“You’re not going to drown,” I say impatiently. “I keep telling you, it’s totally safe. Alex Brandley takes girls out in this boat all the time. We’ll be fine. You’re like, half his size. If it doesn’t sink while Alex has sex in it, it won’t sink with us in it.”
“Oh, great,” he says. “Unstable and ridden with STDs.”
But he pushes the boat into the water and climbs in, and then I run and leap into it, and the boat wobbles and we cling to each other, but it doesn’t tip over, and we don’t drown. We are nervous laughter and fast breath and faster heartbeats, alive alive alive.
And then we calm and become a different kind of alive, the kind that requires music, so we take out the Walkman and push earbuds into our ears.
“Indie shit,” Micah complains, but he hums along. And the next track is Liszt, and his fingers tap against my palm. Eventually we are on our backs, hands pressed together.
We are Janie and Micah, Micah and Janie.
“Let’s play a game,” I whisper. I am the quiet and the quiet is me. “Let’s play Secrets.”
“Okay,” he says, like I knew he would, like he always does. “You start.”
“I peed in the quarry before you got here.”
He quickly retracts the hand he had been trailing in the water. “God, Janie.”
“What? I had to pee. Before I got in the boat. Or else I would have peed in the boat, and—”
“Okay, okay,” he says. “Um. Uh . . . I still do the lightning bug thing. Like, you know. Put them in jars with grass and stuff.”
“That doesn’t count,” I say. “I already knew you did that. I’ve seen them on your dresser.”
“It does count,” he says, sounding annoyed. He’s not, really. Just embarrassed, which he shouldn’t be. I think it’s adorable, and mostly I was just mad that I didn’t think of it first. “It just has to be something you’ve never told anyone before.”
“Fine,” I say. “I ordered a pair of Hunter boots even though I swore I’d never get a pair.”
“Yeah, I’d probably care more if I knew what Hunter boots are. I stuck a cockroach in Dewey’s sandwich at lunch yesterday.”
“Ew ew ew,” I say, and the boat rocks as I try to wriggle the word off. Cockroach. “Ugh, where did you even find one?”
“What, the cockroach? I just—”
“Stop saying that word. I hate that word.”
“—grabbed one out of the empty locker next to mine. There’s always five or six in there. Cockroach cockroach cockroach.”
I try to push him out of the boat. He tries to pull me in with him. We splash each other and we both end up soaked.
“I tried to pierce my own belly button.”
“You used that last time,” he says. “You always try to use that one.”
“Yeah, because I tried to pierce it again.”
“Yesterday I told my dad that I couldn’t believe he grabbed his one opportunity to have an affair, while Mom had so many more and never did.”
It’s quiet now, just the wind and us. The rest of the world has stopped existing. This is it: the quarry and the boat and the curving sky, and our confessions to each other. Our soul is bare, and we are spilling everything.
Well, not everything.
But he’s holding stuff back too.
“I flushed my mom’s Tiffany earring down the toilet,” I say. “Then I went online. It cost five thousand dollars.”
“Did you really?”
“Well, I only flushed one, so I guess it was only twenty-five hundred. So now she just wears the one and leaves her hair down over the other one.”
“I told Dewey that we couldn’t hang out tonight because my dad’s taking me out to dinner.”
“My parents think I’m at Piper’s because they didn’t want me to be alone in the house that they should never have bought, and I’m glad I’m not.”
That’s not a secret, but Micah just braids his fingers tighter with mine, matching up our life lines. I scoot closer. I push my shoulder against his, and my thigh against his thigh, and I hook my foot around his calf because he’s gotten too tall for our feet to match up. And that’s how we lie, telling secret after secret as we drift, until I look around and decide that this is it, this is the center of the quarry.
“This isn’t the center,” Micah says when I tell him.
“Why not?” I ask, and he doesn’t have a good answer.
I open the vodka. We pass it back and forth, throwing it back and coughing all the way down. We flick water at each other as we wait for it to kick in, and when it does—when the dark is fuzzy and the stars are much closer, I bring out my matches. Micah hands me the sparklers. I aim at the stars and set the sparklers off, and we lie back and laugh at how high they go.
“We should do this again,” he says. I watch the fireworks in his glasses.
“Nope. No repeats. Just live the moment, Micah.”
He doesn’t argue. “Something else, then,” he says, and his voice is cautious, almost shy, and I lean back against him. I put my face in his shoulder and breathe him in, memorize the way we fit together.
“Something else,” I say. “After tomorrow. Then we can do anything. Anything.”
“Right. You can legally have sex with Ander,” he says, and his voice gets further away with every letter of every word.
“Micah,” I say, closing my eyes. “Don’t. Not tonight. Hey, what time is it? Can you check? My phone is dead.”