For two weeks after the bonfire, everything I paint is midnight and gold and maroon and ballet-slipper pink. Passionate and deep and metallic. I rip up an old dress—black with thin gold stripes—and sew it into a crop top and high-waisted shorts that look perfect on me. My mom decides I can keep the Vespa if I always wear my helmet and repay my account with money I make from my job. At the pottery shop, I glaze broken pieces from the kiln and make them into a mosaic for Whitney. I teach the littles how to swing dance using online videos and my own pizzazz. We have a picnic in the backyard, we decorate cookies in the shape of suns and palm trees and beach balls, we build a sand fortress at the beach.
I kiss Jonah Daniels four thousand times, every second his family isn’t looking. We bicker about everything on planet earth and beyond. I think jellyfish are so beautiful! Translucent and dancing underwater in fringed skirts. Jonah wishes they would drop dead in the sea. I like boxed mac and cheese with that gooey yellow cheese sauce. Jonah’s face turns pink with frustration, and he makes me homemade mac and cheese to prove his point. And of course I believe in extraterrestrial life! I bet they’ve already been here, I say, but Jonah shakes his head.
I drag him out to the beach late, late at night to see the sun rise. But we get all tangled up, tongues and skin and hands and gasps and yes, and, by the time I’m fully aware of the world again, it’s gone from dark to glowing. I don’t care that I missed the sunrise, because I’d much rather make one of my own.
My birthday dress arrives, and I hang it on a nail in the wall because it is art. I order white butterfly wings online, and it takes me three tries to mix the perfect blue paint.
On the day of my birthday, I open my eyes to the sound of my mom’s off-key voice singing me “Happy Birthday.” I wasn’t sleeping, but I was lying in bed, dreaming. She’s holding an oversize strawberry cupcake in her hands, and the tall gold candle flickers as she walks toward me.
“Make a wish, chickadee,” she says.
I sit up and blow it out and make my wish, and we relax against my pillows, devouring the cupcake and ignoring the crumbs that drop to my duvet cover. I open her glittery card, and a gift card for my favorite online art store falls out. There’s also a scrap of paper which reads: IOU, Save This Ticket.
“It’s not quite ready yet. I pick it up on Saturday.” Her smile is very self-satisfied, so I’m intrigued. “Oh, and I almost forgot! This came for you, too.”
She hands me a white envelope with my name in handwriting I know well enough to imitate. Return address: Ruby Oshiro, Seattle, WA, and I stop breathing.
“She called me last week for our new address,” my mom is saying. I don’t want to open this in front of her because I have no idea what it might say. “I was so glad to hear you guys are back to normal. She said you hadn’t been in touch with her at all.”
I told my mom that Ruby and Amala wouldn’t speak to me after what happened in March. Which would have been true—I’m sure of it. So I didn’t give them a chance. Amala didn’t try, but Ruby called and texted and knocked on my front door. I never opened it.
“Chickie?” my mom asks quietly. “Ruby knows, right? About the bipolar disorder?”
My silence serves as an obvious answer, especially since I can’t meet her eyes.
I feel my mom draw away from me. “Vivian! Ruby is your oldest friend. How could you not tell her? After everything that happened?”
“I don’t have to tell her everything! And I don’t have to tell you everything either!” Before she can protest, I cut her off. “You won’t even tell me who my dad is. So I don’t think I need to provide you with the status of all my relationships.”
“That,” she says darkly, “is entirely different. I am protecting you until you are old enough to deal with certain . . . realities.”
“Maybe I’m protecting you.” If she only knew. I mean, she knows a little—the tattoo, the outrageous money I spent on clothes and presents. She doesn’t know exactly what happened at Ruby’s sixteenth-birthday party last March. What I did.
“I know you’ve been asking to stay in Verona Cove. And I’ve told you that I’ll consider it. And I will, if it is genuinely what is best for you.” Her eyes narrow, the smugness of someone who is revealing the ace up her sleeve. “I will not consider staying here if you’re just hiding.”
