by Trish Doller
“Shit.” Noah laughs, holding me on his lap as he digs in his pocket for his phone. It rings a long time before kicking over to voice mail. “Dude. Matty, come back,” he says. “We’re sorry, okay? Come back and get us.” His shoulders sag as he disconnects the call. “We could be in for a long night.”
“He’s not coming back?”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Noah says. “I don’t think we took the Devil’s Chair seriously enough for him, so he’s probably gone off to sulk.”
“What do we do now?”
“Well, we have two options. We can walk back to our campsite, which will probably take a couple of hours from here,” Noah says. “Or we could just stay until morning.”
“The idea of sleeping in a cemetery scares me a little.”
His big warm hands cover my back as he kisses me. “We don’t have to sleep.”
“Noah, I’m not—”
“I know.” He kisses the tip of my nose. “You’re not the kind of girl to have sex in a graveyard. But let me ask you this … what kind of girl are you?”
“What?”
“Look, anything I say at this point is going to sound like I’m trying to get in your pants,” he says. “Which I am, but not because you’re some campground conquest. I really like you, Cadie.” Noah’s lips find mine in the dark again. “But if it happens right here, right now, we’re the only ones who will know.” He must be aware of how persuasive his mouth—including the words coming out of it—can be, because the next time he kisses me, the tip of his tongue teasing against my upper lip, I feel boneless. Breathless. “It’s not going to change you into anyone other than who you want to be.”
Maybe it’s a line. Maybe it’s a lie. But I like this answer enough to take up where we left off, and it isn’t long before heat races through me like a brush fire, burning me right up to the roots of my hair. I let Noah remove my shirt. “I draw the line at this chair,” I say between kisses, as I tug his T-shirt up over his head. “It creeps me out.”
He doesn’t say anything. He just takes my hand and leads me away from the Devil’s Chair, beneath a copse of trees where the ground isn’t so sandy and we’re not directly on top of someone’s final resting place. I never pictured my first time would be like this—in a cemetery two hours from home. In my head it was always with Justin. Always in my own bedroom. And always on some hypothetical weekend when both my dad and Danny were gone.
Even in my imagination the odds were against me having sex.
But here I am, with Noah’s discarded jeans and T-shirt serving as a bumpy barricade between the rough grass and my ass, and I straight-up want him.
“You, um—you have a condom, right?” I don’t know why I’m whispering, but saying the words out loud in a cemetery seems … indecent. As if being completely naked is somehow not.
His lips move on my neck, sending a little shower of sparks through me. “Uh-huh.”
“With you?”
Noah’s soft laughter vibrates against my skin. “In my jeans, under your butt.”
He lifts and shifts me, rummaging through his pockets until he produces the square foil packet. I feel strange watching him put it on, but I do and it’s fascinating because even though I’ve seen Justin—and even Noah—naked before, I’ve never seen this.
When he’s finished, he locks eyes on mine and I feel him against me. And then inside me. It hurts a little at first. My knees tremble on either side of him, and my heart thumps with this terrible fear that I’ve made a mistake. Especially because he falls silent—his eyes bottomless dark and his face so serious—and I wonder if I’m doing something wrong. If he can tell I’ve never done this before.
But then he moves so gently, and almost all at once I lose the ability to breathe in a meaningful way. The everyday inhale-exhale method walks off the job, and over his shoulder the stars seem to explode out of the darkness and—no one ever tells you that your first time can feel good. But it does. And when a gasp slides out of my throat, Noah wraps it up in the sweetest kiss.
We dress in silence later—so much later that there is a hint of light in the still-dark sky—and I have no idea what time it is or what to think. Or what Noah thinks of me. And even though it’s a weird moment and place to be thinking about her, I can’t help thinking about my mom. Whether I would tell her about this. Wonder what she would say.
We had the sex talk back when I wasn’t kissing Ray Buck. Girls at our church were taking vows to save themselves until marriage and wearing purity rings. Mom couldn’t even sit through the pledge service without giggling, so she excused herself and went outside. Later, she told me that my virginity wasn’t something to be lost or won, given or received.
