I swear he and my mom would be friends.
“Moth’s shoe,” I say.
“What?”
“My mom, when she was younger, used to hitchhike through Europe.”
“Wow, really?”
“She’s British.”
“Oh.”
“Oh-nothing. It’s still awesome.”
“Right. I mean, sure. It is.”
“Anyway, she stayed in a bunch of hostels and said they all smelled the same. Like a moth’s shoe.”
Beck sniffs the air. “Yep, that’s it.”
Walt’s snores are a freight train, but we’re too tired to laugh.
“Speaking of moms,” says Beck, “I told mine. On the phone. Just now—or, before, I mean.”
It takes me a second to put his sentence back together. “You told her what you’re doing? About Claire and everything?”
He nods.
“What’d she say?”
“She said—” Walt turns over in his sleep, grunting. Beck runs his hands through his wet hair, and lowers his voice. “She said I’m making a huge mistake, dropping out of school. Said I should come home. She said a lot, actually. You know what she didn’t say? ‘How’s Claire?’”
His pain is visible, even in the dim light of the television. “What’re you gonna do?”
“No idea.” He looks at Walt for a second, shakes his head, turns back to the TV. “I saw her, you know.”
“Your mom? When?”
“No, not—Never mind. It’s silly.”
I stare him down, wait for him to continue. He will. I know this, and so does he. After almost a full minute, he comes through.
“I saw Claire,” he says. “Walk out of that bathroom at Jane’s Diner.”
“What?”
“Not actual Claire. I mean the kid looked nothing like her. But when she walked out of that bathroom, the look in her eyes was just . . .” Life, it seems, delivers the best punch lines only after we’ve forgotten we were part of a joke. I suddenly feel like I need to throw up. “. . . so fucking pained, you know? Crushed. By the world.”
Beck’s voice, along with the blue-lit room, dissolves, and I feel those things—I feel the weight of the world, I feel fucking pained.
I’ll scream.
I’ll tell on you.
“Mim? You okay?”
I feel his eyes on me now, trailing from my hair, down my body, lingering in places they don’t belong . . .
“Mim?”
. . . for the first time in a long time, I feel like a helpless girl. “You are beautiful, you know.”
“I’m not,” I say, I don’t know how loud.
“You’re too good,” he whispers, leaning his head closer.
“I’m not good,” I say. “I’m no good at all, Isabel.”
“Yes, Mim,” says a voice, cool like a fountain, and comforting. “You are.”
Nothing will happen.
“Mim, look at me.”
Nothing you don’t want.
“Look at me.”
I open my eyes. Or eye. And I’m sick of things the way they are, my many oddities, my limited depth perception, as if it’s not bad enough I only see half the world, but it always seems to be the wrong half.
“Mim,” whispers Beck.
And I’ve never so loved the sound of my name.
“Hi, Beck.”
His face comes into focus now, in front of a familiar stained ceiling. Somehow, I ended up on the floor, my head in his lap, his hands on the back of my neck. In his eyes, I see a look I’ve never seen, not in him, not in anyone. It’s a recipe of fierceness, fire, and loyalty.
“I knew it,” he whispers, shaking his head. “When you called him Poncho Man, I fucking knew it.”
Beck holds me like that on the floor well into the night. We don’t talk. We don’t need to. Sleep is close, and I’m okay with that. Because among the not-knowing of sleep, I’ll know Beck. At some point, he carries me to bed and lies down next to me. It isn’t weird, though maybe it should be; it isn’t wrong, though it definitely could be. I curl up next to him, put my head on his shoulder. He wraps an arm around me, and I swear we were once a single unit, a supercontinent divided millions of years ago—like my fifth-grade science project—now reunited into some kaleidoscopic New Pangaea.
“I’m Madagascar,” I say, sleepily.
“You’re what?”
“I’m Madagascar. And you’re Africa.”
He squeezes my shoulder, and—I think he gets it. I bet he does.
I AM WOKEN by the sharp edges of my brain, a thought more persistent than sleep. “Beck,” I whisper. I have no idea what time it is, or how long we’ve been asleep like this. The TV is still on. The curtains are dark. “Beck. You awake?”
I feel his breath catch in his chest as he clears his throat. “Yeah.”
For a moment, I am acutely aware of my youth, and the recklessness that comes with it. I am aware of the darkness, and of every possibility it offers. I am aware of our comfortable nearness, of his scent, of us being with. But my sharp edges are more persistent than the recklessness of youth, the possibilities of darkness, even Beck’s comfortable nearness. “I thought you left me.”
“What?”
“Earlier, when I came out of the shower. You were gone. You and Walt. I thought you left me.”