Intrepid (5 page)

“Don’t be a jerk.” I stood up and walked towards the river, ignoring the ash that settled at the bottom of the pit from past bonfires. There were still char marks on some of the trees, but unlike the trees, the dry grass had reclaimed the land. It rambled from charred tree to charred tree until it kissed the river and perked up in color.
 

My mother wasn’t a topic I talked about no matter how often I thought of her. Here? In this place? I shouldn’t have to talk about her. I thought Sully understood that because he’d never brought up the questions before.
 

After the house burned down with my mother inside, Ringo built us a squat, one story cabin on the opposite side of the property. Rather than rebuild the once-proud house, he built a bonfire pit out of chunky limestone. When I was a kid, we’d come out here to make s’mores and watch shooting stars. He called it the whispering spot—the place where I could tell my secrets to Mom and the universe.
 

Around junior high, I became old enough to know that the whispering was only heard by the trees, but I still came out here once a week. It just seemed like the right thing to do. After all, Ringo saved me and not her. The least I could do was remember her, even if remembering her was mostly impossible. I’d only seen her face in a couple pictures. Her eyes were a sharp green and her hair went in every possible curly direction. She was a still-framed ghost that had never been real to me, but I think that only made the loss feel heavier with the guilt it caused.
 

“Really, how much do you know about the fire?” Sully got up and stood next to me. I watched him from the corner of my eye and was startled by how close he stood. There was no need to be that close to me with his aggressive questions and his inappropriate curiosity. These were the unspoken things—the things he was just supposed to
get
. These were the rules. He didn’t see me prodding him about his mother and asking him why she didn’t want him.
 

“It’s been a long day, Sully, and we still have a long night to go. Can we not do this?”
 

“Right. The dance. You hate dances.” He laughed, and it wrinkled out the sour mood he was in. “Wanna talk about the weather? Would that help? What’s up with this heat wave?” The questions lacked sincerity, and I cringed.
 

Sully took another sip, and I noticed the oversized watch he always wore on his right wrist was missing. In place of the thick, leather band was something else entirely.
 

“What the hell is that?” I grabbed his hand and yanked it so that his palm faced up and I could see the soft part of his arm.
 

“A tattoo.” His voice was flat, but it stung. How could he hide a tattoo from me? We told each other everything. Or at least I thought we did. After all, he visited Papa without telling me and got sulky when I brought it up. Now there was this ink on the patch of skin he always kept hidden. I’d watched him take pictures all afternoon… how could I have missed it? The watch was on his other arm, which was so subtle a change that it unnerved me even more.
   

I reached over to touch it, and my finger traced the flat lines. It was a strange design: a small box shaded with intricate shadows. It looked like there was a variegated galaxy bubbling up from the bottom right corner into a swirling empty space. “When’d you get it?”
 

“Last weekend.”
 

“It looks older.”
 

“It’s not. See, this is the universe… this is all we don’t know about it.” He stopped pointing at the tattoo and examined my face for traces of understanding I couldn’t give. I got the feeling I was failing a test. It was like I was playing that card came game we played as kids, Memory, where you flip a card and try to remember where the identical one was. Sully and tattoos belonged on completely different cards, and I was resisting the need to draw one picture into another.
 

“Who’s Empedocles?” My nail scraped across the tiny inscription under the bottom of the box. It was so finely written in miniature cursive that I almost missed it.
 

Sully raised an eyebrow as if he didn’t believe me, and I glared at him as if to ask why would I lie? We were always good at having entire conversations with our eyes, although I’d much rather be raising my brows over Ms. Mendez accidentally opening the door for a that’s-what-she-said joke than trying to decipher whatever enigmatic things his face was now saying.

“A philosopher,” he finally answered. A look of reverence coated his expression and his voice dipped low, like he was reading from a text book, as he said, “
Nothing comes to be nor perishes. There is simply continual rearrangement occurring between Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. We must find peace in that our existence will continue without our form when we are rearranged into the other. We must now hear the fourfold roots of everything…
It’s a fancy, pre-scientific explanation for the Law of Conservation of Energy. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed.”
 

I tried to fit the phrasing into understanding. The poetics he spouted off were just as disturbing as the tattoo. I felt the thud-thud of change gallop through my chest, like these two things were confirmation that Sully was different. Somehow and somewhere he stopped being the same boy I grew up with. Now he was this tattooed philosopher.
 

He yanked his hand away when he realized I didn’t understand a single thing he’d said. Disappointment rattled in his eyes while confusion cluttered up mine. He drained the rest of his bottle before he stepped towards the water. “Let’s go for a swim,” he said as he pulled off his shirt.
 

“It’s October.” I reminded him, trying not to watch him.
 

“And it’s hot.” He’d already stripped down to his boxers, and before I could reply, he jumped into the water. I blushed, even though Sully, Lindsay, and I did this all the time. But after the way he looked at me in the gym not an hour before and the strange way he kept acting towards me, my heart was beating in all kinds of directions. Things kept shifting. Things that should not have been embarrassing had suddenly become so, except I wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him he was an idiot for inking up his perfect skin or that he was creeping me out with the fact he’d memorized philosophy like it was some song he heard over and over again on the radio. I was the one who was going to strip down to my underwear, climb up onto the rope swing, and do a cannon ball so things felt less awkward. But when my clothes were in a haphazard pile on the grass next to his, I caught him staring at me from the water. I tried to ignore it and told myself it was nothing, but the way he watched me sent goose-bumped shivers through me.
 

And when I landed in the water, we were still swimming in nothing but awkward.
 

