Sunshiner

I stood there in shock. My mind was barely capable of comprehending the fact that Candace was leaving me. After all of that, after everything we had done together and endured together, she was giving up on me, on us. She was making a clean cut because it was the easy way out.

I watched as she climbed out the window and then turned around to slide it shut. I watched as she mouthed I’m sorry through the dusty glass, as if that could make it all better. The sunshine beamed off of her body, highlighting her form and making her look like a silhouette, like she was just a shadow in my life and nothing more. I watched as she turned away from me one final time and without even a glance backwards, she stealthily and silently climbed down the side of my house, using the nearby branches of the tangerine tree to aid her, until she had descended below the rooftop and out of sight. I watched it all happen, for that was all I could really do at this point. My emotions had been running in overdrive and this event had been enough to finally wear me down; my mind turned off and my reflexes shut down and so I just stood there and let her climb out of my life. What else could I do, though? It’s what she wanted, and who was I to betray a dying girl’s wish?

What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Evan Kasey Ray? The voice that rang out in my head was rough and yet razor sharp at the same time, which was enough to slap me back into reality. I wondered why I had subconsciously called myself by my first name, which was odd because I called myself Kasey even in my thoughts – and then I realized that the voice in my head did not sound like myself, but like my father. Ignoring the possible question that I may have been slowly going insane, I recalled that that had been exactly how my dad had sounded when he was disappointed with me. Although I hadn’t spoken to him in years (not unless I was calling him up to ask for money, and if that was the case then we usually spoke to each other in monotone voices), I could distinctly remember his voice sounding exactly that way when I had been a kid and gotten into a fight with the neighborhood boys. They had all been younger than me and therefore it had been unfair for me to pick on them, which was precisely why my father had been so upset with me. I vaguely wondered why he of all people would come to mind in a situation like this; what bewildered me the most was that the memory of his voice compelled me to go after Candace. It was suddenly as if I was a child again and I would do anything to avoid disappointing Dad. But why would I want to listen to that voice in my head now? After all the things he had done as a father and all the things he hadn’t done as a father, I should’ve be trying to piss him, not trying to make him proud. I should –

Then I realized I was acting like a madman and a fucking retard. I had spent my entire life ignoring what people to told me to do and not caring what people thought of me – I surely was not about to begin to do such a thing now. If I wanted Candace, then I would get her, whether she liked it or not. I was as stubborn and as determined as I had been as a bratty little kid and I wasn’t going to stop now. The voice was the push that I needed.

I bolted out of my room and down the stairs. I heard my mom utter a startled, “Honey? Where are you going?” but by that time I had darted out the door and into the road.

Candace hadn’t even made it to her house yet, and when she heard my front door slam behind me, she spun around with a stunned expression on her face.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” I yelled at her. Before she could respond I had jogged up to her, secured her in my arms and kissed her fully on the lips, lifting her off her feet and swinging her fully in a circle before putting her down again.

“What are – ” she gasped, completely breathless, but I cut her off.

“I’m selfish, too,” I said. “I don’t care if you want to do the right thing. I don’t care if you’re scared shitless, because so am I, and we might as well be terrified together. We’ve gotten this far, anyway.”

I had expected her to be angry with me since I had blatantly ignored her simple request of leaving her alone. I expected her to hit me because I had kissed her in public where her mother and my mother and anyone else in Dayton could see it. What I wasn’t expecting, however, was the wide smile that blossomed across her freckled face. And I definitely wasn’t prepared for her to throw herself on me and kiss me back.

“Um. Okay. That worked a lot better than I thought it would.”

She laughed loudly. “I knew there was a reason I fell in love with you.”

“So you’re not… You mean you’re okay with this?” I asked tentatively.

“Of course I am, silly,” she laughed and flicked my nose. “I was only testing you.”

The good mood I was in suddenly turned sour. “Testing? You were testing me?”

She seemed oblivious to my rising anger and nodded happily. I had to force myself to suppress my temper. I couldn’t waste this moment by yelling. “You do realize that if I ever did this to you,” I said in a strained voice, “that you would beat the shit out of me, right?”

“Yeah, well,” she shrugged, “you tend to forgive me easily. I’m completely unashamed to admit that I take full advantage of that.”

“You are so fucked up,” I whispered.

She kissed me. “I love you too.”

“You know, I’m actually a bit mad at you right now,” I told her in all seriousness. “What you did was totally unfair – ”

“I’ll make it up to you,” she grinned with a wink, implying something quite perverted, and then I knew that it was one hundred percent worth it to forgive her.



A few weeks passed and July ripened to August. Candace and I spent every second together and I completely broke the “bro before ho” rule. Johnny Boy complained to me all the time because I was spending more time with my new girlfriend than I was with my best friend, and he thought I was letting the summer waste away without doing any fun things like camping out on Devil’s and playing paintball with the rest of the guys. I responded by telling him that summer was not a waste at all as long as I was spending it with Candace and if he was going to tease me for that then he could suck my dick. That shut him up.

