“Oh yeah? Really?”
“And there’s nothing you can’t do when you’re with me either. In fact, you have way more power than you think.”
“Why, thank you.”
We took a yacht and it sailed itself out, tiller slicing through the current, sails adjusting to the wind seamlessly while we jumped off to swim, dropping anchor when we climbed ashore to lie on every tiny bay we could find. You could do that trip a hundred times and see nothing, but with him it was different. Gray seals on the black rocks, dozens of them, pumped up and buoyant with fat, lolled in the middle of the estuary mouth, lifted their sleek heads and switched their feathered whiskers to look straight at us with their lacquer eyes. A pod of bottle-nosed dolphins slicked their backs in and out of the water and followed us, talking incessantly and opening up their laughing mouths. Novo knew the birds: cormorants, fulmars, gannets, guillemot, and razorbills. Skua, shearwater, petrel, kittiwake. Tern and falcon and raven. They flocked to him when he called them in their own voices, gathered on scraps and outcrops of rock, fussing and flapping for his attention like kids at a playground.
We walked back along the road, our shorts heavy with water and sticking to our legs like wet plaster, the cars going past us so fast I could feel the hard smack of pushed air against our bodies. Three, four inches to the right and we’d have felt the full impact of metal and engine and glass. So close, that devastation. And then the soft, quiet spaces between them, no engine, no throttle, just the air in the long grass and our feet on the tarmac, and him whistling.
We walked for days. Up on the cliffs, the narrow crumbling edges. Another fault line, another border—the land sliced and dropping straight into sea. Novo was comfortable there, at the margins of things, at the place where things change. We climbed until my lungs and my legs burned, but he wouldn’t let me stop when I wanted to, would never let me stop because he could always see another place ahead, something different. Farther. Better. More.
We walked at night too, diffuse with the low, secondhand light of the moon, and we lay on our backs in the silvered grass to map stars. Novo gave me a meteor shower, because I’d never seen one. “Every time someone says they see a shooting star,” I told him, “I’m blinking, or looking down, for that split second. It’s not even funny.” And before I’d even finished talking, the night was filled with dropping lights, and it stunned me into silence, the total quiet of all that movement, the utter vastness of the sky. I slept, and in the very early morning, wild ponies cut fast across the moor to meet us, to meet him, and we gave them grass and the cores of our apples, and Novo pressed his forehead against theirs and spoke words and they shivered with pleasure and their heads swung up when he let them go.
I remember how many stars there were out on the moor, how the wild ponies edged closer to us in the dark until we could hear their breathing and the rip of the grass they pulled out of the ground with their piano-key teeth and soft mouths. I remember how cold it got while I was sleeping, how wet everything was in the morning, like the sky had turned to liquid overnight, our quilt and blankets, my clothes soaked through and sticking to my skin.
When I said, “Thank you,” he said, “For what?” like it was all nothing, all this magic, and I guess that’s how we did it, how we acknowledged and overlooked at the same time how special this was, how unexpected and temporary, the solid and the unthinkable, the ordinary and the impossible-to-know. I don’t think either of us knew then how long it would last. I accepted and denied his otherness, our otherness. The way you do when you’re falling in love against all logic, wildly fascinating and hopelessly unrealistic, and you say, This is not happening, no way, no thanks, not to me.
How do I remember him right, this life-changing boy? I will never be able to do him justice, but I will never stop trying. Like the solitary soul I’d seen at the water’s edge that first day at the beach, Novo was deep-down sad, the definition of lonely, and yet he laughed more than anyone I have met. He loved to be wrapped up, under a blanket, doing nothing but thinking, and he loved being outside too, moving and searching. He was tireless. Curious about everything. I realized later that I never actually saw him sleep. No detail was too small or too dull to deserve the gift of his full attention. He drank it all in, and all life came to him somehow, the way those seals and dolphins came to the mouth of the sea when he was near it, and the birds clamored and the ponies galloped to meet him. His thoughts showed on his face, when he forgot to stop them. He wrote the world down with his eyes, read situations quickly, and remembered everything he saw. Agile and daring, reckless with himself. And so careful with me. Because he was indestructible, in his own way, I guess, if I ever understood that right. And I am breakable.
I remember falling down the hill when we were smashed, laughing till we were nearly sick, and my bruises in the morning, like tropical flowers, blue-green and purple, fading to yellow, and him, unmarked. Novo was horrified when he saw, but I thought they were magnificent. I said they didn’t hurt, even though they did. I said they were worth it. And I was right.
I remember how tightly he held on to my hand sometimes, when I was touching him and he didn’t want me to stop. I remember the wide fit of his fingers through mine, the lock of our mouths, the bellows-strength of our breathing. It hurts to remember that now, just like the bruises. It’s hard, like I’ve said already. A fist in the chest.
Because bubbles burst. Heads get pulled out of the sand. Love is magic. But reality is the wall you wake up driving toward, with bad brakes. You can’t avoid it. It’s always coming. I know that much.
I woke up next to him, sun flooding warm through the skylight above my bed. I woke up and he was smiling and so beautiful. In that moment, he was the sum total of all the things I thought I wanted. Right then, I would have gone anywhere, without a doubt, without a backward glance, with him. And he knew it.
“Jude,” he said.
“Novo.”
I curled in closer to his body, the body I swear I will be able to draw from memory until the day I die. Every mark and crease and curve of muscle. Every bump and scar and stretch of flesh. He breathed out. He rested his chin on the top of my head.
The knock on the door was sudden. Hard. We both flinched. Both held ourselves dead still.
“Who is it?” I said.
Henry’s voice on the other side of the door was thick with panic. The sound brought the rest of the world back with a jolt. I hadn’t thought about him, or my mum, not really, not much. It could have been a year since I had seen either of them. Or a minute.
“Something’s happened,” he was saying. “I can’t stop it. Quick.”
I got up and opened the door. Henry was ragged and disheveled. Out of breath.
“What is it?” Novo said, still lying in my bed. I looked back at him and even then, even in that moment, I thought: Just stay there. Don’t move. Ever.
“Something snapped,” Henry said. “It’s not working. Jude needs to come home. Now.”