She says this as if the two things are mutually exclusive.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Viv. You have an illness—”
“STOP. You are obsessed with this.” Tears fill my eyes, and I feel my hands clench, bending the card. “It’s my birthday—God, Mom!”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I shouldn’t have . . . I just worry, and . . . well. Come downstairs if you want more breakfast. I got everything for German pancakes.”
I open the envelope after she’s gone and find a handmade card—of course. I’ve admired Ruby’s cut-paper art for years, the intricacy and detail. She can slice a National Geographic photo of an oil spill into a tiny leather jacket, a cotton-blossom pattern into puffy clouds, trim strips of chevron and polka dots for a hot air balloon.
This card is more sentimental than Ruby’s usual work, and the paper girl staring out her bedroom window is Ruby herself. Her jet bangs feathered on her forehead, her trademark fuchsia lips and black leggings. Floral for her comforter, birch for the window frame, stripes for her little boatneck shirt.
But her heart is pasted on the outside of her chest, as hot pink as her mouth. Beyond the window, instead of blue sky, is a square of paper from a map. A tiny red heart at the top of California.
My tears make it hard to see the inside. Oh, Roo. Break my actual beating heart, why don’t you? In her calligraphy script: Happy birthday, Viv. Miss you. Nothing more, nothing less. No demands for an explanation, no accusations, no hint about if Amala hates me as viciously as I’m sure she must.
Fingers pinching the top of the card, I’m tempted to rip it to scrap paper. But Ruby would never create something to make me feel guilty. Only to feel loved. Still, the guilt pushes through my veins, roiling and acidic and spreading, spreading.
After last March, I knew I didn’t deserve friends like that—I didn’t deserve friends at all, when all I did was betray them.
But now, I allow myself one text. Line after line of her attempts to contact me, most of which I never even read, and I finally type three words that I’ve felt for months and months. Miss you too.
I push these thoughts away at the Daniels residence because I’m busy turning a little girl into a plume-tailed bird.
“Spin,” I tell Leah. She obeys. “Yep—you are the most magnificent child-peacock there ever was.”
Jonah isn’t home because he’s already at the restaurant working on my party dinner, but Silas, Bekah, and Isaac all agree on Leah’s magnificence, from her shiny blue leotard to the fanned-out feather tail to the way I rimmed her eyes in white and black face paint. She dances around, as giddy about my party as I am. The other three refuse to tell me their costume selections, on Jonah’s order.
“All right,” I announce. “I have to go home to get dressed.”
Originally, I considered dressing up as a dolphin as an homage to my soul’s former vessel, but you’d be surprised how difficult it is—even for someone as talented as me—to create a dolphin costume for an almost-seventeen-year-old human girl.
Besides, I want wings because, well, don’t we all? Sometimes I bend my arms behind my back and feel the protruding shoulder blades—technically the scapula, but they feel like broken-off wings. Everyone thinks we evolved from apes, but I’m not totally convinced that we didn’t once have wings, at least some of us.
For one night, I want my wings back. But not the wings of a mighty bird, beating powerfully enough to make noise against the air. I want to drift dreamily in the breeze, to let the wind direct me. I know, I know: butterflies are used in bad metaphors about metamorphosis, about bursting forth from a cocoon, born again and in flight. But I’m not dressing as a butterfly to prove that my caterpillar days are behind me—no. No symbolism. It is enough to choose things for their beauty.
My wings are wide and diaphanous—nylon stretched over thin, arced wire. I painted the inner parts with the eye-aching, perfect blue of a sunny day, but the edges are black as if dipped in ink. Between the two colors, I painted little rivers of veins like a leaf’s surface.
The true showpiece is not my meticulous wings but my vintage dress. I paid a small fortune for it, but this beauty is worth every nickel. It’s from the 1930s, a tight-fitting flapper dress slicked in glossy black beads. The hem ends in a fringe right about my knee, and the straps split into these fabulous V shapes across my bare shoulders.
Okay, fine, I’ll admit I’m wearing a very padded strapless bra, but this dress deserves truly divine cleavage, you know?
