“They say the island is bigger than the city, but I don’t think it looks that big. Do you think it looks that big?” Rosie has been talking nonstop since we left the pier. I’m starting to think she might be afraid of water. She’s in a puffy orange life vest and clinging to the side of the boat. “I guess maybe it could be that big, but … Everyone says it’s haunted, but I don’t believe it.”
“Why?” Noah asks, teasing. He nudges her gently with his shoulder. “Don’t you believe in ghosts, Rosie?”
“Oh, no.” Rosie sounds serious. “Of course I believe in ghosts. I just don’t think they’d waste their time haunting an island where no one ever goes.”
“But if people didn’t think it was haunted then they might go there … and give ghosts a reason to haunt it,” Noah tries.
But Megan shakes her head. “No one goes there because it is three-point-six miles from shore; there are no docks and no bathrooms, not to mention no Wi-Fi, cell signals, or running water.”
Noah shrugs. “That too.”
“There are dragons.” I don’t realize I’ve said the words aloud until Rosie spins on me.
“Really?”
Her eyes are impossibly big and blue.
“No.”
At that, Rosie looks incredibly disappointed, but recovers quickly.
“So, Grace …” she starts slowly. “I was thinking that now that you’re feeling better, we should probably start —”
“No,” I say again, cutting her off.
“You don’t even know what I was going to say!”
I don’t need to hear what she has to say to know my answer. “Dominic is just a man with a scar, Rosie. The prime minister had a bad heart and Dominic didn’t kill my mom. He didn’t.”
The last words I say only for myself. I lean closer to the edge of the speedboat and let the mist hit me in my face. It makes me feel alive. Behind us, the lights of Valancia grow dimmer, and on the horizon the island looms larger.
A few minutes later Megan is pulling up among dozens of other boats that float not far from the island’s shore. She drops anchor just as Noah pulls a small inflatable lifeboat from somewhere and jerks a cord, causing the raft to burst to life, inflating in less than a minute. Before Megan can step down into it, though, Noah swings her off her feet.
“Allow me, my lady,” he says while easing her effortlessly over the side of the big boat and placing her gently into the raft. Megan laughs and hits him playfully on the arm.
“Noah!” She giggles. “Put me down, silly.”
I stand for a second, too stunned to speak. Then I look at Rosie. “Are they …”
Rosie shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine,” she says, then jumps into the little boat beside Megan.
A second later, Noah and I follow.
When we finally reach the island, I pull off my shoes and wade through the waves, heading toward the beach. The Mediterranean is cool as it laps against my ankles, and the shoreline is rocky beneath my bare feet. Someone has built a bonfire, and its flames lap up at an inky sky that, here, so far from the city, seems impossibly full of stars. There is music playing, a pounding bass that’s keeping beat like the lapping waves. And all around me, there are people.
Beautiful people.
Awkward people.
People who are so engrossed with the person beside them that I highly doubt they even remember where they are.
People who want to be anywhere but here.
But as Noah and Megan and Rosie and I walk into their midst, no one notices, no one stares. At the beginning of the summer I was an anomaly, a mystery. A new girl. There are even more reasons for people to stare at me now, but no one here seems to know them. I vow to do whatever it takes to keep it that way.
“I wonder if Alexei made it home okay.” There’s a wistfulness to Rosie’s voice. “It would be weird, don’t you think? Going home. I mean … this is home. Isn’t it?”
I have no home, I think, and then she looks at me.
“Have you talked to him?” she asks.
Even though there are probably fifty people on the beach, no one hears. We are anonymous, hidden by the island’s shadows and our peers’ complete lack of interest.
“No. Why?”
Rosie shakes her head. I think I see some meaning in her eyes, but I can’t decipher it. The beach is too dark, and I’m too bad at this — at having friends. So I just keep walking, following in Noah’s footsteps.
From a distance, the party looks the same. There’s a bonfire raging in the center of the beach. Big pieces of driftwood circle around it and a few people gather in clusters, sitting on the wood or scattered across blankets and a few boulders. The beach stretches from the water to the big trees and dense forest that no doubt dominates the center of the island, growing untamed and untouched by man.
It feels like Megan has brought us to the far side of the earth, some uncharted territory or unknown land — like maybe we are our own civilization, if only for tonight.
We curve around the beach and, for a moment, the mainland is blocked by rocks and trees, and it feels like we’ve gone back in time. There are no roads, no lights, no signs of the twenty-first century. We’ve come to a place where even teenagers look different. Our phones won’t work here. There is nothing but the music and the fire and the night.