“Well, if we end up wandering around Virginia for the next few days …”
“Like getting lost?”
He shrugged, his face wide open and serious. “I felt a lot more lost at home than I do here. I just never realized it. But things seem different now, you know?”
Emma watched as he got the fire started, touching the lit state of North Carolina—which was quickly collapsing in on itself—from one branch to the next, coaxing the flames to life and blowing on the kindling until the whole thing began to burn in earnest. She was never sure how to respond to this kind of honesty, though she felt much the same way. All her life she’d been hiding or walking away, doing her best to fade into the background. But things were different now. She could feel it the same as Peter, though she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it just yet.
Peter stood back to admire his work, leaving a sooty handprint across the back of the white dog, who had ambled over to join him.
“‘It is not down in any map,’” he said grandly, taking a seat on one of the flattened logs that was angled toward the fire. “‘True places never are.’”
“Who said that?”
“Herman Melville,” he said. “ Moby Dick.”
“My dad’s favorite.”
“Mine, too. After I read it for the first time, I asked my dad to throw me a whale-themed birthday party. I’ve never seen him so happy. He thought I’d finally gotten into fishing.”
“I don’t think I actually remember any of your birthday parties.”
“That’s because there weren’t any,” Peter said simply. “I always liked planning them out, but they never ended up happening. My dad isn’t great on follow-through. Not that anyone would’ve come, anyway.”
“I might have.”
Peter buried his hands in the pocket of his sweatshirt and smiled. “It’s just as well. I’m not a big fan of birthday parties. It’s like anything where you have high expectations.” He raised his eyes to hers, giving her a long and searching look. “You’re just asking to be disappointed.”
Emma shifted around on the log, feeling suddenly too visible. The fire was spitting now, an orange glow pushing back the corners of darkness, and her cheeks burned from the heat. But it was more than that too. Peter was watching her with such undisguised longing, such wild hope, that it was all she could do not to bolt from the log.
It wasn’t like she was blind. She knew that he liked her, had known it since the moment he pulled up to the rest stop in the blue convertible and she realized just what she’d asked of him. She thought maybe she’d even known it before he did. But until now it had seemed more of an annoyance than anything else, an added complication to the million other complications on this trip, like a bug she was forced to continually swat away.
But lately the evidence had become increasingly hard to ignore: suspicious leaning and hand-brushing, awkwardness above and beyond the usual levels of stuttering and trailing off, of blushing and blustering. Whenever boys had liked her before, Emma had either ignored them or humored them, never quite letting herself care enough to find it anything more than amusing. She’d always felt a sort of detached interest in the process, a bemused fascination with the way these things played themselves out: waiting for James Nicholson to work up the courage to put an arm around her in the movie theater, or guessing how many days it would be until Gavin Sourgen tried to hold her hand on the walk home from school. It had never been much of a problem to faze them out when they got too attached; as with everything else in her life, Emma simply took a giant step backward.
But with Peter it was different.
Emma knew she could be distant and cagey and abrupt. She knew she was wired differently from most people, that she wasn’t often understood and was even less often inclined to try to understand others. But in spite of this she’d come to rely on Peter in a way she’d never allowed herself to do with anyone before. He was easy to talk to, hard to get rid of, and one of the few people who had the nerve to point out when she was being stupidly stubborn or just plain rude. Somehow he’d become the one constant in this whole uneven chapter of her life, and the idea that that could change was unsettling.
Now Peter stood up to poke at the fire with a stick. The flame made the world around it seem small; everything beyond it was dark except for the hazy glow of the giant star in the distance, which shone through the spindly trees with all the subtlety of a UFO.
“You probably would’ve loved the birthday parties my parents always had for me,” Emma said, and when Peter glanced over at her, she could see the fire reflected in his glasses. “Their idea of a fun night is a good game of chess and an old bottle of wine, so you can imagine their version of an appropriate celebration for an eight-year-old.”
“It can’t be worse than the year my dad made me go kayaking and I got hit in the head with the paddle.”
“Trust me, it was.”
“I broke my nose,” he said, raising an eyebrow, and Emma laughed.
“Well, they made me write a poem about what I wanted for my birthday, then had me get up and recite it at one of my dad’s poetry readings in New York City. I told a roomful of literary scholars that I wanted ‘stickers that sparkle, and a dog that barkles.’”
Peter laughed so hard he began to cough, shaking his head and pounding at his chest, his eyes tearing from the smoke. “I bet they saw a lot of potential in you,” he said between gasps, and Emma couldn’t help laughing too; for all the miserable birthdays between them, all the misunderstandings and disasters and disappointments they’d each suffered, it seemed suddenly easier not to care, now that they were together.
“If you could do anything for your birthday,” she asked, once she’d caught her breath, “what would it be?”
Peter smiled at her. “This.”
When he sat down again, it was on the same log as Emma, which seemed a bit closer than necessary in a circle meant for eight to ten people. She watched him lift and then drop his hand twice, as if deciding whether or not to reach for hers, and then—with a kind of slow-dawning horror—she realized he was leaning over to kiss her. His eyes were closed, and his lips were pressed together so tightly he might have been trying to avoid the dentist, but still Emma understood where this was going, and she felt such a mixture of pity and annoyance and sadness all at once that she found she’d scooted all the way to the far end of the log almost before realizing she’d planned to do it.