“Wait for the right moment,” she says. “Trust me.”
Chapter 11
“I think I’m in love”—Nelle lifts her face to the sun, her freckles like flakes of pyrite—“with the sea.”
Sand hardens in the cracks between James’s toes. The water retreats, sighs, then races back up the shore, soaking his rolled-up jeans, cold on his ankles. Sunrise pierces through cotton-candy clouds the color of apricots. He catches himself smiling at Nelle, jealous of the wind playing with her hair.
His foremost reason for coming here was to show her the ocean, but he clenches his phone to remind himself of his other reason. Since his mom surprised him with a clamshell phone in middle school, he has been dependent on one. He checks it like clockwork every few minutes, scrolls for hours when he could be reading or writing or talking to another personin person. He looks at it now. Above him, the clouds are purple, red, and yellow. In the phone’s reflection, they are black and white.
James flips it in his hand three times, spinning a yarn ball of courage, a batter rocking back and forth, ready to swing.
Then he chucks it. It slides from his hand too easily.
Nelle laughs, clinging to his shirtsleeve. She throws her hand up in farewell as his phone flies like a silver bird, far out into blue water. It disappears with a splash, an anticlimactic plop, then it’s gone.
James watches the spot where it vanished until the wind dries his salty lips and a white boat appears on the horizon, breaking his stare.
Nelle tugs his sleeve. “How do you feel?”
He inhales the sharp brine. A hundred pounds slide off his shoulders. He feels, for the first time in years, weightless. Birdlike.
He exhales and spreads his arms. “I feel fucking great.”
Nelle and James roam the pastel streets of Charleston until morning breaks into afternoon and they have to seek refuge from the boiling heat inside an ice cream shop. The AC hums, and the green and white tile clicks under their shoes. The place is lined with vinyl booths and smells like sugar. Nelle orders strawberry, James orders salted caramel, and they take their cones to a tree-filled park overlooking the harbor.
“Father used to tell me horror stories about cavities.” The pink ice cream coating Nelle’s tongue satisfies more than her sugar craving. Father tried to keep her healthy and pure, yet he punished her with violence.Vengeance, she thinks,is best served in a waffle cone.“Keeping me from this was his worst crime.” A dribble of melted ice cream falls from her cone to the cobbles underfoot. “One time he caught me eating a peppermint and told me that my teeth would rot and crumble out of my mouth. I had nightmares for years. Look at me now, Father!”
She thrusts her ice cream to the sky like a middle finger.
“Why do you call him that?” James crunches the last bite of his cone.
Nelle shrugs. “Habit. When I call him Quill, it feels like I’m talking about someone else. A stranger.”
Clouds pass overhead, graying out the park. Talking about Father makes even the sun want to hide.
“But he was no stranger to me. He showed me at a very young age just how violent a man he could be. ButFather, well, that’s just what I’ve always called him.”
“It’s too endearing a term for someone so horrible.” James rolls up his sleeves, revealing the pre-notepad scribbles he has yet to scrub off.
Nelle leans against a metal railing and breathes in the harbor. As a kid, she wondered if the ocean had a scent. Now she knows; it is warm and sour, fish and sulfur.
“Does it bother you that you have to write for me all the time?” she asks, not sure where the question comes from, only that it has built momentum since they left Lincoln. Behind them, a little boy in the park opens his hand and lets his red balloon float up in the tree branches. It gets caught among the leaves, but it doesn’t pop. Nelle is careful not to look at James, not until he answers.
“No,” he says. “Of course not.”
She isn’t sure she believes him.
After lunch at an Italian restaurant, they pass a gift shop where Nelle stops and shields her face against the window. Beyond a rack of Charleston T-shirts and shelves of historic local books sits a display of leather-bound journals and a set of fountain pens, the old-fashioned sort with refillable ink barrels.
“Can I borrow a twenty?”
James digs out his wallet and hands over the money, no questions asked.
She almost reminds him that she needs his permission to enter the shop, but he is already unscrewing the vial at his neck, dabbing his fingertip against the ink, and smudging a message in the legal pad.
Once the ink is set, Nelle ducks into the store and dives for the journals.
Immediately, one stands out. Black and not too tall, and when she holds it, the pages fall open in her hands like the spine has been broken for years. She tucks it under her arm, along with one of the pens, and takes them both to the counter. After she pays, her legs carry her outside like they know where they’re going, paper gift bag swinging in her hand, and she finds James leaning against a lamppost, a 1930s movie star with his sharp chin dimple, sleeves rolled back to his elbows, ankles crossed, brown hair curling behind his ears.
