TOMMY’S SKIN IS HOT. HE is a heat-generating star. His radiation accumulates in my cells, breaking them down, breaking me down, twisting my DNA into tight double-helix knots. His umber skin contrasts against my pale Florida-sun-defying complexion. Our bodies form a T—Tommy’s head on my stomach—our faces turned toward the sky.
“You ever think the moon might want to kill us, Oz?” Tommy’s voice rumbles in his chest, deep as the Mariana Trench, more buttery than my mom’s chocolate chip cookies.
“Uh . . . no?”
He glances at me, the whites of his eyes wide. “Come on. Look at that shifty rock. Are you really trying to tell me she’s not scheming ways to bump us off?”
I wiggle left, away from the shell digging into my spine. Sweat pools on my stomach under Tommy’s radiator skull. “I’m pretty sure the moon isn’t plotting genocide. Because it’s a rock.”
“Nah,” Tommy says. “She’s biding her time, waiting for the perfect opportunity to knock Earth from orbit and take her rightful place around the sun.”
“You’re so weird.”
“That’s why you love me.”
A wave splashes over my toes, washing them with the salty aroma of fish and seaweed. We should think about heading home, but it’s already so far past my curfew that a few more minutes won’t save me from my parents’ sensible lecture about staying out too late. Tommy’s curfew changes depending on his father’s state of drunkenness, and failure to return home by Mr. Ross’s whimsical and unknowable deadline could earn Tommy a shiner or worse.
Tommy’s father is an asshole.
“You still taking the PSATs Saturday?” Tommy asks.
“Unfortunately.”
“Your mom driving you?” I nod. “Can I catch a ride?”
“No way. Take the bus, scrub.” I laugh and rub my hand along Tommy’s bare chest, tracing his dense muscles, pretending I don’t notice him flexing. “We’ll swing by around seven.” I twist my neck to glance at Tommy, but he’s still staring at the moon. “What changed your mind?”
Tommy shrugs. “Pop wants me to work at the garage with him over the summer. He said it’s time for me to learn a trade.”
“You? A mechanic?” Tommy could recite the names of every US president, explain the differences between parthenogenetic and apomictic asexual reproduction, and whip out an expert essay on the troubling racism present in the works of H. P. Lovecraft in an hour, but his impressive stockpile of knowledge doesn’t include how to repair combustion engines.
“Right?” Tommy says. “I don’t know dick about cars.”
“You definitely know more about dick than cars.”
“Never heard you complain.”
I grope for Tommy’s hand in the dark and lace our fingers together. His hands and feet are always cold. Like his heart and brain hoard his body’s warmth, leaving his extremities to freeze.
“You think taking the PSATs will keep you from having to work with your dad?”
“No, but I have to do something,” Tommy says. “Sometimes I feel like I’m floating alone in the ocean. Other times I feel like the ocean’s in a paper cup.” He squeezes my hand. “I refuse to end up like my folks. But what if Cloud Lake’s all there is? What if this is it?”
“Would that be so terrible?”
“Not if we’re together, but I’d rather start our lives somewhere else.”
“Where?”
Tommy stretches. He sighs. “Anywhere, Ozzie. Anywhere is better than here.”
14,380,000,000 LY
I JERKED AWAKE, CONFUSED AND disoriented. I’d fallen asleep sitting at my desk, and my stiff neck protested when I turned it. My laptop’s screensaver shone the only light in my room—the rainbow swirls bouncing from one edge of the screen to another, morphing and changing colors as they sought to escape.
I stretched, rubbed the crusty sleep from my eyes. I checked the time on my phone. 1:43 a.m.
I’d been writing down my memories of Tommy, trying to recapture the history we’d lost. I’d always kept a journal, but when Tommy disappeared, the entries had all changed, and I was determined to record everything I remembered so I’d never forget. It was more difficult than I thought it would be. I hadn’t safeguarded my memories of Tommy, because I figured we’d always be together making new ones.
My parents hadn’t woken me. Since the oh-God-what-are-you-doing?-Why-didn’t-I-knock? incident, my mom rarely entered my bedroom anymore. I think the mess also bothered her. But there’s a difference between messy and dirty. Dirty implies used plates under the bed and layers of dust on the furniture and crumbs of past meals embedded in the carpet. All of which described Renny’s room, not mine. My room was merely a bit disorganized. Stacks of library books teetered on the edges of my desk, clothes waiting to be folded sat in a lump on the foot of my bed, notebooks and journals and more books stood atop my nightstand and TV and on the floor.
Neatness is the trademark of a boring mind.
I woke my computer and called up the folders containing my where-did-Tommy-go? sites. Links to information about the places Tommy and I had dreamed of visiting. Countries and cities we’d spent hours discussing in hushed voices, planning for the day we could leave Cloud Lake and disappear into the anonymous crowds.
Each folder had a different name. “Maybe” for places Tommy had mentioned. “In the realm of possibility” for vague areas he’d thought had sounded interesting—Meyrin, Switzerland, for example, because he wanted to tour CERN. “Likely candidates” for locations Tommy had spoken of often, which included Boulder, Colorado; Savannah, Georgia; and the Grand Canyon.
Each of the folders contained countless bookmarked sites I’d culled over long, sleepless nights, but the most important folder—named “Tommy’s Favorites”—held only two links. One for each of the two locations Tommy had spoken of most frequently. The first was Larung Valley, located in Sertar County of Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in China—a makeshift city consisting of thousands of tiny wood houses, home to forty thousand Buddhist monks, and one of the largest Buddhist institutes in the world. The second was Seattle.
Tommy could have run away to China, but it was far easier for an unaccompanied teenager to book a domestic flight than an international one.