I’m wearing black satin pointe shoes, which don’t feel wonderful on my toes, but they look wonderful to my eyes and make me feel graceful, so there. I glued thick black lashes to my eyelids and lined them in a shimmering navy color. For once, I forgo the red lipstick for a cherry-blossom pink because that’s how the makeup spirit moves me.
Jonah wanted to pick me up, but I begged him not to. If there’s ever a night to zoom through town on my Vespa, it’s the night when I’m the most glamorous butterfly to ever waft the earth. I drive slower than usual, so that my wings are pushed straight back, and I feel somewhere between a superhero and a pageant queen waving in a parade, my true self.
Jonah’s waiting outside Tony’s, done to the nines in a black tuxedo, complete with tails and a white bow tie and vest and oh my stars. My hands go shaky as I park the Vespa.
“Happy birthday,” he says, before I even dismount. “Where’s your helmet?”
Oh, please, like I was going to mat down the hair I spent forty-five minutes on just for a two-minute ride at twenty-five miles an hour. As usual, Jonah out-parents every actual parent in the world. “So what are you supposed to be? Just, like, fancy man?”
He smiles and stiffens his arms at his sides, toddling back and forth on each foot. “Penguin.”
When I don’t react at first—for sheer, gobsmacked delight—his shyly prideful smile fades to doubt. “No? I thought it would go with your dress, and . . .”
I stop him with a kiss because it’s perfect and also because I’ve never kissed a boy in a tuxedo, and you know what? I could get used to it. I throw my arms around his neck and pull myself up to him a little, delighted by how anachronistic it feels, full-on making out in public while wearing vintage formalwear. Heavens to Betsy, forget this party, I’ll take him home and have a party of our own. But he straightens up, collecting himself again, and I’m surprised to find my pink lipstick has left no mark on his mouth. I’ll have to try harder next time.
“You look . . .” he begins, swallowing up my dress with his eyes. “Well. You know how you look.”
“I do.” With a curtsy, I accept his speechlessness as the compliment that it is.
He leads me to the side walkway, where there are lights and laughter twinkling from the patio. I’m holding my breath in excitement and all the extra air in my lungs makes my heartbeat more pronounced, thuddier against my rib cage.
Jonah opens the gate entrance, and my guests cry “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” so loudly that it’s like walking into a wall of sound, and the tears spring to my eyes, blurring everything into blobs of color and glowing light.
There are two picnic tables pushed together, lengthwise, with big pillar candles in lanterns down the center. The leaves are deep jade, crawling up the wooden trellises, and there are white fairy lights everywhere and Chinese lanterns that glow like planets suspended in the galaxy. And benches are filled with my mom and these beautiful people who barely know me and will not only show up but show up in costume. I can barely make them out, but I see the feathered pink flamingo costume that my mom was perfecting for herself this morning.
There should be a word for this feeling: spectacuclarity or burstsomeness. It’s too much to dam inside my body, and I cover my face just moments before the tears spurt out. I don’t even want to try to stop myself from feeling everything, from reacting the way I really feel, because I am only turning seventeen once, and I am honestly trying to live this life while I can. The emotion swells around me, into this huge, humid feeling that I must be doing something right.
“Viv,” Jonah whispers. “Please tell me that’s a happy cry.”
I slide my hands down an inch, so my fingertips rest right below my eyes. Jonah’s eyebrows are turned down, those dark eyes concerned and desperate to read me.
“This is literally the most wonderful thing that anyone has ever done for me,” I choke out. Then I laugh, partially so everyone knows I’m okay and partially because I feel half-hysterical with love and gratitude. “This is already the best night of my life, and it just started!”
Jonah guides me to my seat at the head of the table, and I clear the tears from my eyes to take in all my guests. Isaac is an owl, with a yellow construction-paper triangle taped to the noseband of his glasses. The bottom of Silas’s nose is painted black, and he’s wearing a sweatband around his head that is mounted with two long black socks—droopy puppy ears covering his own. Bekah is in what looks to be a store-bought bumblebee costume, perhaps a relic of Halloween past. Whitney’s dress is covered in glued-on white cotton balls, and little black sheep’s ears stick up from her curly, wild hair. My mom, the flamingo. Leah, my peacock, my tiniest friend. And, between them, Officer Hayashi.
