"They're my parents. What else could they do? Let me die in the street?"
Strangely, we were still holding hands as we threw sharp darts at each other. But he stopped playfully swinging my hand.
"Of course I owe them." I said. "Insurance didn't cover everything. That's why they make me work at the diner for free. My dad says I'm still paying off the methotrexate and daunomycin."
I could feel John shaking his head above me, like I was missing the point. "You needed them, and they helped you. Now they need you. Don't you want to stay and help them? Don't you feel grateful?"
"I feel grateful. Grateful, like, send them a card. Grateful, like, build myself a career and make them proud of me. Grateful, like, have children someday and bring them back to town for Christmas. Not grateful, like, spend the rest of my life with them, running their shitty little diner in the middle of nowhere."
I wished he hadn't brought it up. Or I hadn't. We had to get off this subject and stay off it for the rest of the night, or we'd never get laid.
He must have had the same idea, because he dropped my hand, pinched my ass, and dashed away as best he could through the knee-deep water.
I slogged after him. We played grab-ass in the fading light. Which morphed into a hundred-yard dash up and down the gray beach. He won every time. So I craftily morphed it into a touch football game with a balled-up towel. What we played didn't matter so long as his big hands grazed my waist every few minutes, fueling the fire. I felt like I'd never been terminally ill.
At some point we got hungry and walked toward the road to a stand that sold fried seafood. This place made Eggstra! Eggstra! look like fine dining. But when we took the boxes back down to the moonlit beach and set out our picnic on our towels, I made a startling discovery. The shrimp were fresh. Someone had caught them off the coast that very afternoon. The shrimp we served at Eggstra! Eggstra! had been frozen for God knew how many decades. In fact, I probably had never eaten fresh shrimp before in my life. But I recognized them when I tasted them.
I began to have the sneaking suspicion this night was too good to be true.
I knew it was too good to be true when it got even better. John pulled out his cell phone and called Will. "I'm down for just a few hours, and I want to show the lady a good time while we're here," he shouted over the roar of the tide. "Where's the party?"
He had me pegged. I loved parties.
He laughed into the phone. "No, the lady would not happen to have blue hair. Her hair is indigo. Cyan."
"Violet," I mouthed.
He reached behind my head and ran his fingers down the purple strands in back. He stroked absently while he finished talking on the phone, as if setting my blood on fire were the most natural thing in the world.
Chapter 16
We drove the truck a few miles down the beach highway to an enormous nightclub on stilts. The music from inside pulsed so loudly that the sand strewn across the road vibrated with every beat. We paid cover at the door and walked all the way through the building to get where we were going.
John held my hand like a vise so we didn't get separated among the writhing bodies. I watched the looks on girls' faces as we passed. They checked John out for long seconds. Then they saw we were holding hands. Then they checked me out: hair, face, boobs, belly button, boobs, face, ending with a long and pointed look at my hair. Then another glance at John, like, When you get tired of this, call me. All the mascara, cleave, and midriff in the world didn't make up for the fact that I had blue hair and blue hair was weird. I definitely didn't want to get in a fight with a girl in my six hours at the beach, but I did try to step on their toes in their high-heeled sandals as I passed.
In back of the club, we had the best of both worlds: our white beach and black ocean and white moon, plus a throbbing party. Hundreds of college kids danced inside a square of tiki torches. We kicked off our shoes and crossed the sand.
Alone at the edge of the crowd, in a bank of plastic chairs that the rising tide threatened to sweep away, Will nursed a beer. We recognized the silhouette of his curly hair against the sky. Now that John wasn't in uniform, he and Will gave each other a big boy-hug, swatting each other hard on the back. Will turned to me and moved to hug me. Then he saw John's look and folded his arms around his beer cup.
John leaned in. "I'm going to get her a drink. Don't steal her while I'm gone."
"Are you crazy?" Will asked. "I wouldn't dare steal from the police academy."
John turned to me. "Frozen daiquiri?" "Pina colada, please."
"Virgin?" He wasn't asking my permission. He was just making sure I knew he wasn't going to try to swipe me any alcohol.
"That's optimistic," I said.
He frowned at me and glared at Will before heading across the beach toward one of the bars in thatched huts. Apparently I was not allowed to make sex jokes in front of Will. Surely John wasn't still jealous.
"Speaking of virgins," I said to Will.
He eyed me warily. "Pardon?" He sipped his beer.
"Spring break's almost over. You're here alone. Time's a-wastin'."
"Wha—" he spluttered into his cup. "Am I giving out virgin vibes?" "Kind of."
He gaped at me, then closed his mouth and shook his head in disgust. "I wanted to come here. At least, I thought I did. I really like to look. But when it comes right down to it…I want it to mean something, you know?"
I nodded. "Actually, no, but I can imagine."
A cell phone rang. "And don't you dare tell John I said that," Will went on. "Some things guys just don't say to each other." He pulled his phone from his back pocket and looked at the screen. "Speak of the Devil." He clicked the phone on. "Yes, Governor?" Then he whirled around, glancing in every direction around the beach. "You're watching us? Where are you?"
"He's sneaky," I said.
Will clicked the phone off and pocketed it. "John told me to move six inches to the left." He picked up his plastic chair and edged away from me in the wet sand. "He really likes you."
"He does stuff that makes me think so," T admitted. "Bringing me to the beach." "That's serious," Will agreed.
"And then he does stuff that makes me think he doesn't like me at all. For instance, Tuesday night, he made sure I saw a dead body in a car wreck. That's not my idea of date night."
Will cringed, and shook his shoulders like he had the shivers. "He takes that cop stuff very seriously. But I know he likes you, Meg. The night I saw y'all at McDonald's, he called me from Martini's and told me to back off. You didn't think I was coming on to you, did you?"