Wyatt spins around as though he’s modeling on a catwalk. That’s one of the things I’ve grown to admire about him: he wholeheartedly embraces situations where ordinary men might feel even a nugget of shame. “I think the best part,” he says, “is how they secured the fez to my head using pink days-of-the-week barrettes.”
“Why would they even have those to begin with?” I reach up and adjust the cap so it hides the offending hair accessories.
“I think it says somewhere in every team’s bylaws that they have to keep a bag full of random objects only useful for humiliating freshmen,” he says.
I casually touch the vest draped over Wyatt’s bare chest, but what I’m really trying to do is push it closed a bit—it’s really hard to keep things in the friend zone when his shirt is off. His teammates call him “Ken Doll” because his physique is so defined that it almost looks plastic. “During all that time they spent dressing you, did you ever bother to point out to them that this is a Polynesian luau? Or that your parents are from Trinidad, not Agrabah?”
“At least I’m not him.” Wyatt points toward the base of the volcano, where a freshman athlete in a speedo has been tied to a long spit by his hands and feet. His body hangs a foot above the floor, and one of the upperclassmen shoves an apple into his mouth.
The water polo captain, who’s wearing a tall flowery headdress, shouts “Aloha!” at the top of his lungs. His voice carries enough to somehow silence the entire party. He draws what looks like a portable hairdryer from his waistband. “Let the pig roast begin!” he announces. He flips the switch and begins to poke certain points on the freshman’s torso. Every time the hairdryer gets too close to the freshman’s skin, the poor guy shrieks into the apple and contracts his body upward. The whole party flocks over to watch and laugh.
I’m starting to feel anxious and claustrophobic with so many people in one spot. More guests continually filter through the front door, and I can’t even enjoy the hazing going on because my mind is trying to imagine what Osiris might have planned. Another explosion? Is he going to drive a tractor trailer through the house?
Wyatt is watching me, and I’m pretty sure we’re now the only two people in the house whose attention isn’t on the pig roast. “Can we have some of that alone time now?” He asks so quietly that I barely hear him over the din of laughter around us.
Why? I want to ask him. So we have one more opportunity to succumb to the tension that’s plagued the last year of our friendship? To continue where we left off on New Year’s Eve? So he can prove to me that if Troy were out of the picture, the two of us might be together instead?
I’m saved from having to answer. Down below, the water polo guys are now lighting votive candles beneath the spit-roasted freshman’s back. Beyond them, a clump of new partygoers have just walked through the front door. Among them are Slade, Ivy, and Troy. My boyfriend’s head is pivoting like a meerkat’s while he scans the crowd, probably looking for me.
Wyatt follows my gaze to the door. He shakes his head so hard the fez flies off. “Of course,” he says. “Even two states away from Daedalus, even at a party where I’m an honorary guest, I can’t get away from that guy.”
Is he kidding me? Even though I’m trying to save us all from extinction, I still came to his damn luau, and he has the nerve to play the territorial card? I can’t help it—I snap. “Well, Wyatt, a) that guy happens to be my boyfriend. And b) he also happens to be your friend, who you drove here, so stop acting like he stowed away in your trunk and popped out now to ambush you.”
“Thanks,” Wyatt says, “because I didn’t notice the four hundred miles of cuddling happening in my backseat.”
“What do you want me to do?” In my frustration, I’m losing control of the volume of my voice and I feel Emma’s eyes on me. “Should I pretend like I don’t have a boyfriend every time I’m around you? Act differently because we had one night where vodka made us both cross some boundaries we shouldn’t have?”
“Whoa,” Emma says, finally intervening. She wanders over in a loose, ungraceful bounce that makes me think she’s already on her second cup of jungle juice. “Let’s retract the claws, kitties. Or at least find a scratching post.” She puts a hand on my elbow, and a little bit of her drink spills onto my arm. “Better yet, since this is a party, why don’t we find a table and settle our differences over a game of flip cup? What do you say?”
