The éclair’s full of hot air, and it burns my tongue. I’m staring at Jason with a bit more wide-eyes than I’d prefer. He’s pleased with himself.
“Yep,” he says. “Not much I don’t know about UFOs.” He pauses, then takes pity on me. “Also, when you got busted in Mr. Grimm’s class yesterday, swearing about ships in the sky, I Googled ‘ships in the sky.’”
I swear again. This time at him. With relief.
“Basic search. On my phone. You’d have done it if you weren’t quote side-effecting unquote to no clear purpose. You don’t usually invent things out of nowhere, Az. I tend to believe you when you say you’re seeing a ship sailing through the clouds.” He’s not looking at me. “So, yeah, I think you saw . . . something.”
I’m flooded with relief again, a lot more of it. And something that I guess must be gratitude.
“You didn’t see it, did you?” I ask, a just-in-case plea. “No sails? No masts? Or hear it?”
He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll figure it out, Az.”
“Are you sure?”
Jason spoons filling into the éclairs, pours chocolate over their tops, and is done.
“Yeah. Happy birthday.” He sticks a candle messily into the top of one of the éclairs and lights it.
“It isn’t my birthday yet,” I say.
“So what? Your wish is here early,” he says. “If you don’t blow out that candle, I’m doing it.”
I look at the candle some more. It’s dripless.
“I’ll take your wish and wish it myself,” Jason warns. “You don’t want what I’m going to wish for.”
“Which is?”
“You’ll end up in an alligator suit,” he says. “Roller-skating. Trust me. I could make that happen.”
I smile in spite of myself. I close my eyes.
“Wish,” Jason says, like I’m going to forget to wish.
I wish. I blow. I look at Jason.
Jason looks at me. He’s chewing on his bottom lip.
“I have a present thing for you,” he says.
“Give,” I say, and I’m suddenly filled with hope, because this hadn’t even occurred to me. Maybe this whole ship vision thing was something he did. “Did you hire projectors or something? It’s a hoax, right?”
He just looks at me. This is not his usual. Normally he’d shove something across the table, grinning wildly. Last year, he gave me a terrarium containing a flea circus. He’d bought them from some sad guy who’d spent his life training batch after batch of them. They died pretty soon after, as fleas do, but before they did, they did a lot of crazy amazing backflips.
“What is it?” I ask him. “Where is it?”
I poke his shirt pocket. Nothing there. It suddenly feels deeply weird to be prodding his chest and I snatch my hand back like I’ve just burned it. I try to pretend I have a cramp in my fingers. I can feel his body against my hand still, solid and warm and oh no, no, very no.
“I’ll give it to you while we watch the squid video,” he finally says.
I’m taken aback. I’d totally forgotten about the squid footage, but Jason’s bringing out his laptop.
“Dark,” he says. “This demands dark.”
“Basement,” I say.
Usually, this would be super normal. We spend most of our time in the basement or in the garage.
But he’s looking at me in a way that makes me wonder if he’s invented the whole giant squid footage thing completely, and he’s actually going to do something weird—
pour water on my head when I walk through the basement door, or present me with immortality ointment. I don’t think about any other kind of thing he might be wanting to do with me, because he’s Jason, and I’m me.
We plant ourselves on the couch, almost as though we’re regular teenage creatures and not two people about to watch stolen raw footage of cephalopods illegally downloaded through back channels.
Jason sets up the laptop and cues the video, and then pulls out his notebook, scribbles something, and folds up the paper. He hesitates, and then passes it across the couch to me.
I open it, and see what he’s written inside.
I { } you more than [[[{{{(( ))}}}]]].
Just parentheses and brackets with nothing in them. I look up at him. He looks away.
“Okay. So. That’s my list,” he says. “In case there ever needs to be a list. Which there doesn’t.” He pauses. “Right, so that’s settled.”
He lifts his fist and bumps mine. But then he lets his hand stay there. I feel his knuckles. I feel myself turning red. With my bluish skin, that probably makes me lavender.
For a long time, we’re watching a black screen. We can see a little bit of something glowing—squid bait.
I think of the note.
I want to say me too.
I want to say I know.
I want to say I can read the gaps in your sentences. I can read the space between your letters. I know your language. It’s my language too.
I want to say that.
Instead, I stare at the screen, and say { } for a good minute and a half while Jason’s fingers and my fingers lace together like we’re not attached to them.
The squid appears, a constellation coming into being out of a night that previously contained no stars at all. It unfolds, this silver, twirling thing, and it’s there. Swimming past the camera, alive and impossible and right there. Its eyes, its tentacles, its hugeness. It explodes into visibility, this thing we’ve only really seen dead or dying.