Instead of answering, he carefully hooked a long strand of my hair with his forefinger and held it out between us.
‘When the light hits your hair just right, it turns this real pretty shade of red.’
I tried to respond but none of my muscles felt much like moving, even the ones I needed to breathe. It was only when Wyn let my hair fall through his fingers that I was able to exhale again.
‘Must be the sun,’ I mumbled before taking a noisy slurp through the straw of my giant iced latte. ‘Oh hey, what’s this?’
Without waiting for a reply, I pushed past him and through an open gate to what looked like a park, but as soon as I stepped inside, I knew it was not a park at all.
‘It’s a cemetery,’ Wyn said, right beside me as I scanned the crumbling headstones and randomly placed monuments. ‘Colonial Park, one of the oldest in the country. If I’m remembering correctly, it dates all the way back to the 1700s and there’s at least one guy in here who signed the Declaration of Independence, over that way, I think.’
He pointed off to the left but something pulled me to the right, a nagging feeling that gnawed away at me like I’d forgotten something but couldn’t remember what. This place was so different to Bonaventure, much, much smaller and more open and bright.
‘That tree over there doesn’t have any Spanish moss,’ I said, wandering off the path towards the middle of the lawn. ‘Do you know what kind it is?’
‘It’s a magnolia tree and as far as I know, it should. There’s only one explanation I can think of.’
The shade provided by the thick, glossy leaves was cool and welcoming, and the fragrant white flowers that bloomed on the enormous tree filled the air with a light, sweet scent. Without even needing to ask each other first, we both sat down on prickly grass, appreciative of the magnolia’s generous shadow.
‘In Florida, they call Spanish moss Old Man’s Beard because of an old story of how it supposedly came to be.’ Wyn stretched out his long legs and the white rubber toecaps of his shoes almost touched the trunk of the tree. ‘Legend has it Gorez Goz, a villain with a long grey beard, bought an Indian maiden for a yard of braid and a bar of soap, but she was so afraid of him, she climbed up into the trees to escape. He tried to follow her but his beard got all tangled up in the branches and the maiden dove into the river to escape.’
‘Was she OK?’ I asked, pinching my toes through my shoes.
‘Sure was. She got away but Goz and his beard were trapped up there for all eternity.’
‘Good, the girl hardly ever gets away in those old stories. That doesn’t explain why there’s no moss on this tree though.’
‘That’s the other part of the story,’ he replied in a spooky voice, eyebrows arched over playful eyes. ‘They say Spanish moss cannot grow where innocent blood has been spilled.’
I looked around, checking all the trees in the cemetery. Every single one of them dripping with moss, all except for this one. ‘Well, that’s super reassuring.’
‘I’m just the tour guide.’ Wyn shrugged, a mischievous sparkle in his eyes. ‘There’s no way of telling everything that happened right here on this very spot over the last three hundred years.’
‘Her outfit looks extremely vintage, maybe she knows.’ Inodded at a tall woman with extremely pale blonde hair trailing down the back of a floor-length ivory dress. She looked so washed out compared to the green grass and red brick of the wall beyond her, as though she’d been run through a black and white filter when the rest of the world was in vivid Technicolor. She held my gaze with watery eyes as she moved slowly through the headstones.
Wyn frowned as he followed my gaze. ‘Maybe who knows?’
I turned to point her out but she was already gone.
‘There will be some boring reason,’ he said, rolling onto his back and cradling his head in his hands. I leaned backwards, trying to see where she might have vanished to but there was no trace of her. ‘Pesticides or pH levels or something.’
‘Probably,’ I agreed, ignoring the uncomfortable feeling in my gut that wasn’t quite so sure. ‘Hey, I have another question.’
‘Shoot.’
‘What do you want to do?’ I asked. ‘After you graduate, I mean.’
He made a long humming sound and tapped one foot against the other while he thought about his answer. ‘You got me,’ he said after a good long while. ‘I don’t know for sure.’
‘Something with your camera?’ I suggested.
‘Maybe,’ he replied. ‘I would love to travel the world, taking pictures of everything I see. What about you?’
‘I’m not sure either,’ I admitted. ‘I only had plans set in stone as far as my seventeenth birthday. Dad’s travel schedule was so unpredictable but we had a deal. I went with him wherever he needed to go until I turned seventeen, after that, I got to make my own choices.’
‘What kind of choices?’
‘College first, one school where I could stay and study for four whole years. After that, I’m not sure. Maybe teaching or something to do with books.’