Wyatt ignores her. “You want to act like relationships change things, Renata, but you’re really only trying to talk your way around the truth: that your relationship has changed you. I thought you’d eventually outgrow the honeymoon phase. Now I know for certain that the jelly’s always going to come with the toast.”
“Tell me what you want from me, Wyatt. Is the problem that I have a boyfriend? Or is the problem that it’s not you?”
That shuts him up. Wyatt regards me coldly for a long moment before he turns and jogs down the stairs. When he gets to the bottom, one of his prospective teammates hands him a hairdryer. He never looks up at me again.
I should feel bad. Wyatt was backing me into a corner with that conversation, sure; but I can already feel that this time travel business is making me feel safe saying things I’d otherwise regret. After all, what does it matter if I boldly state what’s been on my mind for four months, when we could all wind up dead, or when I at least might get my ass dragged right back to Patchwork?
Consequences don’t work the same when I’m the only one who remembers what happens.
Emma fidgets awkwardly next to me. “I have this theory,” I say to her, “that as evolution progresses, it’s actually the men who are becoming overly sensitive and melodramatic.”
“I can picture it now,” Emma says. “The water polo team sitting around eating from a tub of fudge while they lament the girls who never called them back.”
I take a long drag from the jungle juice before I’ve even realized it. The sugary punch flavor might mask the kick of the liquor, but it still burns on its way down. Meanwhile, Troy spots me and ascends the stairs with a smile on his face, oblivious to the drama that went down a minute ago. It’s for the best. If I somehow live through tonight, the car ride home tomorrow will be awkward enough without my boyfriend and best friend embroiled in a blood feud.
Emma spots Troy, too. “If I’d known that dirty hair would have men lining up to fight over me, I would have washed mine with mud. I’m going to go top off my drink.” She nods to Troy as she backs away. “… And possibly find me one of those.”
Troy stops on the second step down. Even though he has almost a foot on me, we stand nose to nose. His eyes unabashedly roam my body, from my borrowed sandals, past the grass skirt, and right up to where the strap of my bikini top winds around my neck. “Your outfit makes me wish we had more than three months of bikini weather in Massachusetts,” he says.
“You don’t look so bad yourself.” I flick the flower necklace around his neck. “The pink lei really brings out the color in your eyes.”
“Wanna go somewhere for a few minutes?” he asks.
Downstairs, Wyatt is holding his hairdryer like a gun and pretending to protect the freshman on the spit from his teammates. “I thought you’d never ask,” I say.
We make our way through the labyrinthine upper hallways, where eight bedrooms have been left intact from all the “remodeling” they did downstairs. Troy tries some of the doors, but they’re all locked, except for one that we don’t try because we can hear heavy breathing and moaning behind it.
Eventually we pass through a pair of glass doors out onto a balcony overlooking the dark yard. The indigo clouds, backlit by the moon, look lighter than the night sky around them. Our perch has a gorgeous view of the Windshire campus in the valley below, which from this high up, looks like a miniature village of brick and mortar, dotted with street lamps. I half-expect a toy train to chug through the quad.
Troy leans over the railing and clasps his hands together. “They say you know you’ve found the righ
t college when it feels like home.” He nods to the university below us. “Does this feel like home to you?”
Nothing feels like home anymore, I think. I’m about ready to break down and explain everything that’s happened in the last forty-eight hours. The harbor cruise, Patchwork, the two months of my life—of our relationship—that have been erased. But if Osiris should come again for us tonight, I’d rather Troy’s final impression of me not be that his girlfriend is a delusional lunatic. He’d probably just assume one of the frat boys dropped something in my drink, anyway. “I haven’t found the right fit yet,” I tell him. “Maybe something closer to the ocean. Maine, Newport …”
Troy kisses the top of my head. “Shame there are no universities on Nantucket.”
Nantucket, the island where we had our first kiss. Labor Day weekend, two days before the school year started. We were still only friends when he arrived, but after that Sunday night, under the tidal pull of the Nantucket moon …
From the wistful, almost sleepy smile on his face, I assume Troy is waiting for me wax nostalgic with him. All I can think is how that first kiss almost didn’t happen, and how different this year might have been if I hadn’t made the first move.
