“What are you doing?”

I startle and nearly drop Amy’s phone. I look up guiltily as her shadow falls over me. She’s standing, arms crossed, eyes narrowed.

Fuck. I swallow. I am caught.

“Amy,” I say, clenching her phone. “I know what this looks like but this isn’t that.”

She holds out her hand. “Gimme my phone.”

“Amy,” I plead. “I’m sorry.”

She looks away. I give her the phone and I want her to sit with me but she crosses her arms again. Her eyes are wet. “And I was literally just thinking how happy I am with you.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

“Why are you snooping around?” she demands. “Why are you ruining this?”

“It’s not like that,” I tell her, reaching out.

“No,” she says, waving me off. “I get it. You don’t trust me. And why should you? I’m the one who showed up with a stolen fucking credit card the first day I met you. Of course you don’t trust me.”

“But I do trust you,” I say, and how strange the truth sounds. “I’m looking in your phone because I’m fucking crazy about you and when you go in the bathroom I miss you.” I get onto my knees and grovel. “Amy, I swear. I have never been so crazy about anyone and I know this is crazy. But I love you. Even when you’re in the bathroom, I just want more.”

At first there is nothing. She is blank. And then she sighs and scruffs my hair. “Get up.”

We settled back on the bench as a family emerges from a minivan, loud, sandy. Five minutes ago, we would have been cracking jokes about them. Now we are somber. I nod toward them.

“You and I didn’t grow up like that and we’re a little messed up because of it,” I say. “It’s hard for people like us to trust each other, but I do trust you.”

She watches the mother squirt lotion onto the kids. “Okay,” she says. “That’s fair. About the shitty childhoods and the trust.”

I hold her hand as we watch the father try to reason with his unreasonable four-year-old son, telling him he can’t have another slushie because he won’t have any room for hot dogs at the barbecue. The kid shrieks. He doesn’t want a hot dog—he wants a slushie. The mother comes around and squats and hugs the child and says please tell Mommy what you want. The child screams slushie and the father says the mother is spoiling the child and the mother says it’s important to communicate with kids and respect their own desires. It’s like watching TV and when they disappear back into the minivan, the show is over.

Amy puts her head on my shoulder. “I like you.”

“You’re not pissed at me?”

“No,” she says. “I’m the same way. Sometimes I can’t believe how alike we are.”

I stiffen. “You’ve looked in my phone?” CandaceBenjiPeachBeckMugofUrine.

She laughs. “No,” she says. “But if you would ever leave your phone, I totally would. I’m not very good at trusting people either.”

I nod. “Look. I don’t wanna be that guy. But we can get better.”

She squeezes my hand. “I might fuck up.”

Being together is the best feeling in the world, better than sex, better than a red convertible or that first I love you.

“Yeah?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says, and mimicking is a sign of love.

This was a good idea, this trip. We get more slushies for the road and get back into the ’Vette. There’s been an atomic meltdown and we’re the only two people left on Earth and this is why people shouldn’t commit suicide, because maybe, someday, you might get to sit in the shade with someone who is refreshingly different! I make her laugh so hard that she has slushie spilling out of the corners of her mouth. And then we drive away and find a quiet spot and I eat her out and when I finish I have her spilling out of the corner of my mouth. Your vacation is not the best vacation ever. Mine is. I earned it. She caught me sneaking around in her phone and still she spread her legs.

When we get to the hotel, she gasps. “Wow.”

And when we walk into the room and onto the terrace, I don’t gasp. I knew we were close, but I didn’t realize I’d be able to see it so clearly—the Salinger cottage, twinkling, lit by fireworks, full of people. People who may or may not have seen my mug. Amy nods toward the house. “Do you know those people?”

“One of them,” I tell her. “They’re the Salingers.” I tell Amy about Peach’s dysfunctional friendship with Beck and her inevitable suicide. Amy wraps her arms around me and if this were a cartoon, I could stretch my rubber arm all the way across the beach, into that house, up those rickety stairs, into that bedroom, reclaim my mug of urine, and then, then I would have it all.

4

THE next day we hit the beach with Ralph Lauren towels. We sit near the Salingers’. I figure maybe, maybe, I can ask to use their bathroom. We can ask to use a bathroom. Nobody is going to say no to Amy and while she’s making small talk I can go upstairs. It’s a reach but it’s all I’ve got.

“Whoa,” she says, shielding her eyes with her hands. “He looks pissed.”

I turn. A Salinger man whistles and storms toward us. My balls crawl back inside of me. Amy groans. “They’re as bad as you said.”

“Let’s be calm.”

But he’s not calm. He’s spitting. “This beach is private,” he snarls. Families fascinate me; Peach is dead, but there is her nose, her frizzy hair. “You need to be on the other side of the sand.”

You can’t be on the other side of the sand and Amy peels off her shirt like she’s Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “Did you want to let us know about anything else?”

She smiles at him and he’s staring at her body and she’s a fucking genius. He skulks back to his ugly wife and Amy laughs. “Can we get in the water already?”

“I need to warm up,” I say, but really I need to do recon on the Salingers. There are so fucking many of them, romping on their trampolines on the water, on the sand, as if the sand and the waves and the cottage aren’t enough. Children scamper and older Salinger men in madras shorts with short-sleeve shirts talk Vineyard Vines, golf courses in Ireland, reunions. The women bitch about nannies and salesgirls and a waitress they all think is after their chubby husbands. You would never know that this family lost their daughter, their sister, their auntie. They are on vacation in every sense of the word and their only purpose is to alert passersby that they can’t use the trampoline or sit too close. I have never seen such a family of cunts, living for barricades. We’ve already been yelled at and I am not getting in that house today.

So fuck it.

I grab Amy and throw her over my shoulder and she screams and the Salingers glare, jealous of us, young, poor, in love. I carry her toward the water, the same water where I disposed of Peach, the same shore where she washed up months later after her tragic so-called suicide. Amy wraps her legs around me and envious Salinger men watch, wish, drink. We stay like this, glued in Peach’s ocean grave and by the time we get out of the water, most of the Salingers have retreated into the house. It’s colder now and we put on sweaters and Amy reaches into her beach bag and pulls out a children’s book called Charlotte & Charles. “This was my favorite,” she says. “Can I read it to you?”

“Of course.”

She leans into me and the story goes like this: Two giants, a man and a woman, live on a desert island. The woman is lonely but the man feels safe. Humans arrive and while the woman is excited, the man is hesitant. The last time humans were there, everything went to shit. The humans tried to kill them. Charlotte wants to try again and Charles complies, but sure enough, the humans are ringing bells, the sound of which will kill Charlotte and Charles. But Charlotte and Charles wear earplugs to protect themselves.