by Trish Doller
“You should go talk to her,” Willa says.
“I can’t go anywhere right now,” he says. “I have a raging case of morning wood.”
She laughs and throws her pillow at him. “Fine. I’ll go.”
“No,” he groans. “Stay here with me.”
Willa is so tempted to climb into the v-berth with him and make up for lost time. Except her relationship with Taylor is so fragile. So breakable. Instead, Willa walks up to the shower house and into the ladies’ room. Only one shower is running and Taylor’s striped towel hangs on the hook outside the curtain.
“Taylor? It’s me.”
Steam wisps out over the top of the shower curtain, but Taylor doesn’t respond.
“I know there’s no excuse for leaving you at the party,” Willa continues. “I don’t know what to say other than I’m sorry.”
“You made a promise that my brother was off-limits.”
“Seriously?” Willa is taken aback that of all the things Taylor could be upset about, this is the one. “You’re holding me to a middle school pinkie swear? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?”
“Yeah, ridiculous Taylor, not wanting people to use her to get to Cam.”
“I never used you for anything,” Willa says. “This has literally nothing to do with you.”
For a prolonged moment, the rush of water echoing around the room is the only sound. Then Taylor says, “What about Finley?”
Even though Finley’s feelings for Cam were delivered as punch lines, it doesn’t make them any less valid. If she were here, she would be crushed. Willa’s shoulders sag, and she leans her head back against the cool tile wall. Just once she’d like to be able to think about Campbell without having to factor Finley into the equation. She pushes off the wall and heads toward the door. “Maybe you should ask yourself why a dead girl’s feelings are more important than mine.”
Cam is dressed and sitting in the cockpit when Willa gets back to the boat.
“How’d it go?” he asks, shading his eyes with his hand to look at her.
“As well as you’d expect.”
He laughs. “That good, huh?”
“In middle school she accused me of stealing Finley’s friendship away from her,” Willa says. “Now she thinks I stole you from Finley.”
“I was never into Fin like that.” Cam hauls Willa down beside him. He wraps an arm around her head and pulls her over to kiss her temple. She tickles his side, and he retaliates by kissing her neck, making her squirm. “You, on the other hand . . .”
A bubble of guilt threatens to break the surface of her happiness, but she presses her lips against Campbell’s mouth and forgets all about Finley—just once.
Breakfast is an awkward combination of eggs, bacon, and silence, and afterward Cam retrieves a pair of wooden X-shaped supports from the back of his truck. The bridges spanning the Oswego River are too low for sailboats to pass under, so the marina crew removes the mast and cradles it on the supports, one on the bow of the boat, the other on the deck just behind the companionway.
“So what happens now?” Campbell asks.
The boat is ready to go, and their plan has always been that Cam would travel with them as far as Catskill, where the mast will go back up and he will get a ride to Oswego for his truck. But it’s impossible to gauge what Taylor is thinking when she’s been giving them the silent treatment all morning.
“Do whatever you want,” Taylor says.
“Don’t be like that.” Willa gestures back and forth between the two of them. “This is our trip.”
“So should I just pretend like last night never happened? Like it’s totally cool that you abandoned me to hook up with my brother?”
Willa shrugs. “I’ve been pretending for years that you never called me trailer trash. Trust me, it gets easier with practice.”
Cam’s eyes go wide as Taylor’s mouth drops open. She snaps it shut and looks down at her feet, her cheeks flushed pink with embarrassment, and mumbles, “Let’s just go.”
Campbell takes the helm as they motor south from Oswego. Willa is at loose ends without having to drive the boat, but she welcomes the break. After going through the first two canal locks—which are much smaller and easier than the ones on the Welland Canal—she sits beside him and pretends she’s not on fire as he teases his finger along the hem of her cutoffs, tickling her thigh. Taylor moves as far away from them as possible, dangling her legs over the side of the bow while she reads Outlander. Willa pages through the Captain Norm book, trying to find the answer to Finley’s time-travel clue. Upstate New York is brimming with history. Abandoned sanitariums. Crumbling mansions. Revolutionary War graveyards. But somehow she’s sure that none of these things are what Finley had in mind.
