Eventually, I break it to whisper, “Can you hear my fears?”
“No,” admits the boy, and just as I’m wondering if he thinks this is too weird and dorky, he says, “I hear the sea.”
I smile. Might still be smiling when I drift off, into a dream where me and Kay are walking along the beach and Kay bends down, picks up a shell. A Fibonacci spiral, she says to me, holding out her palm. Normally, such a dream would have me sleepwalking to the shore but in the morning, I wake to light from M.M.’s good old window and something thumping under my cheek.
A heartbeat.
My own heart, sleep-sluggish, wakes up once I see gravity’s work. Overnight, my head appears to have fallen onto the boy’s chest and we both appear to have fallen flat onto the couch. His one arm dangles to the ground while the other rests over my waist. His head’s angled back, the pale column of his throat exposed.
I touch my own throat. The bruises have finally stopped hurting. That night of thunder and rain feels like a week-old dream. The boy beside me （under me?） is warmer than any carpet-blanket, and I’m tempted to lie back down, but rafts don’t build themselves and at last, I lift his arm, lift myself, and carefully reposition the limb over his stomach.
I grab a taro patty left over from last night’s dinner and eat it on the porch. The tide rises with the sun. The boy doesn’t wake. Let him rest. I don’t need his help today when I’m only three logs short of completing Leona.
Three logs short of setting sail.
I feel none of the joy I did when I finished Hubert. Instead, the taro patty sits like a boulder in my stomach, and I do everything slowly—checking my pack, climbing the ridge, even going through the grayscale meadow and its creepy shrines. I cut my trees with precision, trying to make each stroke count. All the while, the forest keeps on calling my name. Beckoning.
Cee.
Cee.
Cee.
Fuck it. I toss down the kitchen knife and rise. It’s just the foggy trees and the Shipyard, deeper in. What do I have to be afraid of?
I follow the call of my name, venturing into the trees. My steps, loud at first, quiet down as the pine cones underfoot decay. No beetles today. The island isn’t exactly a menagerie, crossing predators off my list of things to worry about. But as the fog thickens, strung between the trees like cobwebs, I’m also reminded of how alone I was before the boy washed up—and how alone he’ll be when I leave.
I shake off the thought. We’ve only known each other for one week. Kay and I have shared—and lost—years together. Nothing can compare, and when I reach the clearing in the forest and see the Shipyard, surrounded by the piles of junk I scavenged through to exhume Hubert, it rushes back. Every ridge crossing. The broken arms and ribs. The pain and joy and hopelessness, to have come so close and lost it all to a storm. But despite my worst fears, it didn’t take three more years to find another way off this island. This really is a best-case scenario. Leaving will hurt, but I’ll survive. Nothing can kill me. Kay is waiting. I hear her. Her voice—it’s coming from the pool.
Cee. An ash-gray leaf lands in the middle of it, quivering the surface. My ribs uncurl in reach, and I stumble to the pool rim, my face perfectly reflected in water still as glass.
It shatters as I step in.
The water closes over me. My thoughts dilute. My eyes open. The pool’s shockingly deep. I part the water before me like a curtain, revealing the bottom. It’s plush with moss and speckled with toadstools, some as small as pebbles, other as big as dinner plates, glazed with light from above. Shadows gather, cloudlike, as I dive deeper. The water goes on forever and ever, and at some point, I begin to see.
In color—just like my memories and dreams—I see Kay. We’re in a shoebox of a room, lying on the same bed and curled like kidneys, knee to knee. My fingers comb through her hair as I talk to her and my words appear on my hands, wrists, arms. They darken into bruises. The walls around us move away. Now I’m alone and speaking to a man in a white suit. Eighty years, he says, but I can’t wait that long, so I walk to the doorway and step out, into the ocean waiting beyond. Water licks my skin; the sun bakes it dry as I’m washed ashore. A woman runs out to greet me; she wears a baby-blue sweater with iron-on pugs. I gave her that sweater, and she gives me a mug of tea and together we go to see a wall of concrete, soaring into the sky.
The images come faster and faster.
And freeze.
I choke as something cuts into my midsection, digging in as it draws me up and up and up.
Turns out it’s the boy’s arm, a vise around my waist when we break the surface, and though it doesn’t feel like he’s trying to kill me, I still panic. “The fuck do you—”