When I woke up in the morning, the rising sun was already kindling the desert flame against the red rocks. The summer solstice. The longest day.
Kason’s day.
I didn’t want to waste a single drop of the daylight. I slipped down the ladder, scuffed into my sandals, and crept out the door. The freshness in the still-cool morning would burn off all too soon, but for now, the air was still. As though time really were suspended. But a faint sound rippled through the quiet. Guitar music?
I looked around and spotted a gravel trail ducking under the shadows of the cottonwoods. I followed it until the trees suddenly opened to reveal a small pond, water green as a glass bottle and reeds crowding thickly around the perimeter. And there, perched on a big boulder, was Kason, bent over a guitar. His song was mournful like a question and hopeful like an answer, all at the same time.
Something about him seemed—different, here in the blurring lines of early morning. He was wearing cargo shorts and his #INEEDSPACE shirt again, but no shoes, and one of his bare feet kept tapping against the rock in time with his playing. His glasses were off, and his eyes were shut, and for now, the lines around his eyes were softer. There was a sort of dreamy, peaceful ache in his expression. As if he were playing for the dawn and the day and the standing still of the sun.
Watching him gave me a sort of shivery feeling. Which didn’t make any sense. I looked away from his face and watched his hands instead, the flexing of his tendons, the deftness of his fingers coaxing music from wood and wire. How did he know how to make the guitar sing like that? Where did he learn the music that he carried in his heart?
He strummed some note of conclusion and opened his eyes, then started. “Oh, Jenna! Hey.”
“Hey.” An odd shyness dropped over me, as though I’d intruded on an intensely personal moment. “I’m sorry—I just came out and heard the music, so I—”
“Oh no, it’s fine.” He pulled his glasses from his pocket, shook them open, slipped them firmly back in place. “I was just messing around. Blake told me I could borrow his guitar.”
Strange. Blake owned the guitar. But Kason could make the music.
“It sounded—really pretty.” Flat words, lame words, but the best I could offer.
“Thanks.” He scratched his neck, breaking eye contact for a moment before looking back at me. “Today is the solstice.”
“I know.”
“It’s the longest day.” Absently he rubbed his thumb over the guitar strings. “After today, the sunlight shortens again. This is the—the balance point, you know? Of the whole year.”
Another point of no return. I should have been scared. But somehow, I’d stopped feeling scared a long time ago. Especially when I was next to Kason.
“This is also the day when the sun passes from Gemini to Cancer.”
Gemini. The twins. The design, according to Jaz, of Kason’s tattoo—though I’d still never seen it. “Really?”
“Yes. Air sign to water sign, according to the zodiac.” Something sparkled suddenly in his warm brown eyes. “Better watch out. The transition makes people restless, they say. Spontaneous. Maybe even a little reckless.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Believe what?”
“That the stars—you know, mean things.”
Kason was silent for a moment, and I knew he was weighing my words, turning them over and over the way he always did.
“Well—I believe that if every star is numbered, then every star is meaningful. I don’t believe God does anything randomly. But beyond that, who can say?” He spread his hands, tipping his face to the sky. “The lines of light are complex. All we can do is follow.”
He grinned at me, all his eager heart in his eyes, and suddenly I had that shivery feeling again. I wanted, somehow, to take his hand, the way he’d so often taken mine. To tell him that I was glad he knew all about the stars and the moon and the patterns, that I was grateful he was part of the lines of light, that I was slowly learning to follow even if I didn’t understand.
The feeling off-balanced me, and I looked away. Ridiculous. The zodiac transition must have already been affecting me.
“Anyway.” He hopped off the rock, scooping up the guitar. “You ready for the festival today?”
The morning was bright now, the hushed uncertainty of dawn past. “Yes.” I fell into step beside him as we left the pond behind, trying to regain whatever equilibrium I’d lost. “More than ready.”
“Jenna! Jenna, are you out here?” Jaz’s voice broke off as we came back in sight of the RV. “Oh, there you are!”
Something about being found out here with Kason brought heat to my face. I quickly stepped away from him. “Yeah…”
“I was explaining the solstice to her.” Kason, too, seemed oddly nervous.
Jaz brushed his words away as she bounced up beside me. “I’m doing henna this morning! Want me to draw some on you?”
As usual, I couldn’t keep up with her transitions. “Wait—what?”
“Henna. You know, like temporary tattoos.”