“What animal are you?” I tease, since he’s just in a nondescript blue sweater. But it looks like he’s combed his white hair, and I could die from the sweetness of him sitting between Leah and my mom.
“Grumpy old bear,” he says, and I laugh and laugh, interrupted only by someone touching my arm gently.
“Sorry I’m late,” Naomi says, although her tone is unremorseful. She didn’t wear a costume either, but I like her dress, which is brown with white polka dots. After she takes her place by Silas, she reaches into her purse and pulls out a headband with two pert little ears on either side. She’s a deer—of course she is—with her long limbs and speckled dress. The tears want to start again, but the food is coming, and I choose to focus on that.
Ellie emerges in a white shirt and black vest, our waitress for the evening, and I’m having such a nice time that I don’t even care that her skin glows like amber in the candlelight. She serves us the food Jonah has made, all family-style in big bowls or on platters—beautiful green salad glossed in champagne vinaigrette, and coconut tilapia, breaded and fried and slathered in some sort of spicy pineapple relish that my mind can’t explain but my taste buds can relish, savor, memorize.
My eyes well up as I open my presents—a book from Isaac and silvery-pink nail polish from Bekah and a hand-drawn portrait of me from Leah and a mug Whitney made herself.
“Here. Give that to her.” Hayashi has Leah pass me a little plant still in its plastic container from the nursery. “It’s a—”
“I know.” A Japanese maple seedling. If I can’t go to Japan yet, he gave a little piece to me, and it’s almost impossible for me to swallow.
“Well, I know how you like trees,” he says gruffly. “Maybe if you grow your own, you won’t be tempted to deface arboreal public property.”
“What?” my mom asks, and my jaw drops open. He’s seen my tree in Irving Park?
“Oh, nothing,” Hayashi tells my mom. “Silly joke.”
My eyes are still flooded when Jonah brings the cake out. It’s black cherry and chocolate, two layers, with sparklers instead of candles. I watch them sizzle, and I wish for nothing. How could I dare? How could I dare, when I have all this?
Jonah and I leave only after I have hugged everyone in attendance at least twice, even Naomi, who stiffens at my embrace, and then we take off on my Vespa with Jonah driving, even though he’s technically not supposed to. He makes us stop at home to pick up the helmets. One more surprise, or so he says, and I close my eyes with my arms latched around his waist, wings thrashing violently at my back.
He’s driving farther and farther toward the coastline, not stopping until we’re in front of a building that looks like a small-town church with a steeple. But, no. It’s a lighthouse. The light isn’t on, but I can see its shape—a tower with a circular walkway and black iron handrails. A glass planet trapped inside a birdcage.
“Come on,” Jonah says, pulling me by the hand after we climb off the Vespa.
“Are we going in? Can you get us in?”
“Yeah. My dad knows the caretaker. Knew him, I mean.”
From his pocket, Jonah produces a key on an old lanyard and opens the front door. The piping along the edges of the house reminds me of gingerbread, like you could shingle the roof in licorice and cover the windows with giant peppermints. Inside, the room is dusty and piney and filled with racks of postcards and model ships. Jonah watches me as I survey the trinkets, running my hands along shelf after shelf filled with maritime books. “My dad’s friend starting volunteering at the gift shop when he retired. The lighthouse obviously doesn’t get used for boats anymore, but the Verona Cove Historical Society restored the building and light a few years before I was born. There are actually lots of lighthouse tourists.”
“Enchanting.” My voice is a whisper as to not disturb the delightfully spooky atmosphere. “Can we go up?”
“Where do you think I’m taking you—the basement?” He smiles, lopsided and pleased with himself. “You sure you don’t want my jacket?”
I fluff my hair. “Oh, Jonah, as if I’d cover up this dress.”
