Twenty-one
We eventually emerged from the forest into a field where frogs croaked in harmony with a chorus of crickets. Even a few fireflies, stragglers from the early summer, rose from the grasses, twinkling to disappear among the stars. A waning moon shed an almost ethereal white light on the rubble of some ancient foundation.
Ian and I scaled the stones and arrived at the edge of a large, still pond reflecting the night sky. Rimmed by a sandy beach and protected by scrub pines, it was so pristine and untouched that I went, “Whoa!” a tad too loudly, causing the frogs to quit croaking and hop into the pond with a plop, plop.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Ian asked, smiling in the moonlight.
“We don’t have anything like this back in Bridgewater. Can you swim in it?” I’d heard lakes in the Pinelands were gross and swampy.
“Oh, yeah. It’s fed by a spring, and the bottom as far as I can tell is almost all sand.” He dropped his backpack onto the rocks, crossed his arms over his head, and pulled off his T-shirt. I tried not to look, but he was a Prince Charming, after all, and let’s just say he met the minimum requirements.
Ian stood at the edge of the rubble, hands on hips. “It’s a dammed-up stream left from when there used to be a gristmill here, so it’s pretty shallow.” He put his arms out and dove in like a racer, skimming the surface.
I hadn’t brought a swimsuit, of course, so I sat on the rocks hugging my knees and feeling awkward.
Ian’s head popped out in the middle of the pond. “Come on in!”
“I don’t have a suit.”
“So what? I don’t care. Do you?”
Um, yeah. “I think I’ll pass.” Anyway, my toes were already curling at the prospect of frogs or fish below. I was a Jersey girl. We didn’t do ponds and fresh water. We did cement and chlorine.
“Don’t be a wimp, Kiefer. Come on in. I know you wanna.”
That was true, too, though mostly because I didn’t want Ian thinking I was such a prude that I was afraid to get my tank top wet. Without a passing thought as to whether this violated the Fairyland morality clause, I stepped out of my sneakers and shorts, shrugged off my shirt, and, wearing just my tank and underwear, ran off the rocks before I could chicken out.
Ian was right. The water felt wonderfully cool and smooth after the sticky-hot hike, and I was able to graze the sandy bottom before I surfaced, careful to keep my legs moving lest there be sea monsters.
“Isn’t it awesome?” Ian swam next to me and shook off the water. I didn’t know if he was going to be one of those guys who liked to torture girls by pulling them under and pushing them down, so I was relieved when he left me alone to float on his back and look at the stars.
“How’d you find this place?” I asked, doing the same. I’d never seen so many stars in my life. It had to be because there wasn’t any ambient light from a city or the interstate.
“Saw it on a map before I got here and decided to check it out. That’s the major reason why I agreed to do this internship, because of the Pinelands. Do you know there are actually carnivorous plants around here?”
My toes did that curling thing again. “In the water?”
“Not to my knowledge or information.” He laughed. “My dad’s a lawyer, and that’s how he answers every question, no matter how small. ‘Not to my knowledge or information.’”
I had the feeling Ian was a big fan of his dad and of Colorado, where they used to live and hike every weekend. As we floated around, he told me how his parents separated a few years before and he had to leave his beloved mountains for Dallas so his mother could take a new job. He hadn’t exactly been thrilled by the relocation.
“Everything’s so artificial in Dallas. We live in a gated community where the grass is chemical green, the pools are chemical blue. For fun, everyone goes to the mall or drives around in big air-conditioned cars, sits in air-conditioned theaters. I miss woods like this. I miss being able to walk out my door and be surrounded by nothing but wilderness.”
It seemed like a funny observation from a guy who was interning at a totally artificial fairy-tale theme park.
Our feet touched, and Ian ran his foot along my ankle. I didn’t pull away.
“I’d had a job lined up at an outdoor gear store in Telluride, but . . . my dad’s new wife didn’t think that would work.”
Ouch! My heart twinged in sympathy. “And Dallas?”
“If I’d stayed in Dallas, Mom would have made me work all summer.”
“Work never killed anyone, as my dad likes to say.”
Ian paused. “As a model.”
Oh.
Actually this didn’t come as that big of a shock. I’d heard rumors that some of the cast members had worked as models, Ian included.
“So you really are a Hollister dude, huh?” I asked.
“It’s mega embarrassing. My mother got me into it after the divorce because she said we were broke and I needed the money for college. Between you and me, I think she loves the whole scene, the agents, the photographers, the cash. She’d have me quit school and do it full-time if she could get away with it.”
“And if you didn’t want to be a naturalist . . .”
He stopped floating and looked at me. “How very perceptive of you, Kiefer. As a matter of fact, that is kind of what I’m interested in, and I’ve been thinking a lot about Yale’s forestry school.” He went back to swimming. “How about you? What do you want to do?”
I lay in the water staring up at the stars thinking how, unlike Fairyland, they had been here long before I was born and would be here long after. That filled me with a comforting peace, as if the universe had just given me permission to simply enjoy being alive here in the pond with Ian under the vast night sky, instead of constantly worrying about the Dream & Do grant and Jess and whether I was in trouble.
I said, “I don’t ever want to leave.”
“That,” he agreed, “is an excellent idea.”
After we got out of the water and I wrapped myself in Ian’s towel, we sat on the rocks and ate apples Ian had brought and chatted about Fairyland and what it was like to work for the Queen and who was most likely to win the twenty-five thousand dollars. (We always came back to Dash and Valerie.) When I felt my tank top was as dry as it was going to get, I got back into my shorts and threw on my shirt.
