“There are ranger-led tours of the fort if you’d prefer.”
“Ugh,” I say with a smile. “You know how I feel about learning.”
“Sure, Harvard,” he grins. “Let’s just walk around the moat and you can figure it out.”
We continue on the brick wall that encircles the fort, the breeze whipping my hair, the water morphing from pale aqua to a dense, navy-crayon blue as it gets deeper. With every step my desire to jump in grows until it’s pulsing just at the surface of my skin.
I don’t notice the things I’ve given up when I’m at school. Sure, there are times when I’d like to abandon my orderly life—drinking my greens powder, treadmill for an hour, and on to the lab—and instead run barefoot to the ocean or get towed off the back of my older brother’s car while I ride my skateboard, an activity that put me in the hospital not once but twice.
In Boston, though, I just notice it less. It’s sort of like tucking Halloween candy away in a distant cupboard—you can almost forget when it’s not in your face. And I thought it all required no restraint from me at all, but God, suddenly I resent it. I resent all the years I’ve had to spend not jumping in the ocean and I resent the way I’ve spent my mornings in a dark, sterile gym instead of outside, and I even resent the lab, which might provean incredibly awkward place to work next year if Thomas and I aren’t back together.
I resent the way I’ve avoided the sun between the hours of ten and three and the way I gave up chips and how much time I now spend on my hair and?—
“Fuck it,” I announce, and before I can change my mind, before Elijah can even ask what it is that I’m abandoning, I jump off the moat wall into the water.
I go under fast. The wall wasn’t high, but it was a big enough jump that there’d have been no way to protect my precious five-hundred-dollar keratin and...I just don’t care.
I’m soovercaring.
The water is warm and delicious. I kick my way to the surface and Elijah is standing there with the widest grin on his face. “You just jumped in with your clothes still on.”
“I noticed that, actually,” I reply, pulling the T-shirt overhead and flinging it toward him. The shorts covering my bikini bottoms are next.
“Little wild island girl,” he says. “I knew she was still in there somewhere.”
I’d forgotten he used to call me that. I’d forgotten how much I loved it, and the way it made me feel like all my quirks and my recklessness would eventually find a home, someone to shelter them, adore them, rather than trying to shame me out of them the way my mother did, or beat them out of me the way my father did.
“Throw me a snorkel,” I reply, fighting a smile of my own.
He reaches into the bag the pilot gave him and sends the items into the water one by one—fins, then mask, then snorkel.
He puts his own fins on while standing at the wall, which is definitely the smarter way to do it, then drops all our stuff and jumps in to join me.
“How’s it feel?” he asks when he surfaces.
Free. It feels free, andIfeel free, for the first time in way too many years.
We snorkel for hours.I’m unwilling to get out of the water long enough to eat, or to drink, and with every second, it’s as if I’m being restored. As if I’ve found some vital piece of myself I’d walled off so long that I nearly suffocated it to death.
“You know how much you love this?” Elijah asks, floating on his back. “You haven’t brought up all the things you’re not supposed to discuss even once since we arrived.”
I grin at him. “I decided to save all of them up for my maid-of-honor speech. It’s going to be entirely about you and your flaws.”
He laughs, then glances at his watch. “I really hate to say this, but we’d better go dry off.”
We swim to where the water gets shallow and wade to the wall. Elijah goes to get our bags and the clothes he spread over the wall’s edge to dry, and I sit with my face toward the sun, feeling it burn off the water. I release a wide yawn and my jaw doesn’t pop, for once.
“Sleepy again?” Elijah asks, handing me a towel.
I press it to my face. “Putting up with your grandmother would exhaust anyone. How did your grandfather die, by the way? Did he just sigh heavily and expire, as if he’d given up?”
Elijah rolls his eyes. “You’re the doctor. Why doyouthink you’re so tired?”
I shake my head. The most obvious culprit would be anemia, except I have a disorder that causes my iron levels to go high, not low, which is why I normally avoid steak houses. Possiblyhypothyroidism, but I’ve got none of the other symptoms. “I think it’s your grandmother.”
“You want to hear my theory?” he asks, taking a seat beside me, hanging his long legs over the wall. Before I can saynot really, he continues. “I think that going through a breakup and worrying about your career at the same time is a significant hit. I’ve had that happen before—enough shit occurs at once and your body shuts down the way it would if you had the flu.”
I laugh. “There’s no way that some dumb temporary breakup is hitting me like theflu.”
