“I don’t know. I guess like, the way you felt about, well, me. I’ve always wanted that, but it just never…” I shrug. “It never felt like something that was going to happen for me.”
“This issoweird.” Nora flops backward on the blanket, looking up at the sky. “You’ve said that to me before, almost word for word.”
Finally, I see a hint of a smile pulling at the corners of her lips.
“Well, at least I’m consistent. What else?” I ask, before I can say what else I’m thinking. That I was also jealous watchinghertalk about her feelings for someone like that, because deep down, even if I couldn’t admit it then, I wanted her to be talking about me. I slide the box over to her as she rolls onto her side and props herself up on her elbow.
“Okay, umm.” She digs around inside until she comes up with a handful of Polaroids, some of which I still haven’t seen. “We decided in the beginning to only take photos of each other this way, so no one could accidentally see them on our phones or something.” I expect her to hand them to me, but instead she starts flipping through them. “I actually haven’t seen some of these for a long time.”
I watch a smile spread across her face, wider and wider with each one. She snorts out a laugh, holding one out for me. “This is one of my favorites.”
I squint at it. It’s definitely a photo taken here, the crick filling up most of the frame. But other than a whitish blur hovering over the water in the middle ground, there’s nothing particularly significant about it. “What is this?”
“You don’t recognize yourself?” Nora laughs again, waiting for me to figure it out.
I look again, and—oh my God. I can just make out my long brown hair billowing out behind the blur that is me, mixing with the tree trunks. But wait… I quickly hold the photo against my chest, my jaw dropping open as I meet Nora’s eyes.
“Am I…” I lower my voice. “Am Iskinny-dipping?”
“Yeah, are you scandalized?” she asks, teasing. Flirty.
I grin, my eyes wide. “Kinda! I’ve never doneanythinglike that before.”
“That was your idea too,” she tells me without looking up from her stack of photos.
“Bullshit.”
“You’re right. It was mine,” she replies, and I Frisbee the photo back at her. She bats it down onto the quilt, laughing.
We spend the next little while passing photos back and forth, Nora telling me about each one. It’s so odd, almost unsettling to be looking at all of these memories I feel like I wasn’t there for, but if there’s one thing I’m sure of… it’s that I look happy.
“We really had some fun out here, huh?” I ask as she hands over a selfie of me clinging to her back, our smiles blown out by the flash.
“We did,” she replies, dropping the stack of photographs back into the box.
“I wish I could remember it all.”
“Me too.”
“But… I’m glad we’re here now,” I add, meeting her gaze. “Together.”
“You are?” she asks, her eyes slightly crinkling at the corners, still cautious.
“I am.”
With that, her eyes trace mine in a way that makes my heart race.
She pulls out a couple more things. A novel whose cover features a girl lying on a bale of hay that we supposedly both like a lot, and a winning lottery ticket that we found in a parking lot and never cashed.
“Wait, why didn’t we turn it in and get the seventeen dollars?” I ask, inspecting the three matching fried eggs lined up in a row on the grid.
“We decided to wait and do it right before we, uh…” My eyes flick up from the lottery ticket to find her looking at me, uncertain again. “Before we left.”
I take a deep breath and pull my knees tight into my chest.
“What was I going to tell my parents? My mom?” I ask, a little scared to hear the answer.
“You weren’t going to tell them anything,” she replies.
