I couldn’t stand any more joy to the fishes. Gag me. I jabbed the track button. After a pause, an electric guitar ripped from the speakers. I’d burned this CD of rock anthems years ago when I first decided guitar was more than just a way to blow a few hours after school each day. I might have lost myself in the music if it hadn’t been for the stupid lyrics.
Well, I’m hot-blooded ...
Oh, hell, no. I hit the track button. From the corner of my eye, I could see Adam staring at me, but I kept my eyes on the road. The airport exit was just ahead, three-quarters of a mile. I considered staying in my lane, driving until we ran out of gas. (How far would five gallons take us? Galveston, maybe? I could finish my senior year at Moody High. Surely there was a theater company Adam could perform with. It didn’t even matter. We could be beach bums, sell T-shirts to tourists in a beach shop, live on love. That’s all we needed, right? The toll road to I-45, then Galveston. It would be so easy.)
A jet screamed overhead. The noise—the jet, the AC blowing full blast, the music, the roar of traffic around us—it was all too much. I turned off the AC again and flicked on my blinker and slid into the exit lane.
Fame (fame) lets him loose, hard to swallow.
I jabbed the button again, twice, then a third time.
“What’s wrong, Nate?” Adam said.
I shook my head, not trusting my voice. The heat was creeping back into the car. This time it was Adam who turned the AC back on.
And then “Free Bird” was playing and my fingers ached with the urge to hit the track button again, but I could feel Adam’s eyes on me, so I didn’t. Death by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
“Hey,” he said, running his hand up and down my thigh. “Let’s do Key West again next June. It’ll be my graduation gift to you this time. No parents.”
I gripped his hand tightly and hoped to God I could make it to June. Key West was magic. And I was afraid I was going to need some magic by then.
Chapter 2
Two months earlier
Graduation party and Key West
“Open it! Open it!” Mea cried, bouncing impatiently in her chair.
Adam grinned. “I’m opening it.” He painstakingly worked the envelope flap loose just to tease his little sister. Adam’s parents had waited until the party guests had gotten out of the pool, dried off, and gone home to give him their graduation gift.
Clearly, the wait had been almost too much for his little sister. “It’s an airplane ticket,” she blurted out before he could finish the job.
“Mea!” Mrs. Jensen said, putting her hand over the six-year-old’s mouth.
Adam stuck his tongue out at her and removed not one, but two tickets from the envelope. He looked at them, said, “Wow,” cleared his throat, then held them up for me to see.
“What?” I said, surprised, because one of the tickets was issued to Nathan Schaper.
“Family trip,” Ben said before we could get the wrong idea, which was approximately two seconds too late.
Mrs. Jensen slinked her arm around her husband’s waist. “We’ve already cleared it with your mom, Nate. We have a lot to celebrate and, well, we’re really hoping you want to go.”
A week in Key West with Adam? Was she kidding? Even with his family, it was still a week in Key West with Adam. Just a week and a half ago I’d been girding myself for a second trial, a repeat of the painful and humiliating experience that had been the first trial in March. Facing the second assailant in the courtroom, reliving that horrible night five months ago, laying out the most intimate details of my relationship with Adam, and feeling like I was the one on trial. And then, at the eleventh hour, a plea deal.
Just like that, it was over.
I hadn’t felt this free, been this happy since last New Year’s Eve, until Mea innocently blabbed half an hour later, “Adam’s going to be a star.”
I was helping her get her toys out of the pool while Adam helped his mom and Ben carry the food back inside.
“Adam’s already a star,” I said, hooking a yellow raft with a net and dragging it toward the edge.
“No, he’s going to be a for-real star. In a play and everything. In New York. He even said I could visit him. And he’s going to take me to the zoo in Central Park. And let me feed the pigeons and ...”
New York? New York?
Over the next week, I kept waiting for Adam to hit me with New York, my excitement over the trip to Key West marred by a new impending sense of doom. But he said nothing. And by Friday afternoon I was beginning to think that Mea had gotten it all wrong.
Adam was rummaging through my suitcase when I got out of the shower.
“Why do you have so many books packed?” he asked, flipping through the pages of a novel I’d picked up at a used bookstore after work a few days earlier. “When do you think you’re going to have time to do all this reading?”
“I always read at night before I go to bed.”
“Not this trip. You’re sharing a room with me.”
“What?” I froze in the middle of towel-drying my hair and stared at him, shocked.
He laughed and tossed two books over his shoulder. “Mom and Ben finally gave up trying to figure out room arrangements. They could only get two rooms at such a late date, so they were going to have me sleep with them and Mea. And then that seemed ridiculous when there was an empty double bed in the room right next door. So ...”
A slow smile spread across my face. “So I’m stuck with you for a whole week? In Key West? Me and you? Together? Like alone? All night?”
He laughed and held up a pair of pajama pants. “You won’t be needing these either.” He tossed them over his shoulder too. I threw a box from my nightstand into my bag and he read the label. “Trojan natural lamb. For a more sensual feeling.” He held it up to me, smiling. “A twelve pack? Are you kidding me? I hope there’s a First Aid kit in here somewhere too.”
Key West—the southernmost point in the United States, a mere six square miles, the last in a string of keys off the tip of Florida, and a place where, as one Web site claimed, closets have no doors. But thankfully, the rooms did, with locks. Ben handed over the key with a slightly amused grin.
“I expect you two to behave.”
Fortunately, our room wasn’t next to theirs after all.
The week was pure magic. We filled our days with long walks on the beach and lazy swims in the ocean. We explored the island on bicycle, taking in the nineteenth-century architecture, dodging the free-roaming chickens, and chatting up barefoot hippies with tiny dogs nestled in their bicycle baskets. We wandered through Ernest Hemingway’s house and speculated about Tennessee Williams’s life as we stood, hand-in-hand, outside the bungalow he’d lived in decades ago. And when we got hungry, we ate Cuban sandwiches or conch fritters at a sidewalk table or sitting on the curb and watched other lovers in fearless public displays of affection.
Our nights we filled with passion and long soft gazes and sweet words. We weren’t behaving ourselves, and we didn’t for one moment feel guilty about that.
On Thursday evening, I paid a street performer twenty-five dollars to borrow his guitar for five minutes. It was the first time I’d played Adam his song, the song I’d written for him as a Christmas present, the song I’d not had the heart to play for him before then. And it seemed right that I’d waited. I played it for him sitting cross-legged under a street lamp in Mallory Square with the crowds and tightrope walkers and jugglers as a backdrop. He