“I could do that,” he said, as a pinprick on his arm grabbed his attention. He cursed and swatted at the feasting mosquito. “These bugs!”
“Oh, don’t kill her,” Piper intoned. “She’s just trying to make her babies.”
Anders pulled a face. “On my arm?”
“No. She just needs your blood because she doesn’t produce enough protein on her own to form her eggs. It’s called anautogeny.”
Anders wavered between being disgusted and impressed. “Well, tell her to use your blood, then.” He scratched at his arm where a bump was already forming.
“You know, I’ve never understood why people love ladybugs and butterflies—”
Anders raised a finger, effectively cutting her off. “I don’t like ladybugs or butterflies.”
Piper blinked. “OK, I don’t understand why most people love ladybugs and butterflies, but not mosquitoes or roaches. It makes no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense. Mosquitoes are parasites. And roaches—” He shuddered again, not even sure where to begin with how disgusting they were. “Name one redeeming quality they have.”
“I’ll name five.” She held out her pointer finger and began ticking points off. “They’re survivors—they’ve been around for more than 280 million years. They can hold their breath for forty minutes. They play a major role in our ecosystem, converting just about everything they eat into nutrients that nourish growing plants. In China, they’re breeding them to help combat their huge landfill problem.” She paused, thinking. “Oh, and the Chinese believe cockroaches have medicinal benefits, so they eat them ground up in pills or fried.”
Anders looked at the crab cake he was about to take another bite of, and lowered it back onto the plate. “Remind me never to go to Beijing.”
Piper giggled. They sat in a comfortable silence, watching the mist turn into a dripping rain.
“Why are you here?” Anders asked suddenly.
She glanced at him, arching her eyebrows. “Because you wanted lunch?”
“No, not here here. I mean the island. I know you said your mom brought you over. But she’s gone. Why did you stay? Or I don’t know—go to college?”
She sighed and turned her face back toward the rain. “You sound just like Tom.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, after high school, he was adamant that I leave; go get a degree.”
“And?”
“I don’t know. This is my home. Everything I know and love. And he isn’t ever going to leave. Why should I?” She shrugged, as if that explained everything. She adjusted in her seat and her knee accidentally nudged his. Anders felt the sudden warmth of her skin against his and then it was gone.
Well, he did leave, actually, Anders wanted to say. Instead he said: “Yeah, but you could always come back.”
Piper cocked her head. “You don’t really do small talk, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Most people chat about the weather. What’d you do last night? That sort of thing. But you—you always cut straight to the heart of things. Why didn’t you go to college? Do you miss your mom?”
Anders paused. He’d never considered that before, but it was true. “I’m sorry. Occupational hazard, I guess.”
“No, I like it. I never wonder what you’re thinking.”
“I wonder what you’re thinking all the time,” Anders said, and then snapped his jaw shut. Did he have to say everything that came into his mind?
Piper let the words hang in the air for a few seconds and then changed the subject. “Tell me about you. What’s your family like? Why did you decide to be a journalist?”
For the next ten minutes Anders monopolized the conversation, telling her about Kelsey, his mom and dad—the condensed, easy-to-understand version that made his family sound as idyllic as a Norman Rockwell painting, even if that wasn’t quite accurate. Then he explained about Superman and Clark Kent.
“Wait—you’ve known what you wanted to be since you were five?”
“Yep.”
“And you never once wanted to be anything else.”
Anders considered this. “I guess that’s not entirely true. There was a full month in the fourth grade when I wanted to be a B-boy.”
“A what?”
“You know, a break-dancer?”
“No.” Piper’s jaw went slack, her eyes round. “You?”
“Yeah. It was the first year America’s Got Talent came on TV—you know that show?” Piper nodded. “They had this break-dance group that was amazing and I decided I was going to learn how. I watched a lot of YouTube videos and practiced in the mirror every night. I thought I was pretty good, too—until the talent show, when the entire audience erupted in laughter, quickly shattering my B-boy career dreams.”
“Aw.” Piper clutched her heart. “That’s terrible.”
“To be fair, I don’t think they were trying to be cruel. I’m pretty sure they thought I was doing a sketch comedy routine.”
Piper laughed and then sat up a little straighter in her chair. “Well, go on, then.”
“What?”
“Show me some of your moves.”
“Ah, no. Absolutely not.”
“Please?”
“No. I literally haven’t danced since. I’ve never even watched the video.”
“Video. There’s evidence?” Piper’s entire face brightened at the prospect. “Oh, I really need to see that.”
“Well, fortunately it’s probably somewhere in my parents’ basement, never to see the light of day.”
“I would pay so much money. I can’t even picture you as a child, much less a break-dancing child. You seem like one of those people that was born as an adult.”
Anders absorbed the observation. It wasn’t far from the truth—he’d always felt different from his peers. Older in some way. But he was done talking about himself. They sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes, Piper with a small grin, at what Anders assumed must be the thought of him break-dancing, and he was glad to have amused her.
“You never finished telling me about your mom the other day.”
“If I miss her?” Piper shrugged. “Of course. We email, though. She calls every now and then, but with the time difference and her work—well, we barely talked when we lived in the same house. She’s the type of person who gets all consumed by her work. So even when she was here, she wasn’t here all the time, if that makes sense.”