Although Candace and I hadn’t done anything nearly as exciting as “disappearing” together again, we still managed to enjoy our time. At least she did. We didn’t have any wild fun, and I was upset about this fact because I felt like I was wasting our time, as Johnny Boy had pointed out. If we only had a limited amount of time together then we should be spending it doing insane things that we would never forget.

Candace seemed to sense my restlessness, and one day she led me up to the roof of her house and we lay there to watch the sun set. I watched as the sky turn from a swirling azure abyss to an ocean of pale pinks and yellows to a fire of amber and then finally into a rippled mess of indigo and violet. It was mesmerizing and relaxing at the same time. Candace hadn’t said a word to me the entire time we sat there, and she didn’t need to – I figured out what she was trying to tell me. I had to enjoy the simple things in life. We didn’t need to go sky diving or cliff jumping to have fun; the beautiful things were right there before me, as big and as obvious as the sky, and yet they had always seemed hidden from my eyes because I was too busy trying to occupy my mind with adrenaline-rushing activities. All I had to do was relax – I didn’t even need to look for these secret beauties, because as soon as I started appreciating the world around me, the sights would come out of hiding and I could finally see them for what they truly were.

It was at that moment when I turned away from the sky, which had begun sprouting a few stars, and turned on my side to gaze at Candace. I memorized every freckle on her face and I learned all of the different ways her eyes glinted when she stared at different stars. I could finally see just how beautiful and courageous and afraid she really was. She was my simple thing.

The days that followed that night were just as relaxing and boring as they had been before, only this time I actually liked them. It was nice to be back in Dayton.

Our daily schedule fell into a simple routine. We would wake up late, so late that by that time the sun was high in the sky and it was nearly one hundred degrees. We would eat something cold, which usually ended up being butterscotch ice cream with rainbow jimmies and a cherry on top. After breakfast we would either head to the Lake to swim or, if there were too many people there (we always received a lot of stares and whispers, since everyone in Dayton still hadn’t gotten over the fact that the Candace Harlow and the Kasey Ray were actually dating), we would go to some random person’s backyard and lay in the sun. We tended to stay away from our own houses, mostly because Mrs. Harlow still hated me, and my mom was so happy that we were a couple that she would sneak around and secretly take pictures of us. Very creepy. Therefore we strolled around town, found a house that was currently empty, and stretched out in their lawn until the people came home and chased us away.

There were some days when we hung out with her team or my team – but never both, since they all still hated each other, even though their respective leaders had essentially made a truce – but that didn’t happen much since we preferred to spend most of our time alone. When the sun began to descend in the sky, announcing the arrival of the afternoon, we would go back to either her house or my house and intend to take a nap but usually one of us woke the other to hook up. When the sun had set and the sky darkened, we would get out of bed and go to either Devil’s or Blueberry Island and party with everyone else. It probably should have seemed stupid and juvenile to get drunk, because after all that Candace and I had been through, it seemed like we had done a bit of growing up and drinking should have been beneath us…but it really wasn’t. Getting drunk was fun as hell and there was no point in denying that. After all, we were still teenagers. We weren’t going to waste any fun parties because we considered ourselves to be too “mature.” Please.

When the party was over, we would stumble back to my house (since Mrs. Harlow and Bear were too wary and would definitely catch us, whereas my mom was always dead asleep by this time and there was no way she’d hear us drunkenly stagger up the stairs), and then we’d collapse on our bed and spend a few intimate hours together. When we were done, she’d give me a goodnight kiss (which was exactly as cheesy as it sounded, I had to admit, but I didn’t care) and then she’d creep out the window and sneak back into her house. But if she still hadn’t sobered up, and therefore climbing down my house would be a very bad idea, she would stay the night and then sneak back into her house very early in the morning, which got us out of trouble because it gave her parents the impression that she had slept in her own bed all night. Mrs. Harlow, of course, would have hated the idea that Candace and I had “sleepovers” and therefore we had to pretend we were as chaste as nuns.

Then the morning would arrive again, and I would do the same thing I had done way back in middle school when we were childhood friends: I sat on my porch and waited for her to run out of her house with a smile on her face as she bounded into my arms.

There was one particular morning, however, when she didn’t have a smile on her face – instead, she was smirking.

“Uh oh,” I grumbled as she laced her fingers in my hair and gave me my morning kiss. I noticed that she was holding a large, folded up sheet of paper. “You have trouble planned for today, don’t you?”

“Don’t worry, it’s not a prank,” she said and walked inside my house, shouting out a “Good morning, Beverly!” to my mom, who returned the greeting cheerily from the kitchen. I trailed after her as she led the way into the living room, wondering what the piece of paper was.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said slowly and made her way over to the table. “We should disappear again.”

And then she pulled out her sheet of paper and unfurled it, revealing a world map.