She held out her arm, and I blinked. An intricate design was doodled along her forearm, spreading into a floral shape on the back of her hand and wrapping leafy vines around two of her fingers. When the morning light caught the design, I could see it still glistened wet.
“Like it? I brought my supplies with us, just waiting for a special occasion. I’ve been practicing the drawings all the way here.”
So all those days when I’d thought she was randomly doodling on her arm, she was preparing for this. I leaned closer, the mesmerizing design pulling me in. “And what’s it called again?”
“Henna. It’s plant-based pigment.” She rotated her arm like an advertisement. “All natural and totally safe and wears off on its own. So? You want one? I’m getting ready to do Brooklyn next.” She grinned mischievously at Kason. “Or maybe you, bro?”
“No, thanks.” Kason backed away with his palms up. “That’s a girl thing.”
“It’s a friend thing. At least for me.” Jaz refocused on me. “So? What do you say?”
A friend thing. And suddenly my answer was easy. “I’d love that. Thanks.”
In five minutes, I was sitting on the rickety plastic picnic table, listening to morning wind search the cottonwood leaves and watching Jaz fold herself cross-legged on the opposite bench. “All right.” She snapped on a pair of latex gloves and began stirring a toothpick through some goopy mixture in a plastic bottle. “I hand-mix my henna, by the way. Only way you can make sure it’s all-natural. Plus, I add a little extra rosemary oil. Always seems to make the design last longer.”
The RV door opened, and Brooklyn emerged, picking her way to the table and settling on the other end of the bench. “Hey, Jenna.”
“Hey.” Weird, how the guardedness I’d once felt around her had all but disappeared. I studied her. She had no makeup on this morning. And her hair didn’t look as if it had tried too hard either. The combination made her look surprisingly—vulnerable.
She smiled. “I see Jaz talked you into this too.”
“Yeah.” Jaz could have probably talked me into anything, but I didn’t add that part. “I guess she needed another victim.”
Jaz snorted but didn’t look up from mixing her potion.
Brooklyn propped her chin in her hand. “So what design are you getting?”
“I guess that’s up to the artist.”
“No, no.” Jaz popped an applicator tip onto the bottle and looked expectantly at me. “What do you want? Pick something meaningful to you.”
“Um…” And then suddenly only one answer felt right. “Something with stars.”
Jaz’s smile told me she caught my meaning. “That’s a good choice.”
I held my breath when Jaz first touched the mixture to my skin, but to my surprise, it actually felt good. It was cool and soothing and made my skin tingle a bit.
“So, this should stay on a couple of hours to get the stain really dark.” Jaz glanced at her own arm, where the paste was hardening. “After you take it off, the design lasts a couple of weeks.”
“Will the heat today hurt it? I’ll be sweating a lot.”
“Nah. If anything, heat sets it. In ancient times, women would sometimes sit by fires after it was done to harden the design.”
I watched her fingers, moving deftly over my arm, but I couldn’t discern the details of the design yet.
“Kason is right about one thing.” Jaz shook the bottle slightly. “Henna is traditionally a female art.”
Brooklyn seemed as interested in the process as I was. Another change since Mount Victory. “Wasn’t it done by rajahs’ daughters?”
“Yeah, Indian royalty, pharaoh queens, and wives of Arab sheiks.” Jaz glanced curiously at Brooklyn. “How did you know that?”
Brooklyn shrugged one shoulder. “My sister was into it, for a while. I let her draw it on my hands all the time.”
“Your sister?” Jaz’s hand stilled for just a moment. “Didn’t know you had a sister.”
“Yeah. Brandi. She’s fifteen.” Brooklyn’s laugh held a sudden sad note. “She believes in me more than I do.”
Jaz was drawing again. “Sisters are like that. I should know.”
“Yeah…” Brooklyn rubbed at a scratch on the picnic table. “She’s sometimes too—she sees everything through rose-colored glasses. Including me.”
“I bet you’re a great big sister, though.” Jaz was working on some detail around the base of my fingers.
Brooklyn was quiet. Quiet enough that I thought she’d let the conversation drop. When she spoke again, her voice was much softer. “I’m not as great as she thinks I am. I never will be. One day she’ll realize that when I mess up and—” She broke off and stared away toward the red rock cliffs.
Something pulled tight in my chest. When had I ever heard Brooklyn be that honest?
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that.” Jaz set the bottle down and looked up, waiting until she had Brooklyn’s attention again. “That’s the thing about people who love you. Mistakes don’t matter.”