Except I’d grabbed Ian’s by accident.
“This is the one you ripped on the thorns,” I said, fingering the flannel. “Dash said it was his.”
“He did, did he? How clever of him.” Ian took a last bite of his apple, stood, and chucked the core into the weeds. “Was this part of his plan to get you to confess to the Queen that you’d been in the FZ?”
“Yep. To be fair to Dash”—and it was not easy being fair to Dash—“it sounds like his parents are really pressuring him to bring home the grant. He told me that when his dad dropped him off at the airport, he mentioned all the money they’d spent on Fairyland camps that could have sent the family to Europe. Talk about guilt.”
Ian sat back down next to me so our thighs were touching. “If I’d ever said to Dad that I wanted to go to a Fairyland camp, he would have signed me up for the marines.”
I laughed. “I never thought of it that way, but you’re right. My dad has no clue, either.”
“It’s the mothers you’ve gotta watch out for. They’re the ones behind the scenes micromanaging every detail, making you think something they want you to do is really your idea.”
I kept silent as I always do when people start griping about their mothers.
Ian must have sensed that he’d overstepped some sort of boundary, because he added, “But I’m sure your mother’s nothing like that, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
More silence. I hugged my knees tightly. After a few minutes of this painful awkwardness, Ian asked softly, “Did I just say something wrong? I do that, you know. A. Lot.”
Oh, god. Exactly what I wanted to avoid. If I said, “I don’t want to talk about it,” I’d come off as rude. And yet, if I did relay the morose story about losing Mom, Ian would probably pull a move like my funeral-boyfriend, Derek James, and get as far and as fast away from me as possible.
This was the one vow Jess and I had made to each other: No one would know about her family’s “downturn in finances,” as the Swynkowskis put it, and no one would know about Mom. But if there was one lesson I’d learned during this summer, it was that some rules are worthwhile, and others need to be broken.
I said bluntly, “My mom’s gone.”
“Oh.” He pushed a stone with his foot. “I was afraid it was something like that. When did she leave?”
“She didn’t leave. I mean, not willingly.” I took a big, cleansing breath like Ari, my grief counselor, said I should in these situations. “She died. A year and a half ago, after being sick forever.”
Dammit! As I feared saying that out loud triggered the familiar dreaded reaction. My eyes suddenly burned. My nose tingled. I was going to cry, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“I miss her every day.” My voice choked.
Ian said, “Come here.” His arm slid around me, drawing me to him, and he gently pressed my head to his shoulder. We sat like that until my sobs subsided and I could be a normal human again.
“Sorry,” I said. “I try not to do that.”
“It’s your mom. I totally get it.”
We were silent again, so quiet that the frogs had enough confidence to start up. “I really like being here, Ian. With you.”
He didn’t say anything, and I was worried that I’d come across as too needy, what with the crying and then the sappy admission that I liked him. I started to wiggle away, but he only held me tighter.
“Would you think I was scum if I made a pass at you right now?” he asked.
I smiled to myself. “That depends. Do you want to kiss me because you just found out I’m a tragic figure? Or is this your thing, hitting on girls who’ve lost their mothers?”
“Zoe,” he said, with complete and utter seriousness, “I’m not gonna lie. I’ve wanted to kiss you every day since I saw you at orientation making an ass out of yourself with Dash.”
“It was Dash who—” But I didn’t get a chance to finish. He thumbed a few remaining tears off my cheeks and hesitated.
“You okay with this?”
“With what?” My pulse had started pounding so hard, it had drowned out every sound except for my beating heart.
“I know you’ve been through a tough time, and I don’t want to—”
Oh, please. I brought my hand to the back of his neck and pulled him down. At the touch of his lips on mine, I quivered, and—sensing this—he wrapped me in his arms to steady me.
We broke away, and he shook his head. “Wow. And I do not mean that in the Fairyland sense of the word.”
“I know, right?” I laughed.
“Let’s try that again just to make sure it was legit.” This time I let him make the first move. And this time we didn’t break away.
Somehow we got off the rocks and onto the beach, falling onto the sand, laughing. Next I knew he was on top of me, kissing me and stroking my hair and all I kept thinking was, He’s a Hollister model. How rad is that?
I wanted him to keep going, but he rolled off and rested on one elbow, just looking at me and grinning.
I said, “What?”
“I was just remembering you that first day, how self-righteous you were about everything. You were like some sort of ice princess.”
“I was so not an ice princess.” Valerie. She was an ice princess.
“Really? You jumped all over me for asking you a simple question. I thought you were going to bite off my head when I dared to question why you’re a vegan.”
I ran a finger up his arm, wishing maybe we could stop talking and go back to what we were doing. “So I scared you is what you’re saying.”
“You had me kind of alarmed, yeah.”
“Even with your posse of cannibalistic chickens?”
He leaned over and kissed me lightly. “Don’t dis the chickens.”
I kissed him back. “You know what? I just realized that this is one of the most perfectly happy nights I’ve ever had.”
“Not the happiest night you’ve ever had? I’m very goal-driven, so I need to know.”
I lay back and thought about perfect happiness as I took in the stars, the warmth of the beach, the sound of the frogs croaking in the soft air, and gorgeous Ian Davidson lying next to me, so near I could feel the heat off his body. “Almost. Not quite perfectly happy, but close.”
“Well, let’s see if we can improve on that.” And he kissed me again.