Page 35 of People We Meet on Vacation

His mouth droops open, eyes going wide and glossy with feigned hurt.

“Stop!” I yelp, diving away from him and into the driver’s seat like he’s a live grenade.

“Stop what?” He bends to insert his Sad Puppy Face in front of me.

“No!” I screech, shoving him away and writhing sideways in the seat as if trying to escape a swarm of ants pouring off him. I fling myself into the passenger seat, and he calmly climbs into the driver’s seat.

“I hate that face,” I say.

“Untrue,” Alex says.

He’s right.

I love that ridiculous face.

Also, I hate driving.

“When you find out about reverse psychology, I’m screwed,” I say.

“Hm?” he says, glancing sidelong as he starts up the car.

“Nothing.”

We drive two hours north to the motel I found on the eastern side of the island. It’s a misty wonderland, wide uncluttered roads lined in forests as ancient as they are dense. There’s not a ton to do in town, but thereareredwoods and hiking trails to waterfalls and a Tim Hortons just a few miles down the road from our motel, a low, lodge-like place with a gravel parking lot out front and a wall of fog-cloaked foliage behind it.

“I sort of love it here,” Alex says.

“I sort of do too,” I agree.

And it doesn’t matter that it rains all week and we finish every hike soaked to the bone, or that we can only find two affordable restaurants and have to eat at each of them thrice, or that we slowly start to realize nearly everyone else we cross paths with is in the upper-sixties-and-older set and that we’re definitely staying in a retirement village. Or that our motel room is always damp, or that there’s so little to do we have time to kill one full day in a nearby Chapters bookstore (where we eat both breakfastandlunch in their café in silence while Alex reads Murakami and I take notes for future reference from a stack of Lonely Planet guides).

None of it matters. I spend the whole week thinking,This speaks to me.

Thisis what I want for the rest of my life. To see new places. To meet new people. To try new things. I don’t feel lost or out of place here. There’s no Linfield to escape or long, boring classes to dread going back to. I’m anchored only in this moment.

“Don’t you wish we could always be doing this?” I ask Alex.

He looks up over his book at me, one corner of his mouth curling. “Wouldn’t leave a lot of time for reading.”

“What if I promise to take you to a bookstore in every city?” I ask. “Then will you quit school and live in a van with me?”

His head tilts to one side as he thinks. “Probably not,” he says, which is no surprise for a variety of reasons, including the fact that Alexloveshis classes so much he’s already researching English grad programs, whereas I’m muscling through with straight Cs.

“Well, I had to try,” I say with a sigh.

Alex sets his book down. “I tell you what. You can have my summer breaks. I’ll keep those wide open for you, and we’ll go anywhere you want, that we can afford.”

“Really?” I say, dubious.

“Promise.” He holds out his hand, and we shake on it, then sit there grinning for a few seconds, feeling like we’ve just signed some life-alteringly significant contract.

Our second-to-last day, we hike through the quiet of Cathedral Grove just as the sun is coming up, spilling golden light over the forest in little droplets, and when we leave, we drive straight to a town called Coombs, whose main attraction is a handful of cottages with grass roofs and a herd of goats grazing over them. We take pictures of them, stick our heads through photo-op cutouts that put our faces on crudely painted goat bodies, and spend a luxurious two hours wandering a market stuffed with samples of cookies, candies, and jams.

On the last full day of our trip, we drive across the island to Tofino, the peninsula wewouldhave stayed on if we weren’t trying to save every possible penny. I surprise Alex with (perhaps worryingly cheap) tickets for a water taxi that takes us to the island I read about, with the trail through the rain forest to the hot spring.

Our water taxi driver is named Buck, and he’s not much older than us, with a tangle of sun-bleached yellow hair sticking out from under his mesh-backed hat. He’s handsome in an utterly filthy way, with that specifically beachy kind of body odor mixed with patchouli. It should be repulsive, but he makes it work.

The ride itself is a violent affair, the taxi’s motor so loud I have to scream into Alex’s ear, my hair slapping against his face from the wind, to say, “THIS MUST BE WHAT A ROCK FEELS LIKE WHEN YOU SKIP IT OVER WATER,” my voice thunking in and out with each rhythmic hit of the little vessel against the top of the dark, choppy waves.

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