“Your goodness doesn’t lie between your thighs,” she said, and my twelve-year-old blush was so furious I thought my face was going to explode. “And you don’t lose value by having sex. When you are ready, Cadie, you will know it. Just be your regular smart self and you’ll be fine. Also, never have sex with Ray Buck. He’s as dumb as a post.”
Noah buttons up his jeans and leans forward to kiss me, cradling my cheek in the palm of his hand. “Doin’ okay?” he asks, and I like that he wants to know.
“I think so.” But the truth is, I’m not completely sure. I am changed. My skin feels different. New. And I can still feel the imprint of him all over me. But here is what I know: I don’t have to be in love with Noah. And having sex doesn’t make me into someone I don’t want to be. I’m not a slut and Mom was right. I’m still Arcadia Wells, ridiculously normal. “Do you think the dead mind? I mean, are we disturbing them?”
Maybe I’m not completely normal.
Noah wraps his arms around my head and rubs his knuckles across my hair. “What a weird thing to worry about,” he says. “But no, I don’t think they even know we’re here. I don’t believe in tarot or the Devil’s Chair or any of that stuff, but if I did, I’d say they were probably happy that someone was getting laid instead of getting laid to rest.”
Laughing, I trail my fingers up his side just above his jeans, making him squirm—a weird new knowledge I have of his anatomy—and he drags me back down to the ground. Noah stretches out, crossing his legs at the ankles, and holds me against him. Kisses the top of my head. I close my eyes and feel the rise and fall of his chest under my cheek until we’re breathing together. He tells me about the other places he’s slept—abandoned warehouses, derelict houses, communal squats inhabited by his drug-addict friends.
“It beat living at home,” he says, when I ask why. “My dad drank a lot, and I didn’t like getting the shit beat out of me for no reason.”
“Is that why your mom sent you to Maine?”
“Partly.” The pause that follows feels weighted with more—with things he wants to say—but a yawn overtakes me and I feel his lips against my temple. “Go to sleep, Cadie.”
“Noah?”
“Yeah?”
“I might be the kind of girl who has sex in graveyards.”
His chest shakes with silent laughter, and he squeezes me gently against him. “I guess that makes you my kind of girl.”
Chapter 11
Matt is lounging in the Devil’s Chair when we wake a few hours later, his leg thrown over the arm as if it’s his very own chair. His hair is damp at the ends, and he’s wearing another plaid shirt from what seems an endless supply. This one is primarily brown and does really nice things to his eyes. His mouth curves into a sly little grin, as if he knows what I’m thinking.
“The beer is still here,” he says. “My illusions have been shattered.”
“Sleep well?” Noah asks.
“Like a baby. You?”
“Ground was a little hard,” Noah says. “Otherwise, okay.”
Swiveling my attention from cousin to cousin, I wonder whether an explosion looms on the horizon, but both of them are grinning as if one abandoning the other at midnight in cemeteries is a common occurrence. So very different from the knock-down-drag-outs Justin and
Jason would have over minor things, like eating the last slice of cheese or what to watch on the TV in the back room.
Matt stands and hands Noah the keys to the Cougar. “I walked Molly.”
“Thanks, man.”
“You’re welcome.” Matt drops his arm around my shoulder as we walk toward the car. He smells nice, too. Clean. “Cadie, did you know there’s an actual town in Florida called Arcadia? We should go there.”
“If you want. There’s nothing really there, though. Cattle farms, orange groves, a one-street main drag like back home in High Springs.” He opens the door for me, and I climb into the back with the dog. It’s so comfortable after sleeping on the ground that I stretch my legs between the front seats, my heels resting on the console. “The Peace River is close, but other than that …”
“We are here for the camping.” Noah drops into the driver’s seat and tickles the bottom of my dirty foot—he’s as familiar with my terrain as I am with his—and my face gets hot. He grins at me in the rearview mirror as he starts the engine. “Maybe we can paddle downriver from Arcadia to the Gulf.”
