Page 66 of People We Meet on Vacation

When the song ends, we break apart and join the crowd in applause. Alex crouches for a second, and when he stands up, he’s holding out a strand of chipped purple Mardi Gras beads.

“Those were on the ground,” I say.

“You don’t want them?”

“No, I want them,” I say. “But they were on the ground.”

“Yes,” he says.

“Where there’s dirt,” I say. “And spilled booze. Possibly vomit.”

He winces, starts to lower the beads. I catch his wrist, stilling him. “Thank you,” I say. “Thank you for touching these filthy beads for me, Alex. I love them.”

He rolls his eyes, smiles, slips the beads over my neck as I duck my head.

When I look back up at him, he’s beaming at me, and I think,I love you more now than I ever have. How is it possible that this keeps happening with him?

“Can we take a picture together?” I ask, but what I’m thinking is,I wish I could bottle this moment and wear it as a perfume. It would always be with me. Everywhere I went, he’d be there too, and so I’d always feel like myself.

He takes his phone out, and we huddle together as he snaps a picture. When we look at it, he makes a sound of strangled surprise. Probably in an effort not to look so sleepy, he threw his eyes wide in the last possible second.

“You look like you saw something horrible exactly when the flash went off,” I say.

He tries to pull the phone out of my hands, but I spin away from him, jog out of reach as I text it to myself. He follows, fighting a smile, and when I hand it back, I say, “There, now that I have a copy, you can delete it.”

“I would never delete it,” Alex says. “I’m just only going to look at it when I’m alone, locked in my apartment, so that no one else ever sees my face in this picture.”

“I’m going to see it,” I say.

“You don’t count,” he says.

“I know,” I agree. I love that, being the one who doesn’t count. The one who’s allowed to see all of Alex. The one who makes him weird.

When we get back to the apartment, I ask when he’s going to let me read the short stories he’s been working on.

He says he can’t—if I don’t like them, he’ll be too embarrassed.

“You got into an amazing MFA program,” I say. “You’re obviously good. If I don’t think they’re good, I’m obviously wrong.”

He says that if I don’t think they’re good, then U of I is wrong.

“Please,” I say.

“Okay,” he says, and gets out his computer. “Just wait until I’m in the shower, okay? I don’t want to have to watch you reading it.”

“Okay,” I say. “If you have a novel, I could read that instead, since I’ll have the whole length of an Alex Nilsen shower.”

He tosses a pillow at me and goes into the bathroom.

The story really is short. Nine pages, about a boy who was born with a pair of wings. All his life, people tell him that this means he should try to fly. He’s afraid to. When he finally does, jumps off a two-story roof, he falls. He breaks his legs and wings. He never gets them reset. As he recovers, the bone heals in its misshapen form. Finally, people stop telling him that he must’ve been born to fly. Finally, he’s happy.

When Alex comes back out, I’m crying.

He asks me what’s wrong.

I say, “I don’t know. It just speaks to me.”

He thinks I’m making a joke and chuckles along, but for once, I wasn’t referencing the gallery girl who tried to sell us a twenty-one-thousand-dollar bear sculpture.

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