He flattened out his newspaper to spread his gifts on it, but the wind flared, stole a page, and skipped it away toward me. As I put my foot out to stop it and pick it up, he turned. I don’t remember the page number. International. Something about Yemen. Something else about a man building playgrounds in refugee camps. I do remember the look on his face though, when he saw me, as captured as those sleepwalkers, as vigilant as those kids. I was something to him. I was already, definitely something. I just knew it. We watched each other as I walked across the sand to where he was sitting in his shadow-black clothes, no more likely to keep my distance than a marble is to stay at the top of a slope.
“It’s you,” he said, and I said, “Yes,” because what else could I say? And then I gave the page back.
He seemed to hesitate before he took it and for a moment we were both holding on to different edges of the same paper. I can’t say how long that moment was, I really can’t—a second, an hour, a year, they’d all work, I’d believe all of them, they could all be true.
And then I let go.
TEN
The boy lay back in the sand, and more pages cut and snapped across him in the breeze, but he didn’t try to stop them. He didn’t do anything. His eyes in the bright sun were black tunnels of pupil, flecks of dark and amber pressed out to the edges. I was still standing over him and I moved so his face was in my shade. The sea messed and churned behind us. I could hear its beat and pull and whisper.
One of the dogs started barking and somewhere a seagull squalled and the sand-digger kids ran toward us, around me and over him, shouting at each other, stomping down the sand, mouths open, wind stealing their words. The littlest one at the back of the group grinned at him, they grinned at each other, and as she jumped right over his body she froze, impossibly, in midair, and turned, smiling, to look straight at me. The boy lifted his arms toward her, and she caught another flying sheet of newspaper between her hands, like she was banging cymbals, and held herself still and proud in the air, still watching me, her eyes a bewitched sealskin-gray, cool and knowing. Then she landed, precise and taut as a gymnast, and her mother pounded over to collect her. “I flew,” the kid said, and her mother said, “How lovely,” and the boy sat back up, touched his fingers to his mouth, and watched them go.
I didn’t speak. I think maybe in that moment I’d forgotten how. He held out his hand to me and I sat down next to him, silenced, and stared at the water. The old people’s swimming group was bobbing about in the concrete-colored waves in their bright caps with their straight necks, like some odd species of bird. I thought, That didn’t happen, there’s no way that just happened, and I could feel him smiling then, feel him watching me. So I turned and looked at him. I had no idea what I would do next, but his smile washed over me and all I needed to do was smile back. It was that easy. An old motorbike cut through the quiet with its opened-out mega-phone rattle, and up at the café someone dropped a load of plates and all the atoms of the sea crashed louder against the rocks, and the sky—that shell of atmosphere—was impossibly, ridiculously, groundbreakingly, life-changingly, earth-shatteringly blue.
ELEVEN
Memory is a distorted, persuasive thing and I can’t trust it, my own version of things, but I also have to, because it’s the only version I’ll ever have. I think about us, me and Novo, that morning on the beach, and at first it’s not so much what was said as what went on underneath that I remember best—tectonic plates moving together, a confirmation, the puzzle box sprung open. It happened fast, like everything does, and there wasn’t time to think about it except there also was, enough time that while we looked at each other, I could say to myself that this was something unexpected and easy and just perfect. A run of green lights, smoothest journey ever, so you can’t believe your luck and before you know it you’ve arrived. Alice down the rabbit hole. Edmund through the wardrobe. Us on the flattened sand, me and a tall, dark, magic, infinite boy with a quick smile and crumpled trousers and upturned palms. What did I say about the unknown? On its mark, getting set to happen. Go.
He sat close enough for me to feel the warmth of him all down my side, without touching, and while I thought about all the numberless charged particles crashing about in that slice of air between us, he asked me my name.
“Jude,” I said, and he told me that Jude the Obscure was the saddest, bleakest book he’d ever read. “Quite a thing to have to carry around with you your whole life.”
“Yeah, well,” I said. “I’m just glad you’re not singing the Beatles at me over and over, like everybody else does. Longest song on earth, and let’s face it, not the best.”
He laughed, a match strike lighting up corners of the day I hadn’t even looked at.
“I’m Novo,” he said, and I knew instantly that it was the only name in the history of names good enough for him.
That’s when he hit me with the Saint Jude thing—patron saint of lost causes—and I was like, “Really? Why didn’t I know that?” and I thought, even then, that this was bound to be one of them, a lost cause. That this was going to trample all over us whether we wanted it to or not.
“Whatever,” I said. “Lost causes are underrated anyway.”
He took my hand, and my skin lit up like the sea under his fingers, pulsed and shimmered just below the surface, and we both watched it, we both smiled, and I wasn’t afraid, not even for the smallest fraction of a second. Not ever.
“Pleased to meet you, Novo,” I said, my veins full of fireflies.
We just looked at each other, without speaking, without needing to speak, and then I broke the quiet.
“What is this?” I said, holding my arms out, still filled with light. “How do you do that?”
And even as I asked it, I knew I was in over my head.
“That’s just me, being me,” he said.
I nodded like I understood. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
He said, “I warn you. I’m not from here.”
I laughed. “Yeah. Me neither.”
His eyes were black and white. “I mean I’m not from anywhere, Jude. I’m not like you. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do. I can see that. I believe you.”
The morning was golden and the air was laced at the edges with the stink of kelp and saltwater. Birds picked intently at the baking seaweed, patrolling their lines and lifting now and then straight up into the air on invisible currents.
Novo smiled and shook his head a little.
“Are you ready?” he said.
“For what?”
“For everything I have to give you.”
“What do you mean?”