He didn’t say anything at first. I swiped through playlists for a long time. I didn’t have anything right. I’d never wanted romantic songs before. “You,” he said. I turned to him, confused. “I want to hear what you think about everything.”
We lay back on the sand and I told him about how I used to want to be a professional singer, but that I’d always had a horrible singing voice, and I described my grandmother, my mom’s mom, who traveled all over the world and how I didn’t understand how my mom had stayed put for so long. I asked him if he remembered the day we walked home from the barn and he’d said he could tell I was upset and that he’d listen when I was ready to talk. He remembered. I explained about Ina and my dad and my mom leaving, but that Viv refused to believe it was because she’d found out. Her mom and dad weren’t fighting.
There were grains of sand caught in his eyebrows. When I rubbed my lips together I felt grit on them, too. The stormy sky cracked open, fragments of clouds blew away, and sun seeped everywhere. It turned Harry’s irises amber. I sat up to shrug off my hoodie and looked back at Harry. Arms folded behind his head, a hollow under his chin that my thumb would fit in, his eyes downcast and watching me through fans of brown lashes.
I focused on his lips. I was pretty sure he wanted to kiss me, too.
It felt like we were stealing the last bit of the year’s sunshine. Like we were existing as our own little planet, in a tropical solar system Harry invented. And weren’t we, a little? We’d invented a secret order and rebellions and history. Were there any stars we couldn’t touch?
I knelt over him. He was fighting a smile as I bent to touch my lips to his. He tasted like sand and salt wind. A seagull screeched across the sky. “Isadora,” he whispered. My grown-up, sophisticated name. I kissed him again. No longer self-conscious about my weight on top of him or my breasts pressed to his ribs or my knees on either side of his hips.
It was later, almost five o’clock, and we’d ignored the chirping of both our phones two or three times, when we were brushing the sand off each other. His hands racing down my jeans was almost as exciting as our mouths linked. The sea had calmed as it darkened. Harry took my hand and we started up the gentle slope of dunes.
As we walked over a red IV and two grooves in the asphalt where one of the curfew signs had been in the parking lot, Harry asked, “Are you afraid for tomorrow night?”
I squeezed his fingers. “No way. We’re pros by now.”
“We could get busted. It’s been all trespassing and vandalism so far. The train car, the fire, the gazebo—I don’t know what they’ll call it, but it’s serious. Unlawful destruction, maybe.”
I rocked my shoulder into his. “How is unlawful destruction different from lawful destruction?” Fear didn’t exist in that moment. The swelling thing in my gut had deflated. Harry was someone I’d never had before. I was used to having three best friends. But Harry, he was a one and only.
“Still not afraid,” I said. “You?”
“I should be, because—consequences.” He emphasized that one word and I knew all he meant by it. Each of us had plans that would be messed up by getting into trouble with the police and school. It seemed so far beyond worth-the-risk that the consequences became dull annoyances, flies to swat at or ignore.
He stopped and faced me. Light shone from his eyes—the sky was gray again and I was convinced that the sun had come from him. “Are we—going out? Dating? Hanging out? What do you call it?”
“According to Viv, people mostly say going out. We should call it whatever we want, though. I’ve never had a boyfriend,” I added, unnecessarily since surely Harry knew. “Why didn’t we hang out with your last girlfriend?”
“Because.” He swayed his head side to side. “Because, you.”
“Me. That was like a year ago.”
He looked to the sky, counting. “Ten months.”
“You liked me ten months ago?”
“I loved you ten months ago.”
“Oh,” I said, and shrugged. “I’ve loved you since I met you. All three of you.”
Harry laughed. I didn’t understand why. “C’mon,” he said. “I want to buy my girlfriend a pizza before the barn.”
? ? ?
Graham laid his map out on the table. His finger traced a double line he said represented the railroad tracks. The map included the knoll and the foothills that ran from behind the stores on its east side. They rambled slowly to the Ghost Tunnel, before shooting up in altitude, forming a ridge as good as a wall around our town. The gazebo was indicated with a red circle. A rectangle with wheels marked where the town’s railway station used to be, where the knoll was now.
“I checked the railway car and you were right, Har,” Graham said. “The air compression brakes aren’t on.”
“The air used to control them comes from the locomotive,” Harry said to Viv and me. He added, “That’s the way train brakes have worked since the 1800s, according to the Internet.”
“The tracks follow this course.” Graham indicated the double line. “It runs a mile downslope and a mile of flat ground before it hits the knoll.”
“If it’s moving too fast, it could derail. Go off the tracks,” Harry warned.
“The area’s deserted. No houses,” Graham said, zigzagging his finger over the blank space he meant.
“Does it cross the road?” I asked.
“A couple times—but that late at night, no one’s going to be driving on a road that only goes to a lookout point,” Graham said.
Viv pursed her lips at him. “Night is when people visit lookout points, Graham Cracker.”
“At four a.m.?”
“People have been known to make out even at four a.m.,” she said, toeing my foot under the table. I looked up from the pen I’d been using on my fingers. On the inside of each knuckle I’d written a letter, all ten spelling “Goldilocks.”
She considered me with grave eyes as Graham wrung the back of his neck and said, “If we wait any later, people could be awake, commuting to work.”
Harry had his elbows on the map, studying it. “You said it’s a mile of flat ground leading to the knoll where the tracks stop?”
“I tried to calculate speed but the grade of the hill is different in so many spots and it grew too complicated to solve,” Graham said.
“Physics,” I muttered, trying to poke my recollection. “There’s a formula for finding the velocity of an object on an inclined plane. But we’d need its rate of acceleration and something else. Forget it, I think a mile’s plenty of space.”
“So four a.m. in the Ghost Tunnel. We hit the gazebo on the knoll at, what, three thirty?” Viv said. “Cover it in blood.” She wriggled her fingers in my direction and cackled like a witch.
She was being silly. Involved in planning. But our plan as it was left me racking my brain for more. “I want to frighten them,” I said, my fist smacking the table and jolting their water glasses. Harry slid back into his seat and regarded me with concern.