Jamie has also told me his darkest secret: he loves Hallmark Channel original movies! Can’t get enough of them. When he tells me those plots I like to interrupt with, “Wait, let me guess. The guy and girl have a misunderstanding and don’t speak to each other until a wise child intervenes.”
Nine times out of ten I’m right. The tenth time it’s usually a wise old person who intervenes. But he does have a way of making movies likeOctober Kisssound good. There are also moments where he gets halfway through and I have to tell him, “No, I think we’ve seen this one. She leaves her high-stress job to marry the widowed innkeeper, right?” But lately I’ve just let him continue.
I like listening to him.
Even if he does get to the part where the stepchild hops off a subway to interrupt an important presentation and this look of realization dawns on his face and he says, “Wait, have I told you this one before?”
“Well,” Jamie says now. “Lucky for usyou’rea good storyteller. I like hearing your never-ending mind catalog of movies.”
My lips are pulling into a smile I can’t stop. “You must be a shitty storyteller because I still don’t understand the ‘plot’ ofMulholland Drive.”
He sighs. “Fade in, exterior, Mulholland Drive, night.”
“Stop! I don’t want to hear it again.”
“All right, all right, I’ll skip to the Winkie’s Diner scene,” he says, sitting up.
“No!” I cover my ears as he goes into the scene.
“I had a dream about this place.” He has that evil smirk on his face. I tackle him and cover his mouth. He continues talking andlaughing under my hand and pulls it away. “It’s the second one I’ve had....” I attempt to cover his mouth again as he struggles.
An explosion behind us lights up the night sky in red.
I jump off him and scramble over to our packs, picking up the gun from beside them. Jamie is there, his hand already lifting the rifle. My heart’s racing. My lungs have stopped taking in air. We turn around, looking for the explosion, for the people, for the attack, but nothing’s there.
“What was that?” he asks before I can.
We wait in silence, then a white light zips up from the ground a quarter mile away. Once in the sky, the light explodes into a shower of sparkling green. We lower the guns.
Fireworks.
There’s another zip of white sparks followed by a purple explosion.
“Wait a second.” Jamie goes back to the packs and takes out his mother’s notebook. He flips through the pages and smiles, turning it around to me. There are several tally marks, between twenty-eight and thirty-one, in eleven boxes. His mother’s calendar system. It was too much wasted space to draw a full-box calendar so he keeps tallies and labels the boxes for the month. He points to the eleventh box—“JL” written above it. There are four tally marks in it.
“It’s July fourth.”
“I didn’t even think about it.” Another yellow explosion lights up the sky.
“Neither did I, until now.” He tucks the book away and we sit down, our backs to the fire, and we watch the fireworks.
“I didn’t expect to see fireworks ever again.”
“No.” Blue and red explosions at the same time.
“Maybe they have electricity and internet, too,” I say, joking. Our voices have a dazed tone to them as we watch the fireworks shoot up from the ground.
“Do you want to go find them?”
I do but I don’t but I do.
Idon’t, but I think Jamie does. At least his voice sounds like he does. He’s leaning up now, looking at me. And as another firework ignites the sky, he looks hopeful. He wants to find people. That’s why Jamie left the cabin to begin with, because he thought I was looking for civilization. And why we decided to keep going instead of turning back to the cabin, after all.
My heart aches as he smiles at me and I say, “Sure. Let’s go find them.” But even as the words leave my mouth, my stomach twists into a ball of nerves.
Jamie pulls on his shirt and my stomach knots. What if they’re like Howard and the others back at the cabin? What if we’re packing up and heading toward danger?
A purple firework explodes over us.
