The boat. Picture a sailboat: it looked like that. Sea Fever was painted across the side in indigo-blue script. Two sails, crisp white triangles, the jib and the mainsail, white, white. Remember: I went to camp! I knew when the boom was heading my way. I knew there was a rudder and a till and a hull and a bow and a stern and standard and port side, and once I’d sailed a Sunfish on the lake, all alone. But my experience ended there. This was a big boat! And Connor was on it. On the bow.
After he helped me in, I stood there sort of dumbly for a moment. What were we supposed to do? We hugged very awkwardly. And then the awkwardness melted away and we hugged for real. We had never done that before. I had always been so breakable. There were a million firsts already.
We broke apart. “First of all, this is yours, right?” I said, sitting down on a cushioned bench, port side. Connor seemed completely different at every turn. Nana had a prism on a string that sat on this table in her hallway, and in the late afternoon it would catch all this hazy light. You picked it up and the light jumped off the glass top of the table and hit the walls and the ceiling. You spun it and the light shot to another wall, another part of the ceiling. That was Connor, a prism catching light. Where would he be refracted today? Might he have stolen a sailboat? I didn’t think so, but he kept surprising me, and not always in a great way.
“Well my family’s, yes.”
“And how did you get here? Are you allowed to even be here?” I imagined he was in some kind of lockdown facility. But maybe it was really just a school with a retro sound system.
“It’s the weekend,” Connor said. “We can leave on the weekend. I drove down last night.”
I was dubious. I had several friends from camp at regular boarding schools. There was not a lot of freedom involved in their weekends at all. “Oh. So you have a car at school?” I was starting to not want to have this conversation, but somehow I still felt compelled to bring it up. Everything around me was blue. On the outside. Blue sky, blue water, Connor in his sky-blue shirt, his blue eyes. “That car?”
He laughed. “Yup. The one thing that my mother didn’t get rid of.” He was undoing the rope tethering us to shore. What was that? A lanyard? A halyard? “Are you cold?”
I can’t imagine having kept that car. Every time I got in it, I’d think about the accident. But wouldn’t I think about it every time I got in any car? “A little.” I rubbed my arms. I had on a flannel shirt over a T-shirt, a light cargo jacket over those. How did I know I was going to be sailing?
Connor went down below and came up holding a sweater. “Wear this.” He threw a fisherman’s wool sweater, big and soft and stretched out at the waist. I took off my jacket and pulled it over my head. You know how you can buy boyfriend sweaters? Well, this was an actual boyfriend sweater. This was the inspiration for an entire line of clothing. I was already thinking how to get it home with me so I could wear it every day for the rest of my life.
“Suits you,” he said.
I looked down at it as if I couldn’t believe it was real.
Then there was a lot of checking of the sails, the devices along the dash. I tried to let myself just . . . be. It was hard to let not knowing what was about to happen be a good thing. But I tried it out. Being in the moment. Not in the past or in the future. In this moment now.
“Connor Bryant, you never cease to blow my mind.” I shook my head in mock disbelief.
He looked up. “I aim to please,” he said, winding the line and placing it on deck. “You. I aim to please you.”
“Your work is done here,” I said. “This is just insane.”
And then we were off.
And then we were at sea.