“I’ll say.” I handed him my bowling-ball helmet. “I can’t even imagine how far it is to electricity, much less lights that would interfere with the stars.”
Gavin unpacked the leather satchel with water and sandwiches and the folder with our assignment. He handed these to me and untied a blanket from the other side.
“Flashlight?” I asked.
“Right.” He dug around in a little box attached behind the seat. “Got it.”
We tramped across the parched earth that crunched with dried grass punctuated with tumbleweeds. “Looks like a good place to leave a body,” I said.
He laughed. “You might want to learn to ride the bike before you bump me off in the middle of nowhere.”
“Point taken.”
We scrambled up an embankment to a plateau, which was only a few yards wide but plenty big enough to spread a blanket and our meager things. The wind whipped in random bursts. I tucked the folder beneath the edge of the blanket to keep it safe and laid the food on a corner. “Now we just wait for dark?”
“Time for that body massage,” Gavin said and sat next to me, pulling me between his legs.
His hands worked the muscles of my shoulders, and I relaxed into him. The sun burned yellow on the horizon, just taking its first tentative dip behind a set of hills to the west. The ocean was long gone from our view, but the rolling landscape, barren and edged in scrubby trees and rock, offered a different brand of beautiful.
“We should have brought a camera,” I said.
“I can snap a shot with my phone,” Gavin said. “Crappy though it is.”
“Mine won’t take decent pictures at all. It’s too old,” I said.
He tugged his phone from a pocket. “First the sunset,” he said, snapping an image of the sun’s rays just starting to striate over the hills. Then he flipped the phone around. “And now us.” He laid his head against mine and took the shot.
Gavin turned the phone around. The picture was only of our chins and chests. “Fail!” I said, laughing.
“One more.” He held the phone out, angling it up a bit more. “I’m not practiced at selfies.”
“Me neither,” I said. “I’m not even on any of those social-media sites.”
“I know. I looked,” Gavin said.
I swallowed. I hadn’t wanted to be found, not by Gavin or anybody from my past. But now life was settling in again, back on track. Gavin snapped the shot, our happy faces backed by mountain and sky. It was the sort of thing you would post to your friends, but I didn’t do that. I couldn’t afford to be discovered, to be shared, to leave a trail. I had to live solely in the here and now.
Chapter 33: Gavin
I stared at the picture of Corabelle and me for a minute, trying to remember the last time we had an image together. We’d missed prom. I’d skipped graduation. It must have been some random shot. I didn’t have much of anything from those days, not even a snapshot of us. Just the picture of Finn from the funeral.
“So we’re on a plateau, right?” Corabelle asked.
“Well, that would be a compliment to this little chink in the mountains.” I stretched out on the blanket, hands beneath my head. A few stars were already emerging in the twilight.
“So, Mr. Geology Major, tell me what it is then. A mesa?”
“Not really big enough to qualify for that either.”
Corabelle settled next to me. “So what created this little flat space?”
“Same as the mountains, tectonic shifts in the mantle. Pushed the ground upward.”
“But what makes it flat?”
I swiveled my head to take in the landscape around us. “Probably wind and erosion. We’re in the path of a natural tunnel, so it wore down faster than the hills around us. Although it could have been formed this way from the start, when the ground goes straight up while being pushed. Sedimentary rock tends to split.”
“Huh.” She laid her head on my shoulder, and I wanted to hold on to the moment forever.
“So, Gavin?” she asked.
“Yup.”
“What are you going to do with a degree in geology?”
I chuckled. “You mean if I ever manage to finish?”
“How many hours do you have?”
“About sixty.”
She sat up. “That’s all? Four years to get sixty hours?”
“I work full-time. I couldn’t take a full load.”
Corabelle settled back down. “Wow. You’ll be in San Diego for another four years easy, at that rate.”
I didn’t know what she was thinking, but it sounded like she was making plans around me. “I can transfer, if you want to go somewhere else.”
She got very still, and I wondered if I assumed too much. Only a week had passed — a very good week, and with crazy moments. I smiled to myself remembering the race down the library stairwell yesterday. We were good together. I couldn’t help but think we were back to our old plan. “Corabelle, you tell me what you want.”
Her face pressed into my shirt. I reached for her ponytail and twirled it in my fingers.
“I want to go back in time,” she said.
“And do what? Figure out which night got us Finn and not do it?”
She didn’t answer, so I stared up at the sky, growing darker to reveal more of the stars. I wouldn’t mind a trip to the past, at least to the funeral. “I wouldn’t go away,” I said.