Willa ducks under the mast and goes into the cabin, where she uses Taylor’s laptop to pull up a satellite map of the area. Scrolling along the river, she notices a triangular-shaped clearing beside the main road. As she zooms closer, gravel lanes begin to appear. Then a building. Then a screen. She lets out a whoop of delight and scrambles back into the cockpit. “I found it! Taylor, I found it! There’s a drive-in movie theater in Minetto!”
One night, back before they were old enough to drive, Taylor’s dad was taking them to the Nicholsons’ house for a sleepover when they passed the Sandusky Drive-In, which had been closed for all of their lives. The screen tower was falling apart, and chains were strung across the entrance to keep trespassers out, but it hadn’t been torn down yet to make way for a sports complex.
Finley sighed. “I wish the drive-in was still open.”
“Oh man. Did we ever have good times at that old place,” Mr. Nicholson said. “When my friends and I were in high school, I’d park backward so we could sit in the bed of my pickup to watch the movie. We’d open up the cab’s back window and crank the radio. One time I turned my truck box into a cooler and . . . I probably shouldn’t tell you that story. After it closed down, Julie and I took the kids to the Star View Drive-In over in Norwalk once, but Campbell wandered off and we found him asleep in the back seat of someone else’s car.”
The girls laughed, but his story must have planted a seed in Finley’s brain, because one of the first things they did after she got her driver’s license was gather a bunch of people and caravan to the Star View. They parked their cars all in a row and sat in lawn chairs, and Finley opened the back hatch of her Fiat so they could listen to the movie with the volume maxed out.
“So we’re going, right?” Cam looks from Willa to Taylor, who quickly turns back to her book as though she hadn’t been paying attention. “We’re literally minutes away from Minetto.”
Willa nods. “I’m in. Taylor?”
“We don’t have a car.”
“No, but we have bikes,” Cam points out.
“Two bikes.”
“Willa can ride on my handlebars.” He grins, and Willa can’t stop herself from grinning back. In her head, she’s been on approximately half a million dates with Campbell Nicholson, but none of them ever included sitting on the handlebars of a bike.
The fantasy is ruined when Taylor’s lip curls. “Count me out.”
“You know this is what Finley meant by time travel,” Willa says. “You have to come. Please?”
Taylor is huddled miserably in the cockpit with her paperback and her cat as Willa and Campbell pedal away from the boat. While Willa was changing from shorts and a tank top into her favorite red floral sundress, she considered not going. Even now, as she rides along the main road behind Cam with the breeze tickling the hairs on her neck, she feels a twinge of guilt for leaving Taylor behind. But going to the drive-in is what Finley intended for them, and Taylor had every chance to say yes. And Willa is not going to sacrifice the opportunity to be alone with the boy she likes. Not for Taylor.
It’s hard to talk as they ride, but it takes only about ten minutes to reach the drive-in. Cam pays for their tickets, and they walk the bikes to an open spot in the front row. She spread
s a blanket on the grass while he tunes the weather radio to the correct frequency.
“Taylor should be here,” Willa says, sitting down on the blanket.
Cam drops down beside her and nuzzles the spot just below her ear. “I’m pretty good without her.”
Willa’s cheeks dimple as she smiles at him. His fingertips touch the back of her neck as he leans in to kiss her and she slips her fingers into his soft hair.
“Excuse me.”
They stop kissing at the sound of a woman’s voice. She’s sitting in the car beside their spot with the window rolled down. In the back seat, two small faces are flattened against the window, watching them.
“You’re not planning to have s-e-x, are you?” the woman asks. “Because I have kids in the car.”
Willa and Cam look at each other and start laughing. He shakes his head. “No, but you might be concerned later. This movie gets pretty violent.”
“Oh, I’m not worried about that,” she says as her window slides upward. “They’re just not ready for the s-e-x.”
