And I do.
“Thanks,” I tell Kendall. “Seriously.”
“No problem.”
I hand the phone back to Seth, then call my brother.
Davy’s on his way home, planning on eating dinner with Dad. I tell him I’m staying over at Kendall’s but that I don’t want Dad to know, so I ask him to do the pillows-under-the-covers thing. Dad leaves for work before I wake up most mornings, so I think it’ll work. I hope. Davy agrees and doesn’t even ask any questions, which is weird, but at least that’s taken care of.
“All settled?” Seth asks when I hang up the phone. I nod. “There’s an Airbnb ten minutes away.”
“Great.” I look at the mechanic. “Sir, is there a Target or something around here?”
“Or a deli?” Seth asks.
“Walmart five minutes that way,” the man says. “Food’s in the town center, though, and you can’t get there without a car.”
“We’ll figure it out.” I pull on Seth’s arm. No way am I spending a whole night with him—again—without a toothbrush. “Let’s go.”
—
Half an hour, two toothbrushes, and two sets of cheap clothes later—it’s surreal, wandering the fluorescent-bulbed aisles of a Walmart, picking up a three-pack of cotton underwear with Seth by my side—we’re in the parking lot, Seth once again on his phone. “The Airbnb lady can come pick us up. And we can stop at a deli she knows.”
Twenty minutes later, Tess, a thirty-something blond white lady who isn’t at all fazed by needing to pick two teenagers up at a Walmart on a Tuesday night, arrives. She takes us to get sandwiches, then drives us back to our Airbnb, a three-story house on a quiet suburban block. It’s bigger than my house but nowhere near the size of the Montgomery mansion, old-fashioned and cute, hedges out front, a fireplace and built-in bookshelves inside, pictures of Tess and someone I assume is her wife on the walls. The guest suite is on the third floor, she explains, bedroom, bathroom, amenities provided, feel free to help yourselves to whatever you need.
It’s only eight when we’re done eating our sandwiches, but I’m exhausted and just slightly alarmed at the fact Tess said bedroom, not bedrooms. After cleaning up after ourselves, we ascend two sets of stairs, me in the lead. There’s a hallway that leads to a small bedroom with slanted ceilings and a window unit air conditioner humming away in the corner.
“Seth,” I say.
He comes up behind me. “What?”
“There’s only one bed.”
“Is there?”
But there’s no surprise in his voice.
I glare. “What were you—”
He sighs. “We’re not exactly in a metropolis. It was the only room nearby that didn’t look sketchy. I didn’t think it was that big a deal.”
“Hope you like sleeping in the bathtub.”
“There is no bathtub—”
“Enjoy the hardwood floor, then.” I stomp—quietly—out of the room and down to the tiny bathroom, where I find that he’s right: no bathtub, just a small stall shower.
I shower quickly, change into my Walmart underwear and PJs—cheap shorts and a black T-shirt—and brush my teeth, my mind going the whole time. The bed in that room isn’t a twin, at least, but it doesn’t look that big. Probably not even a queen. Maybe we could take the comforter off and make some kind of makeshift bed on the floor.
When I come back to the room, Seth’s changed into his own Walmart PJs: mesh shorts and a white T-shirt. He’s looking at a framed photograph on the wall. He turns, takes in my damp hair, bare feet. It feels weird and intimate, being in this little room together at the top of a stranger’s house in the middle of Pennsylvania, going through my bedtime routine with him here.
“Have you ever been to Ireland?” he asks.
I blink. “I’ve never been anywhere.”
He nods at the photograph. I come stand beside him. It’s of a curving gray wall, some kind of ruins, set on a cliff over the ocean. The inscription on the bottom reads: Dún Aonghasa, Inishmore, County Galway, Ireland.
“There’s this little group of islands off the west coast of Ireland called the Aran Islands.” Seth’s voice is low, quiet, soothing. “They’re covered in stuff like this. This one’s an ancient fort, built in 1100 BC, but there are also castle remains, old cottages and churches, and this amazing thing they call the Wormhole.”
He points across the room to another framed photo of what looks like a rectangular swimming pool cut into gray rock, a spray of salt water rising out of it.
“How’d they cut it into the rock so perfectly?” I want to know.
He shakes his head. “They didn’t. It’s naturally like that. Isn’t it cool?”
But instead of looking at the photo, I’m looking at him. His brown eyes are lit up, a lock of hair falling over that new scar above his eyebrow. He has this soft smile on his face that sends a shiver through me. Then I realize why: It’s the same look he had on his face when he was about to kiss me.
I push that thought aside. “Cool,” I echo. I grasp at Fiona’s necklace.
“Thatcher did a genealogy project once and traced one of our great-great-something-grandfathers to this island.” His voice is quiet. “We were supposed to go there together someday.”
There’s an ache in his voice that breaks my heart. Because I know it so well. You build this whole future with someone, and even when things aren’t perfect between you, you think you still have time to fix it. To do the things you always wanted to do. You keep your plans safe inside your heart, hold on to them when things get hard.
But then that person dies. And that pretty future inside of you, that dies, too. And you learn that nothing is safe, nothing is guaranteed, there’s nothing to stop everyone you love from leaving you, in one way or another, nothing to stop everything you want from just withering away. That it’s very possible you’ll end up alone.
I’m searching for the words to say to Seth and coming up empty when he clears his throat. “I’ll sleep on the floor.” He gestures down, and I see the pillow and comforter already there. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I’m sorry.”
It’s strange, hearing him apologize. I remember the time we jumped the wall to the Bier property on one of our treasure hunts. We must’ve been about eight. We’d started digging around the ancient oak tree, like we always did. Seth and I were bickering about getting in each other’s way, and at the end he finally got fed up and pushed me into our hole. It was deep enough at that point that it was a real fall. At the bottom, I twisted my ankle, and it took all of us to get me back out. He refused to apologize, even when Thatcher tried to make him.