Page 79 of Pick-Up
“Yup,” I say. “Let’s go.”
Then we both wait. I am stymied by ambivalence.
“Sasha,” he says softly. “The lantern.”
Or maybe we are stymied by me.
“Oh, right!” At that precise point, I realize I have misplaced the lantern.
“What are you doing?” he asks, as I bend down and begin feeling around in the sand.
“Nothing, nothing!”
Like so many unread tea leaves, the grains tell me nothing. My hands find something like the root of a plant. Then I realize it’s Ethan’s toe.
“Oops.”
“Sasha. Seriously. What is happening?”
I exhale. “I kind of… dropped the lantern.”
“What?”
“When I saw the stars, I think I was just overcome and… I sort of forgot about it. I let it go.”
This is what happens when I stop being vigilant. I bite my lip and wait for him to be mad. Instead, he chuckles. “Always on top of things…”
“And now we’re screwed.”
“Nah, nothing as bad as that. It has to be here somewhere.”
Now we are both on hands and knees feeling blindly, disrupting sand crabs from their slumber.
“This is actually a really strange experience,” I say.
“It’s like on Halloween when they blindfold you, put your hands in a bowl of spaghetti and tell you it’s brains.”
“Um. Who does that?”
“Um, everyone.”
“Maybe if you grew up in a cult.”
“No! It’s a thing,” he insists. “My family did it every year at our annual Halloween party when I was a kid. Spaghetti as brains. And grapes are eyeballs.”
“In my family, we just ate our grapes.”
“Oh, I think I got—No. Just a rock. Oh God. I hope it’s a rock. It sort of feels like it’s moving.”
This strikes me as hilarious, and I begin to giggle. Maybe I’m overtired. Maybe the temporary disaster has disengaged me from my paralyzing fears. Maybe the rum is still working its magic.
“Oh, that’s funny? That I maybe just squashed a hermit crab?!”
Now, I’m laughing even harder. “S-sorry!” I sputter, as I crawl around. “I feel like I’m playing some horrible improv theater game.”
“Yes and…?” Ethan starts to snicker too. “This is quite the move, by the way—ditching the lantern. If you wanted to spend the night on the beach with me, you could have just said so.”
What? This will not be pinned on me!