After he returned from Barcelona, I invited Troy to spend the final weekend of summer with me in Nantucket. The last night there, sitting on the beach with the distance between us nonexistent, I was sure he’d lean in first. When he looked like he was about to chicken out, I swallowed my pride, reminded myself that it was a new millennium with new gender rules, and then I kissed him. Kissed him until he took control and lay me down in the sand. It had taken an entire year for our hearts to fall into rhythm. It only took our lips a few minutes to find their own. The rest is history.
History that’s slowly being devoured by the hungry jaws of time travel, one month at a time. Now I’m caught in limbo between a beautiful past, the shadow of a fading future, and where that leaves Troy and me right now.
Back in the present, Troy finds my hand on the railing and squeezes it. I must have totally spaced, because he’s laughing at me. “It was like you were in some other world for a second, there,” he says.
If only you knew. I take a long sip from my jungle juice to conceal that I’m not smiling back. “Do you think you’ll still write to me when you go away to Spain?” I ask.
“If,” Troy corrects me. “If I go to Spain. And wherever I end up next year, whether it’s Barcelona, or UMass, or the toolshed in your backyard, I’ll write to you every week, just like I did last summer.”
I know my question was unfair to begin with. I guess love letters are the kind of hopelessly romantic thing people do when they’re on their way to love, not once they’re comfortably in it. And “comfortable” is exactly where we’d ended up by the time we boarded that harbor cruise in May. Too comfortable.
Stagnant.
Maybe I’ve been expecting too much. Maybe a romance born under the whisper of the sea starts to lose its shine when you put it back in the mundane routine of the school year. Maybe a first kiss that passionate sets your expectations too high, and you spend the rest of your relationship trying to get back to that spot on the beach. I don’t even know what to make of us anymore.
Troy sighs. “About the whole getting accepted to Barcelona thing. I’m sorry you had to find out from my mother instead of me.” As much as I don’t want to throw Mrs. Bridges under the bus, this is not the time to correct Troy. “Truth is, I’ve been about eighty percent sure I would never go overseas for school, so it didn’t seem worth it to alarm you when I was probably going to decline my acceptance anyway.”
I squint at him. Carrying a sealed, stamped enrollment form around in his backpack was a strange way of being “eighty percent sure” he wasn’t going. “Troy, you fell in love with Barcelona when you spent the summer there. When you came back, you said you felt like you’d been born on the wrong continent. Remember that entire month when you were looking into taking Spanish cooking classes in Springfield?” He doesn’t laugh. “Why would you so quickly dismiss the chance to live and learn there for four years?”
He shrugs. “I’ve been close to pulling the trigger all week,” he says. “I’ve had the letter turning them down, signed and sealed in my backpack since last Thursday, waiting for that moment when I’m absolutely sure.”
All at once, it feels as though my heart has been twisted like a soggy dish towel.
Oh my god.
I didn’t make up his decision for him by mailing his acceptance.
I accidentally mailed his letter telling them to piss off.
I’ve thrown away his chance to leave the states. Up until now, I’ve wanted to stay in the moment, to get back to reality. Now I find myself praying that I’ll get sucked back to Patchwork. To wind the clocks back. To fix the horrible deed I’ve just done.
Time for damage control. “Troy, I know you better than I know anyone else. The real reason you’ve been carrying around the decline letter wasn’t because you knew you’d never go. You carried it with you because you knew, deep down, that you wanted to go, that you’re hopelessly drawn to a place where I can’t follow you.” Troy starts to protest, but I cup his face. Even if the time turns back, even if I’m the only person who remembers this conversation, it feels important that I talk this through with him. “You were praying that at some point, on impulse, you’d just slip the letter into a mail slot, and that would be that—you’d never eventually have to make a much harder decision. Because in your head, you feel like you’re choosing between Barcelona and us. Between Barcelona and me. This is me telling you now that it doesn’t have to be either/or.”
