I Fell in Love with Hope(74)
He looks so happy. Even if it is brief, a cursory tick of an arrow on a watch, the moment ebbs with rays of light. It makes the times Sam is lost in his own head, cooped up, staring through glass, seem insignificant.
“Oh, you filthy little animals!” Nurse Ella yells, stomping over to the edge of the mud bath. She plants her hands on her hips. “At this rate, I’ll have to hose you off like dogs! Out! Now!”
Sam and I obey, trudging out of the water, side-eyeing each other in the process, snickering under our breaths.
Nurse Ella drags us back home by our ears, all the while spouting lecture after lecture. She drops us right outside the door, telling us to wait for her unless we want to eat nothing but spinach for the rest of the week. She comes back with buckets of water and pours them over our heads. Sam and I squeal and shiver. Nurse Ella takes to scrubbing our heads with what looks like a small broom.
Once our skin is raw, and we smell of soap, Nurse Ella grunts. “Silly children.”
“I’m not a child anymore, Nurse Ella,” Sam says, his ankles rocking back and forth. “I’ll be taller than you soon.”
“Yes, well, until you’ve learned not to play in the mud, you’ll be a child in my eyes,” Nurse Ella says. She drops towels on our heads. Tells us to come back inside once we’re dry. Before she goes, she takes Sam’s temperature, releasing a heavy exhale when it comes back normal.
She’s a good person, I think.
Good and mean, but good all the same.
“Sam,” I say. “Do you think we could have more adventures like this?”
He looks out into the horizon, past the park and the bakery and the newspaper stands. Past the construction miles in the sky and all the noise with it.
“We could run away together,” he says. “Just you and me. No one else. What do you think?”
I swallow hard, the hospital’s walls and all the people inside tugging. I think of everything I’d be leaving behind, running away. But then, I think of Sam’s face as we hid in the brush. I think of his laughter in the mud, of his lips so close to stealing mine.
“Will that make you happy?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says.
“Promise?”
“Promise.” Sam grabs me round the waist, tucking his head in the crook of my neck, stretching his limbs like a cat on a rooftop. He kisses my cheek, whispering, “You make me so happy, my sweet Sam.”
heaven
The outskirts of the city trail the shoreline. The sea mingles with eroded cliff sides, birds flying in arrowheads, matching the rhythm of the waves. Driving the road outlooking an open bay, I gaze out at a world I’ve never seen with my own eyes.
“That’s the ocean?” I ask, leaning over Sony, hands against the window.
“Is it as beautiful as you imagined?” Hikari asks.
A half-moon crests her skin above our binding line of promise. On mine, a half sun mirroring hers.
We left the parlor thanking Carl for his hard work. Carl thanked us for the story. Then, he, timidly, tapped Sony’s shoulder and asked if she’d give him a call sometime.
Sony smirked, as devils do. She grabbed Carl by the face and kissed him with such force he stumbled back into the front desk. Freedom comes in degrees, and Sony basks in whatever heat of freedom she chooses. Once she was done with him she wrote her phone number on his palm and followed us out.
The ocean graces us with salty scents laden in tart and as stars skate over every ripple. We grace it with our scream-singing voices and poor renditions of beloved classic rock songs. Windows down. Music blasting. Not a care for what we leave behind.
With our remaining six dollars and ninety cents, we park the truck beside the boardwalk and convince a short woman with a white hat and a cart to sell us ice cream for half the price. She calls us damned kids and shoves the cones in our hands.
Hikari points to the ocean reaching for shore, foaming white like a beer bottle and misting like cigarette smoke. On the beach, parties hold on to their end-of-season zeal. People dance beside on-the-sand bars with the familiar smell of actual cigarettes and alcohol.
Lapping at the ice cream, Sony gives her remaining to Neo. She flings her dirty white sneakers off, leaving them on the boardwalk and hopping down to the sand. Effortlessly, she blends into the crowd of end-of-summer deniers.
Strangers look twice, caught by that brutal beauty. The roan layer of hair and the dancing constellation across her nose. C hops down with Neo on his arm. Strangers look twice as strength’s tiny body moves in sync with compassion’s gentle beat. I take Hikari and her sundress into the scene. She stumbles, but I catch her, interlacing our fingers, dancing the only way I know, with her leading my hand. Strangers look twice, not for any semblance of lost time, repulsing illness, or death. They look twice at kids lost in the moment and in each other.
Adventure becomes impatient, and we race to catch it, across the beach all the way to a stretch uninhabited by anyone but the gulls diving for fish and the critters in the sand.
The wind is ferocious here. Sony shrieks into it, stretching her arms out to either side. I run with her, shivering as we dip our feet in the water. She flags this beach from the grassy dunes to the depths of the sea as ours.
The waves we gifted with our messy dancing, and lack of hair urge us on. C takes off his pants and shirt shamelessly, letting the sea take him. His chest and the plastic protecting his tattoo stay above the surface as he mingles with his old friend, cupping the sea in his palms and splashing it onto his face with a sigh.