Dad honked the horn and drove away.
“Pssssst! Leni!”
She glanced sideways.
Matthew stood hidden in the trees across from the school. He waved her over.
Leni waited for her dad’s truck to disappear around the corner and then hurried over to Matthew. “What’s up?”
“Let’s skip school today and take the Tusty into Homer.”
“Skip school? Homer?”
“Come on! It’ll be fun.”
Leni knew all the reasons to say no. She also knew that today was a minus tide and her dad was going to be clamming all morning.
“We won’t get caught, and even if we do, big whoop. We’re seniors. It’s May. Don’t seniors in the Outside skip all the time?”
Leni didn’t think it was a good idea, thought it might even be dangerous, but she couldn’t say no to Matthew.
She heard the low, elegiac honking of the ferry’s horn as it neared the dock.
Matthew reached out for Leni’s hand, and the next thing she knew they were running out of the school’s parking lot and up the hill, past the old church, and out onto the waiting ferry.
Leni stood on the deck, holding on to the railing as the boat eased away from land.
All summer, the trusty Tustamena hauled Alaskans around—fishermen, adventurers, laborers, tourists, even high school sports teams. The hull was full of cars and supplies: construction equipment, tractors, backhoes, steel beams. To the few hardy tourists who used the boat as a blue-collar cruise to remote destinations, the ferry crossing was a pretty way to spend the day. To locals, this was simply the way to town.
Leni had ridden this ferry hundreds of times in her life, but never had she felt the sense of freedom on it that she felt now. Or possibility. As if maybe this old ship could sail her right into a brand-new future.
Wind ruffled her hair. Gulls and shorebirds squawked overhead, wheeling and diving, floating on tufts of wind. The seawater was flat and green, only a few motor ripples on the surface.
Matthew moved in behind her, put his arms around her, held on to the railing. She couldn’t help leaning back into him, letting his body warm her. “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” she said. For once, she felt like an ordinary teenager. This was as close as she and Matthew could get to that, to being the kind of kids who went to the movies on a Saturday night and went for milkshakes at the A&W afterward.
“I got into the university in Anchorage,” Matthew said. “I’ll be playing hockey for their team.”
Leni turned. With him still holding on to the railing, it meant she was in his arms. Her hair whipped across her face.
“Come with me,” he said.
It was like a beautiful flower, that idea; it bloomed and then died in her hand. Life was different for Matthew. He was talented and wealthy. Mr. Walker wanted his son to go to college. “We can’t afford it. And they need me to work the homestead, anyway.”
“There are scholarships.”
“I can’t leave,” she said quietly.
“I know your dad is weird, but why can’t you leave?”
“It’s not him I can’t leave,” Leni said. “It’s my mama. She needs me.”
“She’s a grown-up.”
Leni couldn’t say the words that would explain it.
He would never understand why Leni sometimes believed she was the only thing keeping her mother alive.
Matthew pulled her into his arms, held her. She wondered if he could feel the way she was trembling. “Jeez, Len,” he whispered into her hair.
Had he meant that, to shorten her name, to claim it somehow as something new in his hands?
“I would if I could,” she said. After that, they fell silent. She thought about how different their worlds were, and it showed her how big the world was Outside; they were just two kids among millions.
When the boat docked in Homer, they disembarked with a throng of people. Holding hands, they lost themselves among the crowd of bright-eyed tourists and drably dressed locals. They ate halibut and chips on the restaurant’s deck at the tip of the Spit, tossing salty, greasy fries to the birds waiting nearby. Matthew bought Leni a photo album at a souvenir shop that sold Alaska-themed Christmas ornaments and T-shirts that said things like DON’T MOOSE WITH ME and GOT CRABS?
They talked about nothing and everything. Inconsequential things. The beauty of Alaska, the craziness of the tide, the clog of cars and people on the Spit.
Leni took a picture of Matthew in front of the Salty Dawg Saloon. One hundred years ago, it had been the post office and grocery store for this out-of-the-way spot that even Alaskans called Land’s End. Now the old girl was a dark, twisty tavern where locals rubbed elbows with tourists and the walls were decorated in memorabilia. Matthew wrote LENI AND MATTHEW on a dollar bill and pinned it to the wall where it was immediately lost among the thousands of bills and scraps of paper around it.