Edwin shakes he head. “Fucking girl.” He grabs me and pulls me toward him. Next thing I know, his lips are on my lips. His tongue pushes into my mouth. Quick, he pulls away. He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth and I do the same. We spit onto the rocks. He kissed me hard, like a smack across the mouth. At first I want to laugh. Can you believe what we just did? Can you believe how far my bred will go to fuck a girl? But then I look at he and he looks at me and something in his face stops me. For the first time in we life, Edwin appears afraid.

I hear the girl clap, slow slow. I hear she say, “Bravo.” We don’t move. “Guys?” she says. “Hey, guysss.” Out of the corner of my eye I see she stumble. She falls to her hands and knees like she’s going to be sick. Then she lies down on the ground, curled up like a baby.

Edwin snaps back into the moment then. He turns away from me and faces she. “You satisfied, miss?” he says.

“Shhh. The stars,” she mumbles. Her eyes are closed.

Edwin goes over and sits next to she. He takes the string of her shirt in his fingers and pulls. She lets him. She shirt falls down to she waist. She’s not wearing a bra. Her tits are like Sara’s, small small, the kind that remind you a woman was a girl. He unbuttons his trousers. He runs his finger up she leg, she thigh, under she skirt.

“Mmm.” She says it so faint I barely hear it.

I go off to give them space. I walk to the edge of the rocks and lie down and listen to the sea crash. I close my eyes and for a moment I’m falling, weightless. Then I hear Edwin.

“What the fuck?” he says.

I look over.

He’s wiping his hand on his trousers. “Girl, quit slobbering!” he says.

I laugh. “Edwin, man, she passed out!”

He groans and shoves she off. In the starlight her scar glistens like a thing that could slither away. He lifts she arm and lets go. It flops.

“Typical,” he spits.

Edwin leaves her there and walks over to me. He lies down near me, right at the edge, so close he hangs one arm over it and swings it back and forth through the abyss above the sea. We look up at the stars. A memory comes over me like a breeze, of lying like this back in this same spot in secondary, when Keithley would take us out in the boat and sometimes, amid the bacchanal, the night would find its stillness. I’m drifting off now. Ground cool and smooth. Air cool and smooth. Sound of waves far below.

Then I feel Edwin’s hand on my hand.

He turns and looks at me. I don’t laugh or pull my hand away. It all happens fast. He unbuttons himself, then me. I make my mind go empty. I make myself all body. Not because I know what I want or don’t want, but because this night has taken us to a place we may never find again, and I need to be there with him before it’s gone. I don’t believe we’re doing this until he places my hand around him. He’s warm, like my own self. It’s he or me or we—I don’t bother to understand, just touch and rub, touch and rub, until the world goes tacky with we. We’re together beneath the cold stars, and then the stars groan and unleash their white light and the night goes so thick and sweet with our chlorine I swear that perfume will last until the stars are dead.

Then I’m on the ground. Shoved off by he, hard, and at first I don’t know why, but then I sit up and rub my eyes open and see she looking at we.

“The fuck you staring at, little girl?” Edwin says.

Her eyes open wide. Her mouth makes an O and a sound comes out so small the wind takes it.

She stands, gathers she sandals, and runs.

FARAWAY

“AT FIRST, I believed she would turn up.”

People disappear and are found. A mother at a department store plunges into panic until she hears a muffled giggle coming from inside a rack of clothes. A husband is late on a rainy night, but eventually the headlights come up the driveway. The girl is sobering up somewhere. She is swimming in the ocean, in the pool. She is a bit late, is all, to the breakfast buffet. For a time, the missing person is everywhere. Then, sometimes, just as quickly, she is nowhere.

Clive and I sat on the bench on the sidewalk. Snow had collected on our coats and on Clive’s gray wool hat. The traffic light at the end of the block bathed us in its shifting light—green, yellow, red. It was after midnight. I felt as if I had been walking for days, for years, and now that I had finally arrived at my destination, this faraway place the reaching of which had been my sole object for so long, I didn’t want to look around. I didn’t want to take in the sights or know anything about what kind of place this was. I was only tired.

I said nothing and he continued. “When she ran off, I started to go after her, but Edwin said to let her go, and I did. We were only half a mile from Indigo Bay. We weren’t abandoning her in the middle of nowhere. I figured she’d find her way. On the drive home, we got pulled over and the police officer took us in to sleep it off. You must know about that, I guess. We were in a cell together all night, only the two of us, but we didn’t talk. We just sat there together. But it wasn’t a bad silence. It felt like we had time, is what I mean. We didn’t have to say anything to each other yet about what we’d done. Then the next day we found out she was missing and everything changed.”

“What did you do?”

“When he heard the news, Edwin came up to me on the beach and said, ‘Listen. We limed with she at Paulette’s and then we drove her back here. That’s all.’ So when the police questioned me that’s what I told them. I knew how it must look. The two of us with her all night, and now she happened to be gone? They knew I was hiding something, but what could I do, tell them what had happened?” He shook his head. “The police came and searched my grandmother’s house. They were looking for drugs. I don’t know how they knew. Edwin—he wouldn’t have done that to me. I still believe that. My grandmother watched me get taken away, with all the neighbors out in the street.” He ran his hand over his face.

Clive told me the rest of his story, and I did my best to listen, though I confess I found it difficult to focus on the details of a life that I saw now had very little to do with me. He told me about his time in the eggshell-blue prison, where he and the twenty or so other incarcerated island men did nothing much as they waited out their sentences. At night, he was troubled by dreams. In them, he was back at the cliffs with Edwin, together beneath the stars. He looked up and saw everyone he knew standing in a circle around them, watching. We have found you, we know, everybody knows. He woke from these dreams soaked in sweat. Then he reminded himself that the girl was the only one who had seen them together, and she was dead. He felt so relieved, and right on the heels of this emotion came the next one—filthy, gut-twisting shame that he was relieved that a girl was dead, and in these moments it seemed to him that they must have willed her death somehow, that their desire to protect their secret had made it happen.

In prison he had time to think. Mostly, he thought about Edwin. They had not spoken since Edwin instructed him on what to say to the police, so Clive was left alone with the mystery of that night and what it meant—a mystery that cast its shadow back to the beginnings of his boyhood. He went over it and over it, sifting through the smallest moments and details of their shared life. He thought of the antimen on the beach before Indigo Bay was Indigo Bay, when Edwin orchestrated the ambushes to chase the men away. He thought of Jan sitting in the stifling afternoon air of Paulette’s, his eyes bloodshot with drink, his thumb beating like a heart against the sticky bar. Fleet. What was Jan’s interest in them, in Edwin, really? He thought of Alison and Julie and all the rest, the whole parade of Edwin’s pretty American daughters. Edwin always said he went after them because the local girls were either prudes or skets or gossips, and Clive had always been impressed with himself for knowing better than to believe this. He had thought Edwin pursued these girls because they came from the places he dreamed of going, because he hated them for their stupid good luck even as he tried to draw himself closer to his dreams through their sweet-smelling skin. And maybe that was sort of it. But what if there was something else, too? What if he chose these girls because whatever happened, or didn’t, they were leaving, gone?

No matter how much he thought about it, without knowing what that night had meant to Edwin, it was impossible to determine what it had meant to himself. What would have happened next? What future was thwarted because that girl went off and got herself killed?