I giggled and bit my straw. “It’s good for you!” I insisted. “It’s green!”
He pushed it toward me, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “Here, have some extra health. My treat.”
I couldn’t tell if he actually hated it or if he was just lightening the mood, but I didn’t protest.
Oliver laughed a little, then reached for his burrito. “You’re sure this is good?” he asked before taking a bite. “Because that smoothie ruined your credibility.”
“See for yourself,” I told him, then took a huge bite out of mine. Lettuce and cheese spilled out and I arched an eyebrow at Oliver, who laughed and took a bite of his own.
“Okay,” he said after a minute of chewing. “Credibility restored. And now I get to ask you a question.”
“Hit it,” I said.
“How come you don’t want your parents to know that you surf?”
“Because they’re crazy overprotective,” I said, reaching for a napkin. “They don’t want me to do anything dangerous or something where I might get hurt.”
“Why?”
That was the question I didn’t want him to ask. But he had been honest with me, so I decided to be honest with him.
“After you went missing,” I said carefully, wiping my mouth and trying to look anywhere but at Oliver, “everyone was so scared. All the parents went on lockdown mode, especially mine and, I don’t know, they haven’t really stopped. I think it was hard on them, you know? The kid next door, one day he’s there and the next day he’s gone. And I’m their only kid and they just wanted to protect me.”
“Do you ever think about telling them you come here?”
“Sometimes,” I admitted. “But at the same time, it’s nice having it just for myself. Like, no one tells me when to surf or how to do it or whether or not it’s good enough. I can just . . . do it.” I blushed a tiny bit at the phrase. “No one’s grading me or making me take the AP Surfing test, you know?”
Oliver laughed at that. He had a tiny bit of guacamole in the corner of his mouth, which looked endearing instead of gross. A second later, though, he wiped it away. “AP Surfing,” he repeated. “That would be cool.”
“There’s a surf team at school,” I said. “But I need parental permission and there’s lots of fees and I’d have be at the beach by five forty-five every morning and I haven’t really figured out how to explain that to my parents, so yeah.” I shrugged and ate another chip. Surfing always left me starving afterward. “On my island.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s something Caro and I say. Like, if you don’t like the way something is, you just say ‘on my island!’ As if things would be different on your own private island where you could make up all the rules.”
“Well, on my island, no one would have ever created that smoothie-juice thing,” Oliver said, moving the cup even closer to me. “Because that’s not right.”
“It’s all natural!” I protested even as I laughed. “Made from nature!”
“Nature is cruel,” Oliver replied.
“Well, we’ll just see who’s stronger and fitter when we go surfing next time,” I said without thinking, then realized that I just invited Oliver to hang out again.
He looked at me a second longer than he had before. “Again?” he repeated before chowing down on another chip. “Yeah, that’d be cool. It’s not like I have plans or anything.”
I twisted the napkin between my fingers. “Not to sound like I was stalking you or anything, but I saw you watching movies in your room.”
Oliver just nodded. “Yeah, my dad and I, we used to watch movies together. He was a big film buff and he got me into it.” Now Oliver was shredding his napkin. Between the two of us, the napkins didn’t stand a chance.
“That’s cool,” I said. “You know, there’s a film-appreciation club at school, you could . . .” But I trailed off as Oliver just looked at me, skepticism in his eyes.
“Not joining any clubs,” he said. “That’s not my thing.”
“Not everyone is an asshole at our school,” I pointed out, “but I’m sorry you’re getting harassed. It’s just because you’re new. They’ll get over it.”
“What makes you think I’d want to be friends with them in the first place?”
I didn’t have an answer.
He looked at the skyline, which had turned blue and purple to match the ocean. “Thanks for asking me to hang out today,” he finally said. “It was fun. I’m glad I didn’t die.”
“I’m glad you didn’t die, either,” I said. “It’d be bad if you disappeared for ten years, then you died on my watch two weeks after you got back.”
“Yes, it would,” Oliver said, smiling at me. He looked like his second-grade photograph, the one that had been plastered on MISSING signs everywhere. “I was starting to go nuts just hanging out with my mom and Rick the whole time.”
“Well, they said we should give you some sp—time to adjust,” I said. The word space sounded mean all of a sudden, like Oliver was a shrapnel bomb set to explode.
He just laughed. “Not enough time for that.” Before I could respond, he looked at me. “Hey, you cold? You’re shivering.”