Vacations from Hell

I reach the end of the beach, turn and walk back toward the villa. The sun beats down heavily on my neck and shoulders. It’s cool up by the pool, but down here the heat feels like a heavy, wet blanket. I can see figures moving around up at the villa; they are black silhouettes outlined by the sun. As I near the path that leads back up through the scrub grass, a figure emerges from one of the holes in the rock.



It’s Evan. He isn’t wearing a shirt, just board shorts and flip-flops. His skin is as pale as mine is, but his wheat blond hair looks bright gold in the hot light. He has a few pale freckles splashed across his cheeks and nose, and I try to remember but can’t if those are new or if he’s always had them.



He looks surprised to see me. “Hey.”



“Hey,” I said, feeling, as I have since the wedding, stupid now that I’m around him. “Damaris told me to let you know that it isn’t safe down here.”



He squints, blue eyes against the sun. “Damaris?”



“The cook.”



“Oh, right.” He glances up and down the beach. “It looks safe to me. Maybe she meant there’s a riptide or something.”



I shrug. “Maybe.” She didn’t mean a riptide, but I don’t feel like getting into it.



“Come on.” He gestures at me to follow him. “I want to show you something.”



He ducks back into the dark opening in the rock and I follow, swallowing down my claustrophobia. I have to hold my breath to squeeze through a narrow passage, and then we come out in a larger space. Dim rays from outside spill through the opening slit in the stone, but they’re not all that’s providing illumination here: patches of glowing brightness are dotted here and there on the damp cave walls, and they’re different colors too: ice blue and pale green and sheer rose. “Phosphorescent moss,” Evan says. He runs his hand along the wall then shows the palm of it to me; it shines like the bright fin of a fish. “See?”



His eyes are glowing too, in the darkness. I remember the first time I ever saw Evan loping across the quad at school with his bag slung over his shoulder, his bright hair shining in the sunlight. He moved like someone with purpose, like there was a shimmering, invisible road only he could see and his feet were on it and he knew where he was going. I’d never seen him before—it turned out later he was new that year, having moved to town with his dad from Portland—and he didn’t look like any boy I’d ever liked. I went for the hipster boys: worn jeans and glasses and serious hair. Evan was clean and sporty and he shone like gold in the sunlight, and from that moment I wanted him like I had never wanted anyone before.



Now I touch my fingers to his; they come away glowing, as if he’s transferring his light to me. He tenses when we touch, and then his fingers wrap around mine. My toes dig into the sand as I go on tiptoe, reaching my face up to his, and then he’s kissing me, and his mouth is damp and soft. His fingers dig tightly into my shoulders before he breaks away. “Vi,” he says, and it’s more of a groan than anything else. “We can’t.”



I know what he means. We went over all this before, the night in the garden, when we kissed and then fought for hours. We have to tell them we can’t tell them we can’t do this they don’t need to know of course they’ll find out they’ll kill us he’ll kill me no. No.



Evan moves past me toward the cave entrance and slithers out through it. I follow him, saying his name, squeezing through the narrow slit in the rock after him, and the strap of my bathing suit gets caught on a sharp piece of jutting rock, which is why it takes me a moment to untangle myself then join Evan on the beach. He’s standing there, staring down the beach with his mouth open. When I follow his gaze, I see why.



There’s a woman coming out of the pink house. She pushes open the blue-painted iron gate and walks out onto the sand. Except she doesn’t just walk. She moves like a wave. Her hips roll, and her hair, which is long and white blond, ripples like foam on the sea. She’s wearing a sort of printed sarong. It’s split down one side, and you can see the whole of her perfectly tanned leg when she walks. She’s got on a white bikini top, and the way she fills it out makes me want to cross my arms over my chest to hide how flat I am. She holds a bottle in one hand, the sort that my Coca-Cola came in earlier, though there’s no label on it.



She pushes her glasses on her head as she comes close to us, and any hope I had that her face wouldn’t match the rest of her vanishes. She’s beautiful. Evan is just staring.



“You’re the children from the villa,” she says. She has a faint, indefinable accent. “Aren’t you?”