Chapter One
June 30, 1997
You know those times when the person you are and the person you want to be are exactly—down to your smallest fingernail moon and flimsiest eyelash and your left knee and the part in your hair—the same person? (That fingernail moon is actually called a lunula, by the way, a fact I just learned but that I’m sure I’ll still remember years from now when I’m wherever I am reading this journal because how could anyone forget a word like that, so pale and curved like a shell on a beach?)
Tonight was one of those times, and it’s interesting because it could have easily turned out to be an ordinary night (although, for us, even ordinary is kind of great). We go to the quarry a lot. We sit under pretty skies a lot, not just at the quarry but other places, too. The champagne was new, a first, but I can’t swear that it was the champagne that actually tipped things from ordinary to everything-in-the-right-place, all-of-us-exactly-who-we-want-to-be splendid. I love the word “splendid.”
It was dark. Serious dark. Just an edge of moon, like a little silver smile tipped sideways; the sky sugared with stars. The woods on the far bank weren’t really woods but just a big black ruffle, and the woods on our side clanged with peepers or bugs or I don’t know what else, not deafeningly like in real summer, but in that edge-of-spring way. In a more minor, sleepier key.
We were all there: Kirsten, CJ, Gray, me. The fantastic four. The forever four.
And Trev, too, a little ways away, sitting with his back against a pine tree, smoking, just a moving pinprick of orange and an outline I’d know anywhere. I hate it when he smokes because I really need him to live forever and not get cancer, but if I ever told him to stop, I’d sound like our mom, which is obviously the worst, most traitorous thing I could do. Tonight, though, I didn’t even want to. Trev just being there, his long, slow exhales, the smell of cigarette in the crisp air mixing with the other smells—dirt, pine needles, the metal smell of water—was comforting. Like Trevor was God, watching over us.
We sat on the ground, and even though I forgot and left the blanket back in the car, I swear the dirt under us wasn’t hard at all. Gray leaning against a rock, me leaning against Gray, my back, his chest, long, scrawny me, and dense, strong, wide Gray. We passed around the bottle Trev stole from our mom’s wine collection (and if I know Trevor, he’d tried to snag the most expensive one just to spite her), and divided among five, it didn’t go far, but oh my God, champagne. Gold and silver at the same time, sharp and ice-cold and burning. Kirsten said to sip, but I said, “Screw that,” and gulped and felt the sizzle light a path from my throat to my feet.
No wonder people drink champagne at celebrations. And here we were, my friends and I, with nothing to celebrate except for everything.
We talked the way we do: blizzards of words, everyone laughing and interrupting, followed by small silences, like soap bubbles floating. CJ told one of his long, random, fact-packed stories, which started with how some kids stole his shorts out of his gym locker (again) and tacked them up on the science bulletin board (again), and ended—by some CJ logic—in a mini-lecture about water-resistant lotus plant leaves, and it was the easiest thing in the world to be the way we were: just voices, gleams of teeth, eyes, Kirsten’s white sweatshirt, her weird caw of a laugh cracking the overhanging quiet. And, it hit me so hard how, oh my God, I love these people, and all at once, I realized we had to do something to honor the, I don’t know, completeness of everything. The everything of everything, as if two hours could contain every single good, pure, fun, gorgeous thing the world had to offer.
I gave the back of Gray’s hand a hard kiss and disentangled and stood up.
“Okay, we’re jumping!” I said.
“Hell, no,” drawled Kirsten.
“Hell, yes,” I said. “It’s already been decided.”
“Not by me,” said Kirsten.
“Not by me, either,” I said. “I’m just the messenger. It’s been decided.”
Gray laughed, and, oh, but my boy’s laugh is better than champagne. It’s like a cross between a guitar strum and hot toast with butter and honey. “Too cold,” he said.
Even though it was a little chilly for a June night, I said, “It’s summer!”
“Too dark, too,” said Kirsten, shuddering. “How do we know for sure that the water’s even down there? Maybe someone moved it. Maybe it’s full of sharks.”
“You never know! CJ,” I said, pointing at him, “you jump with me.”
“It’s not like I’m terrified or anything,” said CJ, scooting backward away from me. “It’s not like I have a primal fear of dark water. Or of jumping into the void. I mean it’s the same water as always, right?”
“Of course it’s not,” I scoffed. “The whole point is that it’s different! The whole point is jumping into the void.”
“You,” said Gray, shaking his head and reaching for me. “Come back and sit with me, crazy Zinny.”
But I was already taking off my clothes, stripping down to my bra and underwear.
“It’ll be magnificent, dumbasses,” I told them. I love the word “magnificent.”
I walked to the edge, to the same spot we’d all jumped from—even, once and only once, CJ, under duress and holding his nose, his eyes squeezed shut—in the daylight. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and held out my arms, the cool air making all the hair on them rise. Standing there, I could feel not only the air, but also the stars in the sky, the entire Milky Way swirling on my skin and blazing down my spine and fizzing like champagne through my veins.
I tossed back my head and sang, “O, holy night, the stars were brightly shining,” even though I can’t really sing and it was nowhere near Christmas.
The bugs went still. They actually did.
And then I heard Trevor say, “Wait, Zin,” and there he was, my brother, grinning like a devil in his boxers and his T-shirt, in his splendor and magnificence. And we locked our hands together, Trev and I, and we jumped.
Chapter Two
Ginny
Here’s what I learned on that Thursday afternoon in the produce section of Devonshire Market: sometimes, your hands can be wiser than you are; sometimes, they can sit there on the ends of your arms just like always, and comprehend truths that your mind hasn’t yet comprehended. Truths like: Ginny Beale, life as you know it just ended.
I don’t recommend it: having life as you know it end in Devonshire Market. Particularly not in Devonshire Market on a busy autumn afternoon when you’re wearing a brand-new cream-colored Patagonia fleece and holding two tomatoes, one in each hand. The tomatoes were heirlooms, the left one a piebald purple and jade, the right one striped like a palm-size watermelon, both prizefighter-battered and lumpily picturesque in a way that screamed eight dollars a pound. And if life as you know it must end like this—Devonshire Market, fleece, heirlooms—be sure you’re not engaged in conversation (the conversation, the one that ends life as you know it) with a man dangling an actual woven, double-handled marketing basket from the crook of his arm like Little Red Riding Hood.
That’s what everyone called it (and by “everyone” I mean, of course, we who possessed the willingness to buy tomatoes priced at eight dollars a pound): Devonshire Market, no the, and if that sounds vaguely British to you (“at university,” “in hospital”), I’m pretty sure it was meant to. The market was not located in a town named Devonshire; there was no town named that within a thousand-mile radius, possibly within ten thousand, possibly within the entire New World. Instead, the market was, as Jeb, the son of the owner once told me, named after clotted cream, the kind that comes in a jar.