make sure to invite you.” She flashed a smile and Carter was struck again by how beautiful she was. How had he missed all this before? Or maybe, more urgently, was it okay that he was noticing it now?
Carter stood up and gazed out at the sea for a moment, leaning over the railing, careful not to invade Jules’s space, or study her too obviously. A warm breeze lilted through the salty air. The music of the waves rocked gently beyond the dunes. A lone pelican glided low and dark over the water. A nervous tension coiled in Carter’s heart.
“Look,” he said, pointing at a bird flying low over the water. “A pelican.”
She edged up to the railing next to him, and joined him in gazing out at it.
“Nice,” she said.
They watched it fly for a while.
“I love nights like this,” said Jules. “It’s like everything’s alive and at peace with the world somehow, and you just want to stay there and hold on to that moment for as long as you can. You know what I mean?”
“Totally,” said Carter. But he didn’t, really—not tonight. It was hard to find peace after everything Lilah had just done.
She pointed at the pelican, which had made its way south along the shore without a single flap of its wings and was now directly across from them. Carter noticed that she’d painted her fingernails a nice shade of bright yellow. He couldn’t help comparing it to Lilah’s haphazard attempts at giving herself manicures. Lilah went for the ruby reds, and she had a habit of biting her nails when she was nervous, and picking at the polish until there were nothing more than a few chips scattered like tea leaves above her cuticles.
“Where do you think it’s going?” Jules said.
Carter wondered. “Maybe into the Everglades? Maybe it’s out hunting, trying to scrape up enough fish to feed its five insatiable chicks?”
“I don’t know,” Jules said. “I think it’s more adventurous than that. I think it’s a loner and it’s restless. It’s got it in its head that there’s more to see in the world than the other boring pelicans think there is, and it’s decided to take a risk and soar out to sea. It’s getting ready to hopscotch over the keys and find a rocky island out in the Caribbean where no other pelican has ever gone.”
The vision made Carter smile. “You know what?” he said. “I think you’re right.”
He relaxed a tick. He couldn’t help it. She was so comfortable with herself—you could see it in her posture, in her easy conversation, in the way she was able to look at the things outside herself without worrying about how they related to her—that she put him at ease.
He let himself look at her. She had a mass of string bracelets in every conceivable color tied around her right wrist, and she was wearing a tight white tank top that rode up above her belly button.
His phone—which he kept at all times on vibrate—buzzed in the cargo pocket of his shorts. Two short bursts. A text. Maybe the guys trying to find out where he’d disappeared to.
He did a quick check. It was Lilah. “WHYD U MAKE ME GO TO THAT PARTY?” it said.
Carter put the phone back in his pocket without replying.
“Everything okay?” asked Jules.
“Yeah,” he said. “As okay as it can be, anyway.” Before she could ask more, he said, “So, UPenn. It’s crazy that we’re both going there next year. It’s not the sort of place many kids from Chris Columbus apply to.”
“Yeah. It takes a certain kind of dork to risk venturing up into the snowy north for something as unimportant as an education.”
He laughed. “I know what you mean. Who’d want to do that?”
“Well, you for one.”
“And you for two.”
His phone buzzed again. Another text. It had to be Lilah. He could feel her anxiety teleporting itself into the phone. “IM SORRY, IM SUCH A MESS,” it said.
He was too exasperated with Lilah to get into an extended texting session with her. Instead, he focused his attention on Jules. “So, if you’re going to college next year and I’m going to college next year, then we’re obviously both seniors, which is weird,” he said. “I never really see you at the parties or anything.”
“I keep a low profile,” she said. “Junior CIA. The goal is, I see you and you don’t see me … until it’s too late!”
“CIA, huh. So, spy, what dirt have you uncovered about me?”
Jules tapped her lip with one finger. “Well,” she said. And to Carter’s shock and amazement, she ran down a list of facts about him. His four-year relationship with Lilah, of course. But also, his taste in clothes—button-down shirts in bright, colorful checkerboard patterns and baggy chinos worn over an ever-changing collection of kicks. He used to be on the track team—the 400-meter dash—and his best time was 1.03 minutes, back in freshman year in a race that he’d won. She knew about his love for science and that last year he and Andy had tried to cultivate a coral bed in one of the aquariums in Mr. Wittier’s biology lab.
Another buzz-buzz. Jesus, Lilah! It was like she was trying to make what had happened tonight his fault. But it wasn’t his fault. He’d done the best he could.
Forcing Lilah out of his mind, he said to Jules, “Wow, that’s a lot. You’ve been doing your job well. But now that I know who you are, I mean, you’re compromised, aren’t you? What’s to stop me from telling the whole world?”
She raised one eyebrow and nodded her head knowingly.
“Uh-oh,” he said.
“Yeah, you guessed it. Now I’m going to have to kill you.”
“Can I plead for my life?”
“Sure. But it’s not going to help. Protocol and all that,” she said.
He straightened his shoulders. “Okay, I’m ready. Take your best shot.”
Jules mimed cocking the bolt on a sniper rifle. She aimed at Carter’s heart. She made two short, sharp whistling sounds. “Twhoo-twhoo.” Then by way of explanation, she said, “We use silencers.”
Carter put his hands to his heart and made his best I’m-dying face, reeling backward like he’d just been shot. He fell into one of the ornate wrought-iron deck chairs that circled the table.
His phone buzzed again. Not the short double buzz of a text, but the sustained vibration of an incoming call. He’d known this would come eventually, but that didn’t make him any less annoyed.
“Sorry, hold on,” he said.
He pulled out his phone and stabbed at the button along its side, holding it down until the phone was off. Then he couldn’t help but let out a small exhale of frustration. He cocked back and mock-threw the phone out toward the beach before shoving it back into his pocket.
“What was that?” said Jules.
“Lilah.”