He leads me up a spiral staircase, and I can tell even from the back of his head that he’s smiling because he knows I’m totally taken with this, all of it. My heart beats four times as fast as our footsteps up the stairs, th-thump, th-thump, at the quietness and anticipation. The wind whips straight into my ears as we enter the lighthouse’s deck, but the air off the Pacific is warm, and I gasp at the view. For a moment, I nearly lose my depth perception, trying to reconcile the new heights with the stars and the sea, and I understand why the guardrail rises all the way to my waist.
“Wow.” The word is a hush against the night. For all the joy that tonight’s dinner gave me, all the fullness and humanity and communing, this is something else entirely. I’m at the bow of the terrestrial Earth, steering straight toward the cosmos. I’m watched over by the dove-gray moon, his gentle head bowed, and I have to wonder if this is ygen, profound beauty in the natural world—so subtle that it calls up a feeling of wonder without naming it. The word has no English counterpart and neither does this feeling, so I stand witness to the universe without any thought but enjoying my front-row seat.
“Close your eyes,” Jonah says, and I do it immediately—I close my eyes, and the first thing I hear is music coming from what sounds like a crackly old radio. And then I feel light flash against my eyelids, a sun exploding right in front of me. I open my eyes toward the sea to find that I’m backlit. The light on and ablaze, too bright to look back at.
Jonah appears beside me, his hands on the rail. “The town paid an insane amount of money for it to be a working lighthouse. They only turn it on for special occasions.”
“They let you light it for my birthday?” I can’t believe this; I honestly cannot. How silly I was at the beginning of the summer, believing Jonah needed me to make him happy.
His mouth slips into a smile. “Let’s just say I’d rather beg forgiveness than ask permission.”
We stand together for what feels like a long time, the radio playing melodies over the white noise of sloshing waves.
“My dad used to take me here,” Jonah says finally. “He’s the one who brought that radio up here, to listen to baseball games. I was obsessed with baseball and boats as a kid. We don’t really have boats in Verona Cove, but we pretended.”
“Of course you love boats.” I adjust the straps of my wings. “You used to be a sea captain.”
He smiles at me, shaking his head in that Oh, Viv kind of way that lets me know he’s so terribly fond of me and the things he perceives as eccentricities.
“I haven’t been back here since.” This feels like an admission, like he’s confessing to a weakness or flaw. “But I wanted you to see it.”
I know what he means to say: I wanted you to see me. And I do see him—illuminated with his downturned eyes and the mouth that must be pried into a smile, that gorgeous hair dancing in this wind. I also know he can’t talk about his dad so easily, like each word tries to float up his windpipe, but they get stuck to the back of his throat. For once, I keep my damn mouth shut because I want to leave room for him.
“Have you ever heard that saying ‘Ships are safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for’?”
I nod, although I’m not sure where or how I’ve heard. Maybe it’s one of those phrases that somehow exists in the collective subconscious of all people—and especially those of us who are drawn to the sea, who hear a siren call to the water.
“My dad had that quote engraved on the underside of this watch that his dad gave him. He said it’s the reason he spent all his money opening the restaurant, why he married my mom and had us kids so young.” He sighs, looking down at the ocean below us. “He said the measure of the man is in those decisions. Do you keep yourself and your family safe in harbor, always? Or do you move forward and brave the storms?”
At this, I reach for his arm, placing my hand over the sleeve of his tuxedo jacket. “He sounds like such a good dad.”
“He was.” Jonah’s stare stays out over the water. “I keep wondering if it’ll ever hurt less. This . . . this hole in our lives.”
“Oh, I imagine it’ll hurt less eventually. I think there will always be a hole, though. But lace is one of the most beautiful fabrics, you know. All those holes and gaps, but it’s still complete somehow—still lovely.”
This makes him smile, at least. “I wouldn’t have thought about it like that. Sorry. I’m being a downer. I was lucky to have him for as long as I did. I know that.”
This makes me tilt my head away from him, frowning as I consider what he means. “Jonah, you don’t have to justify missing him just because I don’t have a dad. They’re totally different things.”
He locks eyes with me, daring a question. “Do you ever miss your dad?”