Cam falls back on the blanket, cracking up. Willa lies back beside him, giggling, and for a long time they don’t do anything but laugh. Then he scrambles to his feet. “I’ll go get us some popcorn. Butter?”
“Absolutely.”
He kisses her quick. “Be right back.”
Willa watches the light fade to twilight, and when the first star appears, she wishes for Campbell to be hers. He returns with one large tub of popcorn and a large drink with two straws, and her heart thumps like she’s got an entire marching band in her chest. He sits down on the blanket. “Come here.”
Willa settles between his thighs, leaning back against his chest, as the movie previews begin. He kisses her shoulder and she feeds him a piece of popcorn. “Keep rewarding me with popcorn every time I kiss you and I’ll have to kiss you everywhere.”
“Not here.”
“Of course not here.” He laughs softly. “Around these parts they’re just not ready for the s-e-x.”
Willa isn’t sure she is ready for the s-e-x either. If the rumors about Cam are true, he’s in a whole other world of experience. What if he has porn star expectations? What if she’s bad in bed? She’s not even sure how to be good in bed. But Cam doesn’t mention sex again. He kisses the top of her head, the back of her neck, the palm of her hand—seemingly benign places that only make her want him more.
Campbell falls asleep during the second feature, sprawling out on his side. Willa lies facing him. She brushes his hair back from his face, and her breath catches in her chest as the lights of the movie play across his skin. Now she understands what it means to say you could stare at someone for hours. She could. She does.
He wakes when the car beside them revs up. He offers Willa a sleepy-eyed smile. “How long was I out?”
“Almost the whole movie.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
He leans forward and kisses her. “When Taylor asked me to stay away from her friends, I should have said no.”
“Well, I pinkie promised that I’d stay away from you.”
Cam laughs. “That’s serious business.”
“In middle school? Hell yes it is.”
As the cars line the lanes, all waiting their turn to leave the drive-in, he gathers Willa in his arms and they kiss until they’re the only ones left. On the road back to Minetto, they pass a thicket of trees. Cam stops and swings off his bike, dropping it into the grass on the side of the road. Willa isn’t sure what’s happening, but she does the same and follows him past a NO TRESPASSING sign into the trees, where he catches her up and pulls her to him.
“I’m not ready to go back yet,” he says against her mouth. “Let’s spread the blanket out here and . . .”
She knows what his silence implies and a couple of hours hasn’t suddenly made her brain ready, but her body knows what it wants. Cam turns on his phone flashlight so they’re not fumbling around in total darkness as they spread the blanket.
Everything he does is gentle. The way he slides down the straps on her dress. The slow caress of his hand against her skin. The sweep of his tongue in her mouth. Except there’s a twig poking her back under the blanket and they’re making out on someone’s private property. She hasn’t been holding out for true love or even the perfect, romantic setting, but Willa feels more exposed than sexy. She wishes she could rewind a few hours and be Campbell’s girlfriend for more than a minute before they have sex.
“Hey, um . . . can we take a break for a second?” Willa says. “Maybe we could just . . . talk a little.”
Cam falls onto his back with a frustrated sigh and rubs a hand over his face. “Sure. I guess. What do you want to talk about?”
“I don’t know. Things are moving kind of fast, don’t you think?”
“With my sister around, we’ve gotta grab the time when we’ve got it,” he says, leaning over to kiss her bare shoulder. Willa feels that pull inside her, magnetic and strong.
“I know, but—”
The sound of something rustling in the underbrush stops her short. An animal? A person? The rustling grows louder and closer—and a dog appears out of nowhere. Willa shrieks. The dog barks. And Campbell cracks up laughing.
“Otis!” a man’s voice shouts from a distance as the dog barks and barks and barks. “Who’s there? I’ll call the police.”
“We need to get out of here,” Willa whispers, scrambling to her feet. Cam snatches up the blanket and they bolt out of the woods with the dog behind them. Their bike wheels kick up gravel as they pedal away, Otis giving half-hearted chase as far as the next driveway.
