Page 4 of People We Meet on Vacation

In the past week, we’ve had approximately forty minutes total on the shore of Sanibel Island. The rest has been spent holed up in bars and restaurants, bookstores and vintage shops, plus a whole lot of time in the shabby bungalow we’re renting, eating popcorn and counting lightning streaks. We’ve gotten no tans, seen no tropical fish, done no snorkeling or sunbathing on catamarans, or much of anything aside from falling in and out of sleep on the squashy sofa with aTwilight Zonemarathon humming its way into our dreams.

There are places you can see in their full glory, with or without sunshine, but this isn’t one of them.

“Hey,” Alex says as he puts the car in park.

“Hey, what?”

“Let’s take a picture,” he says. “Together.”

“You hate having your picture taken,” I point out. Which has always been weird to me, because on a technical level, Alex is extremely handsome.

“I know,” Alex says, “but it’s dark and I want to remember this.”

“Okay,” I say. “Yeah. Let’s take one.”

I reach for my phone, but he already has his out. Only instead of holding it up with the screen facing us so we can see ourselves, he has it flipped around, the regular camera fixed on us rather than the front-facing one. “What are you doing?” I say, reaching for his phone. “That’s what selfie mode’s for, you grandpa.”

“No!” he laughs, jerking it out of reach. “It’s not for your blog— we don’t have to look good. We just have to look like ourselves. If we have it on selfie mode I won’t even want to take one.”

“You need help for your face dysmorphia,” I tell him.

“How many thousands of pictures have I taken for you, Poppy?” he says. “Let’s just do this one how I want to.”

“Okay, fine.” I lean across the console, settling in against his damp chest, his head ducking a little to compensate for our height difference.

“One... two—” The flash pops off before he ever gets to three.

“You monster!” I scold.

He flips the phone around to look at the picture and moans. “Noooo,” he says. “Iama monster.”

I choke over a laugh as I study the horrible ghostly blur of our faces: his wet hair sticking out in stringy spikes, mine plastered in frizzy tendrils around my cheeks, everything on us shiny and red from the heat, my eyes fully closed, his squinted and puffy. “How is it possible we’re both so hard to seeandso bad-looking simultaneously?”

Laughing, he throws his head back against his headrest. “Okay, I’m deleting it.”

“No!” I fight the phone out of his hand. He grabs hold of it too, but I don’t let go, so we just hold it between us on the console. “That was the point, Alex. To remember this trip how it really was. And to look like ourselves.”

His smile is as small and faint as ever. “Poppy, you don’t look anything like that picture.”

I shake my head. “And you don’t either.”

For a long moment, we’re silent, like there’s nothing else to say now that this has been settled.

“Next year let’s go somewhere cold,” Alex says. “And dry.”

“Okay,” I say, grinning. “We’ll go somewherecold.”

1

This Summer

POPPY,” SWAPNA SAYSfrom the head of the dull gray conference table. “What have you got?”

For the benevolent ruler of theRest + Relaxationempire, Swapna Bakshi-Highsmith could not possibly exude any less of our fine magazine’s two core values.

The last time Swapna rested was probably three years ago, when she was eight and a half months pregnant and on doctor-mandated bed rest. Even then, she spent the whole time video-chatting with the office, her laptop balanced on her belly, so I don’t think there was a ton of relaxation involved. Everything about her is sharp and pointed and smart, from her slicked-back high-fashion bob to her studded Alexander Wang pumps.

Her winged eyeliner could slice through an aluminum can, and her emerald eyes could crush it afterward. In this moment, both are pointed squarely at me. “Poppy? Hello?”

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