The Cousins(8)

It’s a little weird, maybe, to be carting all this around, but I don’t know these people. And when I don’t know something, I study it.



I shove the folder into my duffel bag and zip it up. It’s one of those oversized bags meant to see a kid through two weeks of summer camp. It has to last me two months, but I don’t have much. “Don’t you know any back roads?” I ask Frederico. We’re down to eight minutes.

“These are the back roads,” Frederico says, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “How fast are you?”

“What?”

“Can you run a five-minute mile?”

“Shit.” I exhale as his meaning hits me. “You can’t be serious.”

“We’re not moving, kid. If I were you, I’d make a run for it.”

Desperation turns my voice into a snarl. “I have a bag!”

Frederico shrugs. “You’re in good shape, aren’t you? It’s either that or miss your ferry. When’s the next one?”

“Two and a half hours.” I look at his dashboard—seven minutes to go—and make up my mind. “Fuck it. I’m going.” A mile isn’t that long, right? How bad could it be? Better than being stuck at a dock for almost three hours. Frederico brakes so I can get out, and I loop the straps of my bag around my shoulders like an oversized backpack.

He points out the window. “GPS says it’s on the right. Should be a straight shot along this road. Good luck.”

I don’t answer, just take off for the grass at the side of the road and start running. For about thirty seconds it’s fine and then everything goes to hell: the bag’s thumping too hard against my back, I can feel rocks through the thin soles of my cheap sneakers, and my lungs start burning. Frederico was wrong; I’m not in shape. I look it, because I spend hours every day hauling boxes, but I haven’t flat-out run in a long time. My lung capacity sucks, and it’s getting worse by the second.



But I keep going, lengthening my strides because it doesn’t feel like I’m getting anywhere near fast enough. My throat is so dry that it aches, and my lungs feel ready to explode. I pass a cheap motel, a seafood restaurant, and a minigolf course. The air is hot and muggy, the kind that settles over your skin even when you’re standing still, and sweat coats my hair and pastes my T-shirt to my chest.

This was a big mistake. Huge. How am I going to explain collapsing on the side of a Cape Cod road to my parents?

Somehow I’m still running, my bag whacking me painfully with every step. My eyes sting with sweat and I can barely see, but I keep blinking until I make out the edge of a squat white building. It looms closer, and I spy a cobblestone path and a sign that reads STEAMSHIP AUTHORITY. I don’t know how much time has passed, but I’m here.

I drag myself to the ticket window, panting. The woman behind the glass, a blonde with heavy makeup and teased bangs, looks at me with amusement. “Ease up on the heavy breathing, handsome. You’re too young for me.”

“Ticket,” I gasp, digging in my pocket for my wallet. “For…the…one…twenty.”

She shakes her head, and my pounding heart drops to my feet. Then she says, “You like to cut things close, don’t you? You almost missed it. That’ll be eighteen dollars.”

I don’t have enough breath left to thank her. I pay, grab my ticket, and push through the doors into the station. It’s bigger than I thought, so I pick up my pace to the exit, one hand pressing against the stitch in my side.

There’s a fifty-fifty chance I’m going to hurl before I get on this boat.



When I reach the dock there’s hardly anyone on it, just a few people waving at the ferry. A guy in a white shirt and dark pants is standing at the entrance of a walkway connecting the dock to the boat. He checks his watch and grasps a chain that dangles to the ground, fastening it across the two posts on either side of the walkway. Then he looks up and catches sight of me lunging toward him with my ticket outstretched.

Don’t do it, I think. Don’t be a dick.

He takes my ticket and unclips the chain. “Made it in the nick of time. Bon voyage, son.”

Not a dick. Thank Christ.

I stagger up the pier and through the ferry’s entrance, almost groaning with relief at the air-conditioned chill that greets me, and collapse in a bright-blue seat. I dig inside my bag for my water bottle, unscrew the top, and drain almost the entire thing in three long gulps. Then I pour the rest over my head.

Note to self: take up running this summer, because that was pathetic.

My fellow passengers all ignore me. They look primed for vacation, wearing baseball caps, flip-flops, and T-shirts with what I’ve come to realize is the unofficial Gull Cove Island logo: a circle with the silhouette of a gull inside and the letters GCI above it.

I keep still until my breathing returns to normal, then pull a Gull Cove Island tourist brochure out of my bag and flip to the transportation section in the middle. The ride is two hours and twenty minutes, and we’ll pass Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket along the way. Gull Cove Island is smaller than either of them—which is saying something, since Nantucket is only fourteen miles long—and what the brochure calls “more remote and rugged.”



Translation: fewer hotels and worse beaches.