“Oh my God!” Willa laughs. “That was wild!”
“The best nights usually are.”
They ride side by side back toward Minetto, and Willa works up the nerve to ask him why he dropped out of Cornell.
“It was boring, so I left.”
Since graduation, Willa has been worried that college will be as exhausting as high school, but she never once considered it might be boring. This new fear crowds into her chest along with the cell phone at the bottom of Lake Erie and the broken taillight on the car, and she almost can’t breathe. “Seriously?”
“I was surrounded by a bunch of overachievers knocking themselves out for . . . what?” Cam says. “A piece of paper and a mountain of debt? It’s not worth it.”
“So, do you have an alternate plan?”
He shrugs. “Just keep do what I’m doing.”
Willa thought being a business major was the answer—she had a plan—but now doubt itches beneath her skin like an insect bite. She goes silent, wondering if she’s made a mistake.
Cam laughs quietly. “You’re thinking way too hard about this.”
“But—”
“Relax, little Willa. College is made for people like you.”
She’s not sure what he means by that, but it doesn’t sound like a compliment so she doesn’t ask. Instead she pedals fast, then faster, making him race to catch up.
Taylor is asleep when they return to the boat. As they stand in the cockpit, Campbell picks a stray leaf out of Willa’s hair, then takes a Sharpie from the back pocket of his jeans. In the dim light, she watches as he writes not ready for the s-e-x on her arm. She laughs softly, and he kisses her good night as though they’re standing outside her apartment door. “Thanks for a fun time.” She smiles. “See you in the morning.”
Taylor
TAYLOR WAKES TO FIND HER brother and all of his belongings missing. It doesn’t make sense that Campbell would leave. He was supposed to stay with them all the way to Catskill.
“What did you do?” she demands, shocking Willa out of sleep. She blinks as if Taylor is speaking gibberish.
“What are you talking about?” Willa asks.
“Cam is gone.”
“Maybe he went for coffee or something.”
“He took everything. Backpack. Wallet. Keys. Why would he just leave?”
Willa is still for a moment and her blinking picks up speed, as though she’s trying to keep from crying. But Willa never cries.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I really don’t know.”
Taylor doesn’t believe her. Especially since she slept in her dress and has bits of leaves stuck in her curls. Taylor notices a streak of black marker on the inside of Willa’s forearm. “What’s that?”
“Just a joke from last night. This woman thought . . .” Willa trails off. “Never mind. It’s nothing important.”
But as she scratches the back of her head, Taylor reads the words “not ready for the s-e-x.” It seems more important than Willa lets on and Taylor guesses it’s the reason why Cam left. Maybe he came, saw, and conquered. Or maybe—judging by the Sharpie tattoo on Willa’s arm—he didn’t.
Taylor texts Campbell. Where are you?
I forgot about some shit I had to do.
What shit?
The marina at Catskill will know what to do with the mast.
Is this about Willa?
The reply bubbles flash repeatedly, as though Campbell is typing and deleting his response. When it finally appears, it’s only one word. No.
“I don’t think he’s coming back.”
Taylor tries to read Willa’s mood as she pushes back her comforter, but she’s all business. No sign of tears. No hints at what might have transpired between her and Campbell. She’s all locked up, as usual.
“We should go,” Willa says, folding up her bedding. “Since we traveled fast through the lakes, we don’t have to rush the canal. We could stop at Fulton and Phoenix and maybe go to that little amusement park at Sylvan Beach.”
Except last night—after Cam and Willa left for the drive-in—Taylor worked up the courage to call Vanessa. “It’s um—it’s Taylor. You put your number in my phone, but then I realized you didn’t have mine.”
“Hey! So glad to hear from you, Taylor,” Vanessa said. “And I hope you don’t think this is creepy, but I tracked down your Instagram so I could see pictures and follow your progress.”
“It’s only a little creepy.” Vanessa’s big laugh made Taylor smile. “So then you know we’ve only made it as far as Minetto.”
