I howl.
“You promised!”
“I know. I’m horrible. I’m sorry.” I think you’re plenty hunky—but the boy looks mortified enough. “Just—hunky.”
The boy is not amused. “What term would you use?”
“‘Smoldering,’ maybe. ‘Dark.’”
“Do I look dark to you?” demands the boy.
“No tragic backstory?”
“Nope. Tragic, right?”
My abs ache as my laughter finally releases me. We’re standing in the shadow of the ridge. Not working. Not moving. Just talking. And I don’t want it to end. “Heath?”
“No.”
“Stop rejecting my names.”
“Stop pulling them all from the same hat.” Then the boy frowns and looks at me closely. “Are these coming off the top of your head?”
“Yes?”
“Maybe names are like faces in dreams,” says the boy. “Maybe you only know the ones of people you’ve met before.”
“You’ll have to write that theory down. Publish it in some peer-reviewed journal when we get off the island.” Be scouted by an innotech firm.
Now where did that come from?
“Am I?” asks the boy, distracting me.
“Am I…？”
“Getting off the island.” He speaks without bitterness or blame, his words as soft as the rain that begins to fall. He faces the ridge. “You don’t have to answer that,” he says, and starts climbing as I stand, speechless at the bottom.
Great. Just great. He’s not allowed to say something like that and leave me agonizing over what he really means, because there’s no way he’s that neutral to the idea of being left behind— Or is he?
I stare at him over dinner. As we wash the dishes. He gives me nothing to work with. We part for the night, and I’m left tossing and turning on the couch, his question gnawing at me.
Am I getting off the island?
The raft could be big enough for both of us, if I keep building it. Food is the real issue. We haven’t stockpiled enough for two people on a journey of indeterminate length. I could set sail first, I decide, and spare the boy a watery death if I fail. And if I succeed, and find Kay, then I’m sure she’d help me rescue the boy as well. But why do I assume he needs rescuing at all? What if he also has someone he needs to find, someone he doesn’t remember? And even if he doesn’t—if he’s truly alone—does that discredit his desire to go home? Is his life worth less than mine just because he isn’t missed or loved?
“Still up?”
The whirlpool in my head stops at his whisper. I nod, say “Yes” in case it’s too dark for him to see. He comes around to the front of the couch. I sit up and pull my legs in to make room. The cushion beneath my feet flutters as he sits, and something in me flutters too, adjusting to his presence across from me.
I wait for him to address what he said back at the ridge.
I don’t expect him to ask, “Do you ever dream about things you can’t make sense of?”
“Sometimes.” Sometimes, scenes from my dreams seem too good to be true. Like the blueness of the sea, the crystalline sky, and the white ladder running between the two. “But mostly, I dream about my sister.” Or swimming in the ocean, which usually ends with me waking in the ocean. “What about you?”
For a minute, it’s just the sound of my even breathing and the rain, gentle outside.
“White.” The boy speaks in a whisper. “In my dreams, all I can see is white.”
“What kind of white?”
“Just … white.” A measured breath. “A white worse than nothingness. The kind that makes you go blind.”
His voice is hushed, his fear barely audible, but there.
It hurts me to hear it.
I inch over to him as he says, “I don’t know how you did it, living so long here on your—what … are you doing?”
“Combing out the dreams,” I say, one hand on his shoulder, the other running through his hair.
The boy is stiff, but doesn’t move away. Doesn’t move at all when I replace the hand on his shoulder with my head. “And this?” he asks, voice airless as if he’s stopped breathing.
“Listening to your fears. Rest your head on mine.”
After a second, he does—very, very carefully, as if our skulls might break. As the weight of his head settles, so does the breath in his chest. He resumes breathing; I’m close enough to feel it, now that we’re sitting arm to arm, in darkness and silence still as water.