“It’s a pretty long way, and then we’d have to go back for the car,” Matt points out. “But we could paddle as far as we can in a single day, camp overnight on the riverbank, and then head back the next day.”
“Done,” Noah says. “Cadie, you in?”
“If I can have a hot shower, a change of clothes, and breakfast,” I say, “I’ll go anywhere you want.”
On our way through Cassadaga, we pass Joan’s house with the purple neon hand glowing in the front window. She comes out of the house with a little boy. As she locks the front door he does these weird little toddler hops—the kind where he tries to get both feet off the ground, but actually only gets one at a time. It’s something I remember Daniel Boone doing when he was learning to hop, and I feel a longing so ferocious it brings tears to my eyes. I lean forward, my face between the seats. “Can I borrow a phone? I need to call home.”
“Yeah, sure.” Matt opens the glove compartment and as he rummages through registration papers and CD cases, I decide I’ll call Duane first. Feel him out to see if Dad is still as mad as he was yesterday. Then I see something that brings Joan’s warning slamming back into my head and everything else is just … gone.
“Whose gun is that?”
Lots of people I know own guns. Justin’s dad owns an entire arsenal of hunting rifles displayed in a bizarre china-cabinet-for-gun-collectors in their family room. Duane keeps a gun in his tow truck—just in case. Even my father has an unloaded gun locked in the safe in his bedroom closet. But a medium in Cassadaga didn’t warn me about those guns.
“It’s mine.” Noah says the words matter-of-factly. There’s no pride or shame in his tone, just his own Noah-ness.
The gun looks like something from an old-school police show, and even though Joan didn’t describe the gun from her premonition, I can’t help imagining this is what she saw.
“Cadie, are you okay?” Noah pulls the car onto the shoulder of the road and puts it in park. “You look completely freaked.”
“Why do you have a gun?”
“There are all kinds of dangerous things you can run into out in the Maine woods—bears, bobcats, a pissed-off moose”—he smiles at me, and I think that’s my cue to respond, but laughter is very far away right now—“and even not-so-good people. I’ve never needed it, but I can put it in the trunk if it would make you feel better.”
“It would,” I say, although I’m not sure anything about the gun is actually going to make me feel good. But right there on the side of the road with me watching, Noah unloads enough of the trunk to have access to the spare and hides the gun inside the gray-checkered spare tire cover.
“Hey.” After the trunk is reloaded, he touches my chin to get me to look at him. It’s hard to do when I don’t know what to think about all of this. “I was hiking Mount Katahdin once, and I met a black bear on the trail. She was fat and lazy and ready to hibernate, so she didn’t even bother with me. I got lucky. Another time I was camping alone near the coast when I was approached by a hobo looking for food. He turned out to be a harmless dude with amazing stories, but both those things made me realize I had to be more prepared. I don’t want to carry the bulk and weight of a rifle, so … Cadie, you don’t have to be afraid of me.”
“It’s just—yesterday, the psychic’s premonition—she saw a tattoo and a gun.”
“What kind of tattoo?”
“Not one of yours,” I say. “But—”
“Look, there’s no good way to say this, but do you think maybe you’re overreacting a little bit? I mean, you’re putting a lot of stock in the word of a woman who makes up prophecies for a living in a town founded by a man who believed he was led here by ghosts.”
I laugh, mostly at myself. “When you put it like that …”
“I swear to God, Cadie, I will not hurt you.” Noah doesn’t try to kiss me, which is a huge relief considering my nerves are still a little jangled. He just touches my arm with gentle fingers and walks his way along the side of the car to the driver’s door. He looks back at me as the door hinge creaks open. “You in?”
I’ve never had an issue with the fact that my best friend keeps a gun for protection when he’s making roadside assistance calls along I-75, so why can’t two guys camping their way through a strange state do the same? Florida is full of weirdos—most of them natives. Running my hand through my hair, I look at Noah standing there looking at me. He’s waiting for an answer, and I am a sucker for his face all over again.
