I felt the grains of sand between my toes first—still hot from the day’s sun, though it had set hours before—and then I smelled the rich smoke of the bonfire, heard its crackle. Beneath me was rough bark, a log on its side, and next to me, Matt, bongos in his lap.
They weren’t his bongos—as far as I knew, Matt didn’t own any kind of drum—but he had stolen them from our friend Jack, and now he drumrolled every so often like he was setting someone up for a joke. He had gotten yelled at three times already. Matt had a way of annoying people and amusing them at the same time.
Waves crashed against the rocks to my right, big stones that people sometimes spray-painted with love messages when the tide was low. Some were so worn that only fragments of letters remained. My freshman year of high school I had done an art project on them, documenting each stone and displaying them from newest-looking to oldest. Showing how love faded with time. Or something. I cringed to think of it now, how new I had been, and how impressed with myself.
Across the fire, Jack was strumming a guitar, and Anna—my oldest friend—was singing a dirge version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” laughing through most of the words. I was holding a stick I had found in the brush at the edge of the sand. I had stripped it of bark and stuck a marshmallow on it; now that marshmallow was a fireball.
“So your plan is to just waste a perfectly good marshmallow,” Matt said to me.
“Well, do you know what a marshmallow becomes when you cook it too long?” I said. “No. Because you can never resist them, so you’ve never let it get that far.”
“Some questions about the world don’t need to be answered, you know. I’m perfectly content with just eating the toasted marshmallows for the rest of my days.”
“This is why you had to drop art.”
“Because I’m not curious about charred marshmallows?”
“No.” I laughed. “Because you can be perfectly content instead of … perpetually unsettled.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Are you calling me simpleminded? Like a golden retriever or something?”
“No!” I shook my head. “I mean, for one thing, if you were a dog, you would obviously be a labradoodle—”
“A labradoodle?”
“—and for another, if we were all the same, it would be a boring world.”
“I still think you were being a little condescending.” He paused, and smiled at me. “I can give it a pass, though, because you’re obviously still in your idealistic-adolescent-art-student phase—”
“Hypocrisy!” I cried, pointing at him. “The definition of ‘condescending’ may as well be telling someone they’re going through a phase.”
Matt’s response was to seize the stick from my hand, blow out the flames of the disintegrating marshmallow, and pull it free, tossing it from hand to hand until it cooled. Then he shoved it—charred, but still gooey on the inside—into his mouth.
“Experiment over,” he said with a full mouth. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Go where?”
He didn’t answer, just grabbed me by the elbow and steered me away from the bonfire. When we had found the path just before the rocks, he took off running, and I had no choice but to follow him. I chased him up the path, laughing, the warm summer air blowing over my cheeks and through my hair.
Then I remembered.
He was leading us to the dune cliff—a low sand cliff jutting out over the water. It was against beach rules to jump off it, but people did it anyway, mostly people our age who hadn’t yet developed that part of the brain that thought about consequences. A gift as well as a curse.
I watched as Matt sprinted off the cliff, flailing in the air for a breathless moment before he hit the water.
I stopped a few feet from the edge. Then I heard him laughing.
“Come on!” he shouted.
I was more comfortable just watching antics like these, turning them into a myth in my mind, a legend. I watched life so that I could find the story inside it—it helped me make sense of things. But sometimes I got tired of my own brain, perpetually unsettled as it was.
This time I didn’t just watch. I backed up a few steps, shook out my trembling hands, and burst into a run. I ran straight off the edge of the cliff, shoes and jeans and all.
A heart-stopping moment, weightless and free.
Wind on my ankles, stomach sinking, and then I sliced into the water like a knife. The current wrapped around me. I kicked like a bullfrog, pushing myself to the surface.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” Matt said as I surfaced.
As our eyes met across the water, I remembered where I really was. Lying in a hospital room. Unaware of how much time had actually passed.
“I like this memory, too,” he said to me, smiling, this time in the visitation instead of the memory. “Except for the part when I realized my dad’s old wallet was in my pocket when I jumped. It was completely ruined.”
“Oh, shit,” I breathed. “You never said.”
He shrugged. “It was just a wallet.”
That was a lie, of course. No object that had belonged to Matt’s father was “just” something, now that he was gone.
He said, “So this is your favorite memory?”
“It’s … I …” I paused, kicking to keep myself afloat. The water was cool but not cold. “I never would have done something like this without you.”
“You know what?” He tilted back, so he was floating. “I wouldn’t have done it without you, either.”
“It’s your turn,” I said. “Favorite memory. Go.”
“Okay. But don’t forget, you asked for this.”
I had always thought he was cute—there was no way around it, really, short of covering my eyes every time he was there. Especially after he cut the floppy mess of hair short and you could see his face, strong jaw and all. He had a dimple in his left cheek but not his right one. His smile was crooked. He had long eyelashes.
I might have developed a crush on him, if he hadn’t been dating someone when we first became friends. And it seemed like Matt was always dating someone. In fact, I counseled him through exactly three girlfriends in our friendship: the first was Lauren Gallagher, a tiny but demanding gymnast who drove him up the wall; the second, Anna Underhill, my friend from first grade, who didn’t have anything in common with him except an infectious laugh; and the third, our mutual acquaintance Tori Slaughter (an unfortunate last name), who got drunk and made out with another guy at a Halloween party shortly after their fifth date. Literally—just two hours after their fifth date, she had another guy’s tongue in her mouth. That was the hardest one, because she seemed really sad afterward, so he hadn’t been able to stay mad at her, even while he was ending things. Matt never could hang on to anger, even when he had a right to; it slipped away like water in a fist. Unless it had to do with me. He had been angry at me for longer than he was ever angry with a girlfriend.
For my part, I had had a brief interlude with Paul (nickname: Paul the Appalling, courtesy of Matt) involving a few hot make-out sessions on the beach one summer,