“Is it possible to miss someone you never met?” I ask. But I do—miss my dad, I mean. Or, at least, I wonder what I might be missing by not knowing him. Every once in a while, when my mood starts to whirlpool, I feel angry at him or my mom or I feel sorry for myself. “Yes, I suppose it is possible. Because I miss your dad sometimes, even though I never met him. I feel like I know him a little, like if I collect fragments of the six of you and tape them together, there he is: a mosaic of your pieces.”
This gets a smile, if a sad one. “Do you know anything about your dad?”
“He was a musician, I think. I’ve figured some of it out, even though my mom refuses to talk about him. I badgered her so much when I was little, just for one detail, that she finally told me she met him when she was at a concert.” In my mind, I can see my mom, only nineteen, and this blur of a man I’ve never seen or met. I imagine him with longish hair and a stubbly, rock-star beard, maybe tight pants and tattoos. “I don’t really blame him for not being around, you know. He’s a creative soul, a free-spirited musician, and I think that’s partially where I get my wild streak from. That’s just who he is, wherever he is, and I like that I come from artistic stock anyway.”
I cock my hip, posing with one hand in my hair. “I actually feel bad for the guy. He doesn’t even know what he’s missing.”
Jonah looks at me so admiringly, and my heart bounces like a pinball from my stomach to my throat to either side of my rib cage. I know I am something special—I know that I am because I am trying to be, and it is nice to be seen, the way I see him.
I face the ocean, and he wraps both of his arms around me, chin on my shoulder. I have this feeling that if we fell forward into the water, hanging on to Jonah would buoy me, drag me back up to the surface.
Some of the guys I’ve been with, they’ve tried to pin me down. They wanted to box me into the details, the wheres and whens and hows of our togetherness, and it always pinched my nerves that they needed to map out a plan for feelings. Other guys, they seemed totally content to let me prance in and out of their lives, relieved that they didn’t have to agree to future plans, no concert tickets for a show later that summer, no prom tickets months in advance.
Jonah doesn’t do either thing. We are together for now, above the choppy black water and the flicking white waves, and it is enough.
And the next horrible thought is how badly I want to tell Ruby and Amala about him. I try to push away the idea of them. In my mind, we’re always in Amala’s bedroom, dyeing the tips of Ruby’s hair some fantastic color and howling over stupid jokes. We went to art museums and the most hip coffee shops and record stores and concerts. Why do I go back to the simplest moments, in pajamas?
“Viv?” Jonah asks. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I say, almost hesitating. “Did you have a group of friends? Before your dad?”
He nods against my shoulder. “Good guys. They’re not gone or anything. I’m just really busy. And . . . you know. They don’t know how to talk to me about everything.”
Before I can say anything, he jumps back in. “You never talk about friends back home. You must have a thousand, based on the hundred you have in Verona Cove.”
I lift one shoulder, glad he can’t see my face. “We had a bit of a falling-out before I left. Water under the bridge. I’m here now.”
So why do I wish I wish I wish I could take a picture of me and Jonah and send it to Ruby and Amala and say this is falling in love with someone GOOD and it is so good.
We stand there pressed together for a while until it is no longer my birthday. I think about boats, how they’re powerful but so delicate compared to the fickle sea. I think about lighthouses, about safe mooring and how easy it is to crash. I think about love and what I deserve and how I’m trying to accept everything the universe is giving me.
Then the radio changes to something upbeat and folksy.
Jonah’s voice is near my ear. I can hear his smile. “I like this song.”
At first, we stay standing together, but then the chorus plays, and it’s free and alive. So the serious-eyed boy in the penguin suit takes the butterfly-winged girl by the hands and spins her. We sway our hips and stamp our feet like the drunken revelry of turning sour grapes into wine. Our bodies block the beam from the lighthouse as we wave our arms and, even though we can’t see it, we’re casting shadows onto the sky.
This is where I am, somewhere between the night’s total darkness and the light’s utter brilliance, and I grin as I dance and the night wind kicks up Jonah’s hair. The glow of my birthday candles and the fairy lights would have been more than enough. But Jonah Daniels? He lit up my whole world.
Even the constellations can see us now: we are seventeen and shattered and still dancing. We have messy, throbbing hearts, and we are stronger than anyone could ever know.