So I get in the car.
Chapter 12
“Cadiebug, where are you?”
Duane doesn’t sound mad when I call him from the road, but he doesn’t sound especially pleased with me, either. I press a finger to my ear opposite the phone to blot out the rush of the wind.
“Down around Arcadia,” I say. “We’re planning to do some canoeing on the Peace River.”
“Is Lindsey Buck with you?”
“She left yesterday morning before I even woke up,” I say. “Texted that she had a family thing and needed to go home.”
“Her mom got a message saying she was with you.”
“That’s weird.”
“Very,” he says. “A camper’s gone missing up in Okefenokee Swamp, Lindsey’s not answering her phone, and you’re off traipsing around Florida with a couple of strangers you met at a party. So you might be able to understand why your dad is a little crazy right now. Truth be told, I’m a little worried, too. You doing okay?”
I’ve got Molly’s head resting on my thigh, and Noah looking at me in the rearview mirror as he drives. “Couldn’t be better.”
“As long as we’ve been friends I’ve known you to have a stubborn streak,” Duane says. “But what’s up with this little rebellion? This ain’t like you.”
“I’ve only been gone two days,” I say. “Dad should be able to manage for two lousy days. I’m tired, Duane, and I hate being made to feel like a selfish bitch over this when I just want to feel like a regular teenage girl again. Even if it’s just for a few days.”
“When you coming home?”
“Tomorrow,” I say. “We’re going to paddle as far downstream as we can make it in one day, camp overnight, then head back. I promise.”
“If you want, I can come pick you up,” Duane says. “Maybe bring Daniel Boone along for the ride.”
“Maybe.” I probably should have said those things to my dad instead of unloading them on my best friend, but it’s nice to get them off my chest. “I’ll call you.”
“Be safe,” Duane says. “And if you hear from Lindsey, let us know, okay?”
“Okay.”
It’s closing in on noon by the time we’re on the water. Noah paddles solo, carrying his dog and a pared-down collection of camping gear, while Matt and I share the second canoe—him in back, me in front, and the big red cooler in the middle.
“I think we’re going to ge
t wet,” Noah says, as we head side by side up the Peace River from the landing at Gardner, a few miles north of Arcadia. The water is the same tea-stained brown as the Santa Fe back home. A little narrower. Not quite as shady, although the same kinds of trees line the bank. The current is slow and lazy this time of year so paddling upstream is not hard work. But clouds are thickening in the sky and the bright blue of this morning is working its way toward gray. I think he’s right.
“There’s a landing with a campground at Zolfo Springs,” Matt says. “It’s about thirteen miles, and as long as we don’t get lightning we can paddle in the rain.”
“Do you think you’ll be able to handle that, Cadie?” Noah asks.
The extent of my experience includes my river picnic with Justin, a two-hour trip I did with my dad when I was a kid (he did all the work), and our visit to Naked Ed the other day. But a hopeful look hangs on Noah’s face, and I want to prove to him—to both of them, really—that I can do this. That I can keep up. “I guess I will.”
Noah’s blue-ribbon smile makes me feel as if I’ve won a contest, and I wish we were together in one canoe, but Matt’s been like a third wheel since Lindsey bailed. It doesn’t seem fair to make him do everything alone. It’s not his fault she’s gone.
“Hey, Cadie.” I turn around at the sound of Matt’s voice. He takes off his Red Sox baseball cap and leans forward in the canoe to drop it on my head. “This’ll help keep the rain off your face if it comes to that, and I have a spare rain jacket in my pack.”
“Will you be okay without it?” The cap is warm and damp with sweat around the band, but the bill throws shade across my face. He knots a blue bandanna around his dark hair. With a day’s worth of stubble along his jaw and his hair off his forehead, his resemblance to Noah is profound. They could be brothers.
“I’m good.” Matt winks, and I spin back forward, heat crawling up my neck. He laughs softly, but I don’t turn around.