Jess could see the tan lines from her bathing suit, white ghost straps, and she started to write letters between her shoulder blades with her finger.
“F,” Dani said, her voice muffled in the sleeping bag. “I. S. H. Fish. Come on. Make it worth my while. And why fish, you weirdo.” She laughed. “Do another one.”
Jess wrote grunion, and botany, and lozenge, and pristine. Dani guessed half of them, her voice sleepy.
“Now me,” Jess said. She turned over with her face in her pillow. Dani’s finger on her back felt like an eraser. “Not so hard,” she said. Dani eased up. She wrote fusion, and esoteric, and sunstroke, and Jess guessed all but the second. On the last, Jess, drowsy, couldn’t tell what the word was.
“Song?” she asked.
“Nope.” Dani moved her finger in the same place, over and over, until Jess got the chills.
Jess struggled to keep her eyes open. “Doll? I can’t tell.”
“ ‘Love,’ you simpleton,” Dani said. She sighed and lay down.
Jess laughed into the pillow. She rolled on her side and opened her eyes. Dani curled like a shrimp inside her bag, her glasses off, eyes closed. The sky yawned above them, too, and Jess closed her eyes against the shimmering, star-scarred blackness. She fell asleep hard and fast, the kind of sleep she could rarely find at night—heavy, dreamless—not waking until late the next morning, sweltering in the damp tent.
Then she and Dani climbed in the back seat for the drive home, propped up on sandy pillows, sunburned and sticky, the taste of salt on their lips. Jess took one last look out the window at the place where the desert met the sea. Next summer would be their last trip together before she went off to college. This, the penultimate. And never again with her father and mother together. This last thought snuck up on her. She blinked back the sting of tears.
Dani said, “Thank you, Maud. This trip completely made my summer. My life, really.”
“You’re very welcome.” Jess’s mom looked in the rearview, frowning when she noticed the tears.
Jess smiled, waving her off. “Completely. Best Mom prize for sure.” She plumped her pillow and leaned against the window, pressed her palm against the warm glass. Lulled by the sound of the engine, safe in her mother’s care and with her friend beside her, she slept again. She woke disoriented, staring at a strange stretch of road. She lifted her head and looked to the front of the car.
Her mom smiled at her in the rearview, reached back and patted her knee.
“Not too much farther,” she said. “Almost home.”
On the Fourth of July, Jess went with Dani and Paul to the fireworks at the ball field. A friend of Paul’s from the track team, Warren Smith, whom everyone called Smitty, joined them on the blanket they’d spread in right field. He sat next to Jess. As the evening progressed, he reached out and hooked two fingers around her right pinkie. Jess kept her eyes on the fireworks that streaked and flowered against the onyx sky. When she jumped at the booms of the duds, Smitty squeezed her pinkie. When they said good night, he kissed her on the mouth, a quick peck with firm, dry lips. She smiled, her heart warm. He was sweet. She couldn’t help but think of his first name: Warren. A rabbit’s den. A sweet rabbity kiss.
After, Jess stayed the night at Dani’s. They climbed into the twin beds and debriefed about Warren and his pinkie squeeze, and when her parents went to bed, Dani snuck out her bedroom window to meet Paul. Left alone, Jess tossed in the bed, unable to sleep. She went to the living room and sat on the sofa, peering at the familiar objects—books, picture frames, figurines—rendered strange by darkness. The stiff tweed cushions scratched her bare thighs. She couldn’t curl up here as she would on her sofa at home, cocooned in worn plaid twill, the shelf of green encyclopedias and Big Red in her line of sight.
She opened the sliding glass door that led onto the Newells’ redwood deck, where more than once she had sat in the wooden Adirondack chairs and eaten a sandwich or sipped a soda, her feet propped on the railing, her friend’s house fast becoming her second home. She plopped down now in one of the chairs before she realized someone else was there. Mr. Newell. He leaned against the railing, smoking a cigarette.
Startled, she pulled her nightshirt down her thighs and scrambled to get out of the low chair. “Sorry. I didn’t know anyone was out here.”
He said, “Stay. It’s fine. Don’t tell Dani I’m smoking, though. I quit. Is she asleep?”
“Yes,” Jess said, looking at her hands.
“But you couldn’t, huh?” He crushed out the cigarette. “Me either. Thinking too much.”
He dragged a chair to sit next to her. Because it was dark, he misjudged and scooted the chair too close, and when he sat down, their knees brushed. Jess flinched and pulled her knee away, and he did the same. They sat there, unmoving, knees so close she could feel the heat from his skin. She breathed as if through a fireplace bellow: air sucked from her lungs and then blasted back in. But he didn’t move the chair.
She tried to think of something to say. She glanced at his profile. That beaky nose with its knuckle in the center. A yellow pencil behind his ear again. She thought of his aspen painting upstairs, soft and milky, and she smelled snow and lemon-soaked apples, and time seemed to slow for her. Dream time, supple and lethargic. Her breath shallow, she pressed her knee closer, skin to skin, almost as an experiment to see what he’d do.
He didn’t move. He kept looking straight ahead, but he put his hand on his knee so the edge of his palm brushed her kneecap. A wisp of contact. He still didn’t look at her. In her dream state, she reached out and took the pencil from behind his ear. When she did, she heard him give a little sigh. The pencil was warm from his skin, and she held it tight.
He said, “You should go inside. It’s late.”
His voice startled her. She jumped up from the chair, tugging her shirt down, her legs shaking. All of her, shaking. She stumbled inside, tripping over a rug in the doorway. She climbed into the bed in her best friend’s room, listening to her best friend’s father move down the hall and climb the stairs to his painting studio. She listened to the creak of footsteps above her. She clutched the pencil, running her thumb down its ridges. She put it lengthwise across her lips and bit it, feeling the soft wood give between her teeth.
When Dani snuck through the window an hour later and whispered, “Hey, are you awake?” Jess feigned sleep. But she did not sleep. She dressed and slipped out the door before Dani was awake, leaving a note: “Had to get home. Call you later, gator.” Walking home in the cool morning, she shivered, but she wasn’t cold. The opposite. As if someone had struck a match and lit her. Or more like she was the match, scraping across the red striker pad, and whoosh. Phosphorescence.