I really wish I hadn’t started this conversation.
“I’m serious,” he insists. “It sounds about as different to here as it gets, and, honestly, I could be doing with a change.”
“Yeah,” I agree blandly. “I can see how this place would get on your nerves after a while. All this sunshine, and luxury, and having to decide which of your houses to sleep in every night… It would get you down, for sure. You’d find yourself desperately wishing you were in Heather Bay, about to choke on a deep-fried Mars bar from the Wildcat Cafe”
“You’re making that up,” Jett snorts, ignoring my sarcastic jibe. “No way is there a place called The Wildcat Cafe, selling fried whatever-it-was. I’m calling bullshit on that.”
“There is,” I tell him. ‘There’s a stuffed wildcat in a glass case above the counter and everything. Just the thing you want to look at over a tasty lunch. Not that you get a tasty lunch in the Wildcat, mind you. Food isn’t exactly their specialty.”
“Well, that settles it,” Jett says, chuckling. “I’m there. I gotta see this place.”
We walk on, me still desperately trying to swallow down the bitter taste of sadness that rose up in my throat as soon as I started thinking about home. The irony of Jett and I both wanting to be somewhere other than where we belong isn’t lost on me, and the line he quoted from the movie last night comes back to me in a rush.
If I felt that I belonged someplace.
Did he mean it, I wonder? Is that how he really feels? Or is it just another line he learned by heart?
“So, how come you’re scared of seeing dead crabs in a restaurant, but you’re okay with potentially seeing live ones on the beach?” he asks as I ruminate on this. “Shouldn’t you be freaking out around about now?”
“There aren’t any live crabs on this kind of beach,” I say, indicating the smooth golden sand that rolls out beneath our feet with nowhere to hide. “There are too many people around.”
Actually, the beach is fairly quiet. The windows of the houses that crowd around its edges, though, are all watching us like a thousand eyes. It’s not just the crabs who’d feel uncomfortable under that level of scrutiny, really,
“They prefer to lurk in rock pools,” I go on, trying to ignore the feeling of being watched. “The creepy little bastards. Did you know coconut crabs probably pecked Amelia Earhart to death? Those ones canclimband everything. I will never, for the life of me, understand why people aren’t more afraid of them.”
I’m about to explain the theory about the body washed up on a Pacific island which might have been Earhart when another thought suddenly strikes me.
“Hey,” I say, shading my eyes from the sun as I look up at him. “That reminds me: you still haven’t told me your deepest fear?”
“I did. It’s heights. You saw it with your own eyes.”
Jett’s response doesn’t exactly encourage me to go on, but I plunge right in, anyway.
“No,” I correct him. “That’s justafear. You specifically said it wasn’t yourdeepestfear.”
“I’m scared ofyou,” Jett replies immediately. “Isn’t everyone?”
I smile, but I know he’s just stalling; using humor to try to hide what he’s really thinking. I know because I do that too.
Takes one to know one, I guess.
Jett doesn’t want to tell me what he’s afraid of. Which is fair enough, obviously, but it was just a couple of days ago that I was forced to confront my own biggest fear at The Crab Shack, so I’m not letting him off that easily.
“Come on,” I say softly, nudging him gently in the ribs. “I told you mine. It’s only fair that you tell me yours.”
At first I think he’s just going to ignore the question, like he did when I clumsily tried to get him to tell me why he didn’t insist on going through with the fake kiss. But then he clears his throat as if he’s about to make a speech, and I realize he’s actually taking this seriously.
Okay, now I feel bad.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to—” I say hurriedly, but he’s already started to speak, so I clamp my stupid mouth shut and listen.
“I’m scared of my dad,” he says, so softly I have to strain to hear him above the crash of waves on the shore. “Of disappointing him. Of never being good enough, no matter what I do.”
There’s a single beat of silence between us as I try to decide what to say to this.
I was expecting him to say he was scared of snakes, or empty swimming pools, say, even if he had to make it up. Instead, though, it would appear he’s decided to trust me with somethingreal. It’s a plot twist I wasn’t expecting, and I’m not totally sure how to react to it.
“I know that probably sounds stupid,” Jett mumbles, reaching up to rub at his invisible beard.
