Parth leads us into the Ferris wheel line. I try to pair up with Sabrina, but she sidesteps me in the queue, switching places so she’s with Parth and I’m with Wyn.
“Okay, okay,” Parth says. “Raise your hand if you’re high.”
“What if we all close our eyes first?” Kimmy says. “Just so no one’s embarrassed.”
Wyn’s head droops against my shoulder, his laughter spilling across my skin, dripping down my spine, lighting up my nerve endings as it goes. A mixed metaphor, sure, but when are you supposed to mix your metaphors if not at thirty years old, high as a satellite?
“I feel young!” I cry, which makes Sabrina cackle again, throw her arms out to her sides, and spin twice.
Parth grabs my shoulders and says urgently, “We are young, Harry. We’ll always be young. It’s a state of mind.”
“Now seems like a good time to tell you,” Cleo says, “Kim buys this shit from a neighbor who makes it at home. It’s not regulated. Hope you’re all prepared to go to the fucking moon.”
Kimmy’s eyes have essentially disappeared at this point. “Listen,” she says, “you’re gonna have a great time. Moon’s beautiful this time of year.”
Normally the idea of unregulated weed gummies might make me a tad anxious. Or, like, have a full-blown panic attack. But the way Kimmy says it and the goofy look on her face make me snort-laugh some more.
“Wait,” Wyn says, face stern and serious, “how do you make gummies at home?”
“Listen,” Kimmy says. “It’s a mystery.”
“Listen,” Sabrina says. “I love it.”
The very unimpressed twentysomething Ferris wheel attendant waves us up the metal steps to the loading platform.
Sabrina and Parth take the frontmost open bench, and Wyn steadies me as we climb in the next one, my breath still coming in giggly gasps.
“These,” he says, “are not my mother’s weed gummies.”
I chortle into his shoulder, then pull back quickly. Well, in all honesty, I doubt I’m doing anything quickly, but I do remember to remove my face from his neck region, and that’s not nothing at this point.
We lift our arms as the attendant checks our lap bar, then drop them again as he moves to the bench behind us to latch Kimmy and Cleo in.
“Remember the maritime museum?” he says.
I wipe my laugh-tears away with the back of my hand. “Remember might not be accurate. I have bits and pieces floating around inside my hippocampus like little soap bubbles.”
“It was the trip right before your last year of medical school,” he says.
“Seriously?” My hand flops onto his on the lap bar. I pull it back. “It was that long ago?”
He nods. “It was the same trip where Sabrina and Parth first hooked up.”
The memory feels like it’s being broadcast from another life. Sabrina and Parth had stayed up later than all of us, caught in a viciously competitive game of gin rummy, wherein they took turns winning. Late the next morning, they’d come down to the kitchen together, cranky but glowing. “Don’t say a single word,” Sabrina warned. “We aren’t going to speak of it.” And we’d all nodded and hid our smirks, but that night, they’d shared a room again.
“Later that day we all shared one joint,” Wyn goes on, “then went to the museum, and you watched that boat-making presentation for like thirty-five minutes without blinking.”
“He was an artist!” I cry.
“He was,” Wyn agrees. “And for like two hours, you were convinced you were going to quit medical school to make boats.”
“I’d never even been on a boat at that point,” I say.
“I don’t think that’s strictly required,” he says.
“I was probably just scared I wasn’t going to match with any residencies,” I say.
“You told me you wouldn’t even care,” he replies. “You said it would be a sign from the universe.”
My chest pinches with guilt. As if I’d cheated on my future, had an emotional affair with boat making. I’d devoted my entire adult life to this one thing, and all it took was one puff of the right joint for me to contemplate throwing it all away.
“It was fucking adorable,” he says. “I high-texted my dad to ask what we’d need to get for you to be able to make a boat in the shop.”
“Seriously?”
“He was extremely excited,” Wyn says. “He was going to ask around to see if someone could come show you how to get started.”
“You never told me that,” I say.
“Well,” he says, “you never mentioned boat making again, so I kind of figured it was the weed talking.”
“It was exceptionally talkative weed,” I muse.
“What about the gummy?” he asks. “Is it telling you we should impulse-buy some heavy machinery?”
We. Hearing him say it is like biting into a Maine blueberry, the way you taste the salt water and the cold sky and the damp earth and the sun all at once. When we lands on my tongue, I see everything:
His moonlit shoulders leaned against the Jaguar.
The moment he pulled his hoodie down over my shoulders, my hair pushing out around my face.
A kiss in the wine cellar.
Falling asleep crammed in one twin bed, his sweat still clinging to me.
The night he asked me to marry him.
“Harriet?” he says. “What do you think? Should we invest in your boat-making dream or not?”
The morning we found out Hank was gone.
The deep, painful silence in our San Francisco apartment.
The night he broke my heart.
I shake myself. “What have we got to lose except for thousands of dollars we don’t have and limbs we’re fairly accustomed to and—” I scrabble for his arm as the Ferris wheel lurches to life, sweeping forward along the loading dock and then shooting us skyward.
As the ground drops away, Wyn’s face lights in alternating hues of neon, colors pulsing in a nonsensical rhythm.
For a few seconds, I’m hypnotized.
Okay, realistically, I have no concept of how long I’m hypnotized. The weed is still making time stretchy as taffy. Some colors paint his face for eons, and others flash so fast I hardly have time to register them.
The bitter salty breeze runs through his hair as we lift higher into the night, the smell of burnt sugar still clinging to his clothes.
“You’re staring, Harriet,” he says, the corner of his mouth twitching.
“Am I?” I say. “Or are you just high?”
When he laughs, I become intensely aware of my fingers, still clutching his forearm, and of the smooth, dry texture of his skin. Up close, whenever he’s been out in the sun, there are millions of tiny dark freckles, small as sand grains, scattered over his skin. I want to touch all of them. In my current state, that could take days.
Wedged together like this, I feel his breath moving in and out of his lungs, his heartbeat tapping out messages in Morse code.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks.
“Like what?” I say, a bit thickly.
He tucks his chin. “Like you want to eat me.”
“Because,” I say, “I want to eat you.”