“But if he proposed here, weren’t you going to say yes?”
I nod. “I think that I used to believe that love was supposed to feel like a lightning storm—superdramatic, with crashes and thunder and all the hair standing up on the back of your neck. I had boyfriends like that, in college. But Finn … ?he’s the opposite. He’s steady. Like … ?white noise.”
“He puts you to sleep?”
“No. He makes everything … ?easier.” Saying this, I feel a surge of love so fierce for Finn that my knees go weak.
“So he’s the first person you felt that way about?” Beatriz asks, probing.
She isn’t looking at me, but there’s a stripe of heat across her cheekbones, and I realize she isn’t really asking about me. If not for this pandemic, Beatriz would be at school and would likely be confiding in a friend her own age about her own crush.
Then I think of what she said about being flamed on social media. I remember that Gabriel told me Beatriz begged to come back to Isabela.
Suddenly she breaks into a jog, and stops at the edge of a yawning hole that seems to reach to the belly of the earth. It’s about sixty feet wide, with a ladder mounted at the lip, twined with several thick ropes. Ferns and moss grow on the walls, which narrow and narrow to a black hole further down. I peer into the abyss but it looks only dark and endless.
“People rappel to the bottom,” Beatriz says.
I feel the walls of the tunnel pressing on me, and I’m not even inside it. “I am not rappelling to the bottom.”
“Well, you can climb partway,” she says. “Come on.”
She scrambles down the slippery wooden rungs, wrapping the ropes around her arm as a safety measure. I follow her more cautiously. The tunnel narrows around us. The vegetation smells ripe and lush as I concentrate on stepping firmly with my foot down, down, down.
When Beatriz descends into the neck of the tunnel, I lose sight of her. “Beatriz!” I call, and her voice floats up to me.
“Come on, Diana, it’s magic.”
The further down we go, the hotter it gets, as if the tunnel is tapering toward hell itself. There is no more vegetation, just lava rock that is light and porous, and that shimmers in the faint light from above. I keep moving methodically and nearly scream when I feel Beatriz’s hand close over my ankle. “Three more rungs,” she says, “and then the ladder runs out.”
She shifts so that we are clinging to the same bottom rungs, side by side. “Look up,” Beatriz says.
I do, and the sky is a tiny pinprick of hope. When I glance back down and breathe in, it feels like the air from someone else’s mouth. I can’t see at first in the dim muscle of the tunnel, and then all of a sudden I can—just the shine of Beatriz’s pupils. It feels like we’re sharing a heartbeat.
“Remind me why we’re here,” I whisper.
“We’re in the belly of a volcano,” she says. “We could hide here forever.”
For a few moments, I listen to the moan of wind from what must be a hundred feet above. Something wet drips onto my forehead. It is terrifying being here, yes, but it is also almost holy. It’s like crawling back in time. Like preparing to be reborn.
It feels like the place to confide a secret.
“Truth or dare,” I whisper, and I hold my breath, waiting.
“Truth,” Beatriz says.
“Your father told me you wanted to come back here, but you don’t want to be here.”
“What’s your question?”
I don’t answer.
She sighs. “Neither of those,” Beatriz says, “is untrue.”
I wait for her to elaborate in this cocoon of darkness, but instead, she turns the game on me. “Truth or dare,” she says.
“Truth.”
“If you could change your mind three weeks ago and take the ferry home, would you?”
“I don’t know,” I hear myself answer, and it physically hurts to say it out loud, in the way that truth can sometimes be a knife.
The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve told myself that being stuck on Isabela was a mistake. But there is also a small, new part of me that wonders if it was meant to be. If I’m delayed because the universe decided Beatriz needed someone to depend on; if I had to distance myself from Finn to see our relationship more clearly—its strengths, and its flaws.
Unconditional love is bullshit. “Truth or dare. Is there someone at school you wish you could be with?”
I have wondered if, when I eventually leave, Beatriz will go back to Santa Cruz, back to her host family and, maybe, this crush. If that would stop the cutting. Would make her happy.
“Yes.” The syllable is no more than a breath. “But she doesn’t want to be with me.”
She.
I hear the quiet hitch of Beatriz’s breath. She’s crying, and I’m pretending not to notice, which I suspect is what she wants.