“Nice splash. I’d give it a eight-point-three,” Sully said. He was just about a foot from where I landed, and there was that look hovering on his face again. I couldn’t read it, and I couldn’t put it into a place that made sense. He swam closer to me, and fear ripped through me like a hot, hot knife.

Suddenly, the throbbing in my heart leapt to my head, and I cringed.
 

“You okay?” Sully asked, cocking his head.
 

I backpedaled in the water. “I’m fine,” I said between gritted teeth, feeling a strange surge of anger. I was tired of the stupid worried look he kept sending my way all day.
   

I dunked my head under the surface to alleviate the pain. I blew out the air from my mouth and felt the bubbles tickle my nose before coming back up to refill my lungs. My heart was not supposed to be moving that fast, and my mind was not supposed to be racing.
 

When I resurfaced, Sully was already a bobbing head in middle of the brownish river. The further he swam away from me, the further he stretched the tether that used to connect us into impossibility. I watched the muscles in his arms and shoulders ripple the way shadows do on mountains, and by the time he swam to the other edge of the river where dark, green elephant-ears bloomed like they were listening to the wind, I’d realized I’d been imagining things.
 

Sully was just Sully. Goofball, best friend, idiot, Sully, and that was all he was ever going to be.
 

 
Liam

The Intrepid
 

In the quest for progress

We must stand on the shoulders of the Intrepid

For we cannot stand on those of the gods.
 

The Intrepid know beyond knowing

We can only reach the stars by climbing
 

Each rung of an already begun ladder

And placing our mark just above the last.
 

We can only scrape the sky

By laying one brick on top of the other,
 

And no road is paved

Without there first being a trail
 

Blazed into the horizon.
 

The Intrepid understand beyond understanding

That no victory is theirs alone,
 

For we Stand on the Shoulders of Giants.
 

-Madame Isaac Newtonian
 

-Scientist, Poet, and Philosopher
 

-S-892, V-32343-L87987, Stag.
 

Chapter Six
 

The ocean was the big kind of blue—the kind that only happens on extremely sunny days.
 

“What do we
know
?” Nobu leaned out of the open window of the bridge of the boat and screamed the question out to the entire world. He couldn’t get enough of the hunt. We were so close, and it made the adrenaline pump haphazard currents through our veins.
   

“We know west!” I screamed.
 

“And what’s west?”

“That damn island.”
 

“And if we turn south? What’s
south
?” These were the questions that filled us with bulbous laughter because they were questions we used to not have the answers to. Now these answers belonged to us and to those who came after us.
 

“Those damn yuppy-pups!” I yelled.
 

The wind became less aggressive against my hair as I reduced
Geeta
’s
speed and adjusted her course. She was a big beast of a house boat. She was more like a layered, floating city. But she moved faster than anyone would ever think just by looking at her.
 

Nobu let out a whooping laugh as the Franco Islands moved to our left. Green bloomed out of the blue. It was the alive kind of green, full of noises and leaves that moved in the softest of winds. There were concrete ruins on some of the islands, grey against emerald vines, and sometimes we stopped to explore them. Not this time. We had too much on our plates this year.
 

The yuppy-pups headed south this time of year from the Franco Islands, and where there were yuppy-pups, there were red-whales. It was a yearly ritual for us to search for the same red-whale—the one with the weird birthmark in the shape of an artichoke on the backside of her tail. The first time we saw her, I was ten, and Nobu named her Arti (because Choke sounded too crude). This was before Corbin had his accident, and the old man was still able to visit. He sat us on the deck with pen and paper and had us log every observation: size, shades of color, markings, exact location of the sighting, and habits in movement. We followed Arti for three days, tracking her just south of the Franco Islands until we got too close to the Swirl and had to backpedal. How Arti navigated the Swirl was still a mystery, one we never had time to figure out. Corbin called it an exercise in data collection, and that next October, he sent us the message:
Peel back the layers of the sea, boys. Find that artichoke.—C.N.
 

For the first time in my life, I witnessed Nobu grow impatient. How could we find Arti in the expanse of the ocean in front of us? With no land in sight, the water felt infinite and finding the whale (let alone a specific whale) felt impossible. When we explained the impossibility of it to Corbin, he replied with the message:
Perspective is relative.—C.N.
 

“What the hell does that mean?” I growled and closed the screen.
 

Nobu’s cashew-colored eyes softened over hardened cheekbones. It was clear Corbin’s advice made more sense to him than it did to me. “Focus on the solution, not the problem, Liam,” Nobu was constantly telling me. “Focus on what you know and it will lead you to what you do not.”
 

Eventually, he said, “Perspective is everything, right? So the whale is comparably small to the ocean. But on the off chance we find Arti, she will overtake our perspective. Her vastness will replace the infinite ocean and become infinity herself. The closer we get to her, the larger she’ll feel until eventually she’ll end up being all we can see.”
 

“That still doesn’t help us find her,” I said and kicked my toe against the railing along the deck.
 

Nobu frowned. “Finding Arti is not the lesson the old man is trying to teach us. It’s a lesson in perspective. We can never let the whale become all we can see, because the whale is nothing in comparison to the ocean. The ocean is nothing in comparison to the world. The solar system. The galaxy. The Multiverse.”

I still wasn’t getting it, and it annoyed me to no end. Sure, Nobu had age and experience on his side, being a whole nine years older than me, but sometimes I just wanted to understand something before him.
 

“A lesson on perspective,” I mused. We sat there and listened to the waves swish in several directions with the tide. Hours passed, and the sun fell from the sky before I finally had an idea. “If it’s a lesson on perspective, then it’s a lesson in Watching. As Watchers, we need to see the connections that lead us to the Optimal Path. If we get stuck on one idea, we cannot see how it connects to all the others! We have to keep our minds open.”