No boy should look like him, no boy should say the things he does, and somehow sit only a few feet away and not lose his mind to the obsession that plagues others. He looks at me with somethingelse… something simple, instinctual, a wandering faraway shiver. A thing I haven’t deciphered yet. But God, I want to figure him out.
“Why does everyone call you Oak?” I ask.
His eyes flicker, a memory rising behind the green. “When I was young… my mom used to call me her ‘little acorn.’?” He smirks, looking the tiniest bit embarrassed. “But she said that I had the bones of an oak tree inside me and that someday, when I grew up, I’d be sturdy, even against the strongest storms. That I could never be ripped from the soil or upended.”
“I like her,” I say, trying to imagine a mom who would say such things and mean them.
“Me too.” He glances out at the wide, slow stretch of water where the boat drifts for a moment, and he relaxes his arms, ripples feathering away from the bow. “She died when I was ten. She was sick for a long time.” His jaw tenses, eyes steady. “She fought it… until she couldn’t anymore.”
Without thinking, I lean forward on the seat, closer to him: I want to touch him, lay my hand on his, press my fingers against his jaw until it relaxes. But I only shake my head. “I’m so sorry.” I wish I had something more useful to say, and when he looks back at me, wetness rims his eyes before he blinks it away.
I sense that he’s told me more than he’s used to. These are memories he doesn’t often let rise to the surface.
I sink back against the boat, the light of day fading around us, the sun inching below the tree line, and I wonder whether it’s more painful to lose a parent to death or betrayal. Ishishurt worse than mine? My mother is still alive, but she chose a life that doesn’t include us. Include me.
Dad left too, but it wasn’t his fault. It was the tulips’.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Pain is pain. It digs deep no matter the method, the weapon. We both carry around wounds inside us, cut into the place where our heart used to be.
The river widens even more, becomes lazy and fattened, nearly as still as the pond where we swam, but Oak steers the boat to the shore and drags it halfway up onto the grass.
“Where are we?” I blink through the golden light of the setting sun, to a grassy hillside.
“Follow me.”
I let my hand find his again, stepping free of the boat, but this time he doesn’t release it. He squeezes his palm to mine, and he might as well have my heart in his fist—clenching tight, threatening to destroy me.
The sun is now gone from the sky, the air turned dark and warm, and we walk through the tall grass, up a gently sloping hill to where a row of trees grows toward the night sky.
At the line of birch trees, the land opens up, a meadow of wildflowers stretching out into the distance—soft and swaying in the moonlight. Yet it’s not the wildflowers that stall the breath in my throat, it’s the thousands—maybemillions—of winged insects fluttering through the night air.
Fireflies.
Tiny little orbs of light pulse golden and rhythmic among the dark, so many that it feels like candles set adrift in the air—an otherworldly sight.
I laugh, and the sound echoes through the trees, before I claspa hand to my mouth. “What are they all doing here?” I ask, turning my eyes to Oak.
“I don’t know. They shouldn’t be here, in this part of the world. It doesn’t make sense. But they come to this meadow every spring. My mom showed me this place when I was little.”
I realize how special this meadow must be to him. I showed him my secret places—the abandoned train car, the farmhouse and the pond—and now he’s showing me his.
“She used to tell me that there are all kinds of magic in this world. But not all of it has an origin. Or a reason. It just exists.”
This place—fireflies humming all around us—feels like the most genuine kind of magic, a summoning of tiny winged creatures that should be witnessed only by kings and queens, a rarely performed ritual that bestows lasting luck on those who glimpse it before it’s gone.
“It’s beautiful,” I hear myself say.
Oak squeezes my hand and pulls me out into the meadow, into the thumping, pulsing heart of the fireflies. Their wings sound like bits of paper rubbing together, and they look like confetti hovering in the airless sky, a kaleidoscope of dancing light. I laugh again, grinning, and I release Oak’s hand to turn in a circle, feeling heady and buoyant, the fireflies amassing around us.
But when I tip my face back to Oak, I realize that he’s watching me—his face soft and silent, like nighttime, like a thousand thoughts are trapped inside him but he’s afraid to say any of them aloud. Half a dozen lightning bugs have landed on his shoulders, their incandescent lights pulsing slowly—like heartbeats. I reach out, and one ofthe insects lifts from his shirt, then lands on my index finger. I smile, holding it in the air between us, a beacon, a lighthouse, the rhythm of the light hypnotic.
“I feel like I’m in a dream,” I mutter.
He is silent, and it feels like I’m drifting farther from the waking world.
“If you’re the dreamer…,” he says, his mouth forming carefully over each vowel, “then please don’t wake up.”
Nothing feels real, his eyelashes, the lightning bugs pulsing around us like falling stars, the air in my lungs.
