Page 94 of A Quick Stop in Paradise

“At least I used my actual name.”

“Okay, you win just this once. It’s still close, though.”

“I’ll give you that.” She sighed. “I kept telling her we should go do painting or something together, but we never actually got a chance to do it… now I feel sad I didn’t get to put my studies to good use trying to impress a hot girl.”

“Do some paintings and post them on your Instagram. Shedidfollow you back, right?”

“I amnotbecoming an art influencer just to get her attention. I’d be just as bad as you then.”

“Just as bad,you’d be ten times worse. I could see you doing it, though.”

“Ten times is alot.Have you seen how bad you are? Maybe just like… three times worse.”

“Five times.”

“Five,” she settled. “I almost wish we hadn’t added each other… a clean break would have been easier.”

“Says the one chiding me for having a clean break…”

“I said Ialmostwish it. Ugh. What’s the sense in life if you’re not going to spend it looking for something good?” She pointed an accusing finger at me, and I flinched looking at it. “If you’re just cutting out everything that makes you happy because one day you might not have it? When everything we have in life, everything that’s good and everything that’s bad, all of it is temporary anyway? There’s no difference between hiding from everything you want and just lying down to die. Jesus, why were any of usbornif not to go and look for those things that make lifegood?What’s the point of carrying on each day just wincing that the next one might hurt?” She dropped her hand, looking down at the ground. “What a stupid-ass fucking mindset.”

I didn’t say anything—let the silence set in, let the sound of the wind in the trees and the low crackle from the brick oven, the distant rolling of the tides, the occasional hum of a car driving past, fill the night air around us, before, finally, I said, “You’re going to start posting your paintings, aren’t you?”

“Ugh. Yeah.”

“Youaregood at it. I’m sure she’ll notice. Maybe she’ll saydamn, what a cool painting, let’s have video sex.”

“You’re so annoying.” She paused. “That’d be nice. I, uh, I don’t think it’d happen, though.”

Kind of embarrassing how she was braver than I am with these things. Not embarrassing because there was something wrong with her, just… she’d made it clear since the first time she got here that she looked up to me, followed me as some kind of role model, even though she’d die before she admitted that to my face. Cool, confident queer woman who owned her sexuality and didn’t need her family’s approval of it. And now, here I was, letting her down.

Letting myself down.

Maybe one day I’d be better. Or maybe I was wasting my life away shrinking away from the next day. And maybe trying to look cool and confident didn’t mean anything when I didn’t have the guts to do something hard.

Maybe. Who could say?

Chapter 24

Ryan

Iknew saying goodbye was a mistake the second I closed the door to Brooklyn’s house behind me, but I didn’t turn around like I should have. Just kept on walking, telling myselftake ten more steps and then you can think about it, just ten more steps, and eventually, ten more steps added up to the airport gate, where I sat together with the whole family feeling the tension sizzle and bubble around us.

Oscar and Stella had apparently taken it on themselves to flank me, sitting on either side of me in the terminal gate, sterile white walls and tile floors and tall windows looking out over one of the two runways the airport had. Quiet right now—not the busiest airport. I’d been through smaller, but going through this one alongside the oppressive silence of my family felt claustrophobic.

Not least of all because Shane had not, in fact, made good on his promise to leave early, and he sat in the row of seats across from me, clearly trying to make eye contact with me. I had no clue what for. Guilting me for leaving him or guilting me for having been with him—I had no idea how to convey to him that I could not possibly have cared any less about anyone who wasn’t Brooklyn Sterling at the moment.

Amongst the smattering of cousins and other aunts and uncles, Mom sat on Oscar’s other side from me, lining up the four of us in a way that felt painfully symbolic against where Aunt Helena and her husband James sat on one side of Shane and my grandparents on the other, Aunt Helena whispering to Shane while my grandparents exchanged quiet complaints—from the bits I could pick out, about the trip, about my parents, and of course, about me.

I kind of wished it would blow up. This awkward tension of dead silence where everybody waited for somebody else to say something first, all keeping their bitter thoughts on the inside where everybody knew they were having them but nobody could say anything about them, made me want to scream. I never thought I’d long for hearing the kind of incessant fake-polite conversation that had been going a mile a minute on the flight here, but dammit, I was almost willing to beg somebody to say something before, almost right on the dot half an hour before boarding was supposed to start, the monkey’s paw curled, and I regretted what I’d wished for, because it was Grandma who spoke.

“Well, that’s the last vacation I go on,” she said, in that specific tone of voice where it sounded like a whisper but was clearly intended to be “accidentally” overheard, and Aunt Helena went red in the face, sitting up taller.

“Mom, please don’t say things like that,” she said. “This was just a one-off event. We’ll make sure everybody behaves next time,” she added, eyes narrowed at me as she did, voice sharpened to a prong. Stella stood up before I could stop her.

“Can we not with the passive-aggressive remarks?” she said, and Grandma scowled at her.

“Oh, and that’s what we need right now, is it? To crown things off with an argument at the airport?”

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