haven’t discussed what we’re going to do about my father when we get back home. Or anything about the future. I don’t want to think about it. I want to stay here. This is impossible, and I know it, but when I start thinking about what awaits us—parents, school, the so-called friends who abandoned us, the looming threat of my dad’s affair . . . all of this creates doubt in my head. Doubt, worry, and a growing sense of dread.
The sun sets during the final stretch of the hike up the foothills. We’ve connected up to a major trail with official park signs informing distances to several nearby attractions. Condor Peak is outside King’s Forest in a state-maintained area. There are several scenic points on and around the mountain, but the one we’re headed to, the Northern Viewpoint, is right in front of us, point-five kilometers. The star party is gathered at a small campground below it, just across a road that borders the national park.
An actual road. With actual cars whizzing down it.
I never thought I’d be reluctant to return to civilization.
All my misgivings move to the back of my mind when we spy a big sign for the star party posted at the entrance to a parking lot connected to a small campground. The sign warns the public that they are approaching a protected Dark Sky area, and nothing but red lights are allowed past the campground, to avoid light pollution. The actual viewing area is a quarter mile up a short path that curves around the mountain. Even small amounts of white light are objectionable to astronomers, and many of the cars and RVs here have red tape adhered to their headlights. I’m prepared for this, and have brought along a small red penlight.