Troy’s hand slides up and presses my own harder into his cheek. “Time and oceans aren’t kind to fairytales, Renata.”
“Then I guess we’ll have to hope time and oceans are patient with reality.” I stand on my tiptoes and kiss him. You never know these days when a kiss will be your last. I make it count, and so does he.
He always does.
I’m prepared to savor this kiss, but out of the corner of my eye, I detect movement in the grass below. At first, I think it must be a drunken partygoer who’s wandered out into the dark yard looking for a tree to piss on. But there’s something about him that doesn’t belong here. He’s older. His saunter is familiar.
I pull away from Troy. “Mr. Slattery?” I whisper.
Troy opens his eyes. “Please say that’s not who you imagine when you’re kissing me.”
“No.” I spin him around to look down on the figure slinking along the edge of the frat house. “Am I crazy or is that—?”
Troy’s body goes rigid. “That’s definitely Mr. Slattery.”
Slattery hasn’t seen us yet, and with the lights off out here, he probably won’t. He glides from window to window, trying to see through the heavy curtains into the party.
“Well, I’m sufficiently creeped out,” Troy whispers. “Any possible way it could be a coincidence that he traveled hundreds of miles for a college party where we just happen to be?”
I shake my head. “Something tells me he didn’t come here for a tour of Windshire.” Alarm bells are ringing inside my head. Osiris is hunting me through memories that we share, and now that I reflect back on it—
Mr. Slattery was a chaperone at the harbor cruise prom.
Mr. Slattery was in the audience at the softball championship.
And now Mr. Slattery has shown up in the last place I would have expected him to be. A place he has no right to be.
Until now, he’s mostly come across as a mildly creepy, slightly pitiable world history teacher. How could he possibly be an assassin?
“Should we ask him what he’s doing here?” I lean over the railing, trying to see where he’s going. He disappears around the edge of the house.
“Are you kidding me?” Troy grabs my arm and drags me back toward the hallway. “Slade and Ivy would kill us if they didn’t get to be there when we exposed Slattery’s college visit. Let’s g
rab the two of them, then let’s confront him.” I’m not sure I care for the plan—if Slattery really is the assassin, backing him into a corner sounds like an easy way to get all our throats cut in one swipe.
When we reach the main hall, we’ve clearly missed the opening of some sort of ceremony. The lights throughout the house have dimmed, and the floor below is thick with mist pumping out of the fog machine. As we make our way down the packed staircase to look for Slade and Ivy, the partygoers have all turned their attention to the summit of the volcano, where the water polo team has lined up two freshman players. The captain announces something about sacrificing them to the volcano as honorary inductees of the Leopard team. That old panic swells in my chest as we muscle our way through the packed crowd. I smell something pungent that no one else seems to acknowledge or care about—something even stronger than the stench of spilled alcohol or the stagnant mist.
Then the electricity cuts out.
As one, the lights go dark, and the fog machines stop whirring, and the ukulele music stops playing, immersing the house in a near impenetrable blackness. The crowd starts to murmur, though it hasn’t stopped a drunken couple from bumping into me while they grind. Cup Guy, who has his arm draped over Emma, shouts to the team captain, “Did you forget to pay the utility bill this month, Jack?” The audience erupts in laughter. I don’t. I take Troy roughly by the hand and start to pull him toward the door. We need to get out of here. Now.
Some light still filters through the tiny windows, and a shadow flits over them—somebody running around the edge of the house. Wherever the shadow goes, light springs up from the baseboards, a red flicker that climbs the wall. When I put two and two together, my throat constricts as I realize what’s really going on.
Someone is running along the outside of the house with a torch.
The walls go up in flames as easy as newspaper in a campfire. Screams erupt all over the floor. The whole crowd pushes wildly toward the exit. As I’m caught up in the throbbing, flowing mass of partygoers, my hand gets ripped free of Troy’s.