Brooklyn gave a wan smile. “I guess.”
How much hurt did she carry behind her put-together persona?
As Jaz kept working, I looked back at the RV. What a motley crew we were. An assembly of broken hearts and shattered stories and shameful secrets, all rattling around on roads we’d never traveled. But I couldn’t help but wonder if the lines of light that had tied us all together were also pulling us onward. If maybe all of uswere running hard toward something bigger than we could have ever known.
“There.” Jaz sat back and stretched her arms over her head. “What do you think?”
I glanced down and caught my breath. Even with the mixture still wet and lumpy, I could see the beauty of the design. Geometric lines angled down my forearm, pulling between bright sunburst shapes. Stars swirled to my fingers and encircled a crescent moon on the back of my hand.
“What do you think?” Jaz looked at me hopefully from the other side of the picnic table.
What I thought was that it was beautiful. That it was a song on my skin. That I would never have imagined that I would be here, in the Utah desert on the longest day of the year, while a friend who’d clung to me despite myself painted her prayer for me on my arm. That I was ready, finally, to stand tall with the stars on my arm and the lines before me. That I knew I was not forgotten.
That, in all the sand and stars, I belonged.
But none of that fit into words. So I took Jaz’s hand and squeezed. “It’s perfect. Thank you.”
She smiled at me, her eyes holding the understanding of what I couldn’t say, and then turned to Brooklyn. “Now, what do you want?”
“Um—” Brooklyn shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“No, now.” Jaz tilted her head. “Come on. What’s something you love?”
“Well—” Brooklyn shifted on the bench. “Flowers, I guess. I—I used to love gardening.”
“All right, then.” Jaz smiled and picked up her bottle again. “Flowers—getting ready to bloom.”
I rotated my arm, watching the wet paste darken in the sun. The design that matched the arms of these girls who had traveled all these miles with me.
I hoped the henna got really dark. And I hoped it lasted a really long time.
#
The festival didn’t start until late afternoon, so while we waited, we drove through Arches National Park. The day was hot, the sun blaring like trumpets against the red rock. The main road through the park was a little dicey, but Blake managed to maneuver the RV all right. We stopped at every overlook and dashed out for photos against the landscape, which looked like some post-apocalyptic movie set.
“Come on, girls!” Jaz would remind Brooklyn and me at each stop. “The heat sets the henna!”
“Can you show me your design?” Kason asked me as we were driving toward Balanced Rock.
I tucked my arm under the table, feeling oddly shy. “Wait till this afternoon. When the paste comes off.”
By the time we left the national park, the festival was starting, and cars were clogging all the downtown roads. Driving into that seemed like diving into the unparted Red Sea, so we went back to the RV park and then walked the few blocks from there.
Moab was an artsy-hippie town—trendy little tourist shops and flower beds zesty with southwestern blooms and bike lanes that were probably better maintained than the streets. Cars were crammed into every parking lot and packed parallel along the roads.
“Must be a big festival.” Jaz had helped Brooklyn and me peel off the henna paste before we left the RV. Now she kept tilting her arm to study her design in the sunlight. “Happy with your henna, girls?”
“I love mine.” The ink had darkened into a glorious rusty brown. I glanced around for Kason to show him, but he was talking to Adam just ahead of us.
“Me too.” Brooklyn’s design was indeed flowers, twining vines of buds just opening into bloom. For the first time since the trip started, she looked at Jaz with something like respect. Even warmth. “Thank you again.”
“Happy to do it.” Jaz pointed toward the park. “Here we are.”
A swirl of music and aromas and colors enveloped us as we walked into the park. Too much was happening for me to see all at one time. A band was grooving on the makeshift stage, one of those indie folk groups with an unexplainable name and handmade guitars. Next to the stage, a woman was painting kids’ faces, while across the grass, food trucks beckoned with colorful banners and delicious smells. Some people were picnicking on the grass, while others were trying their luck at horseshoes or cornhole, or shopping at the little booths that lined the perimeter of the park. Nearly everyone I saw looked as if they were waiting for Woodstock to happen again.
“Come on!” Jaz was in her element here, head already bobbing in time with the music. She linked her hennaed arm through mine. “Let’s get ready to party.”
#
It was a bright day, there in the desert, celebrating the climax of the sun. Moments still stick in my memory like Polaroid shots—playing cornhole long enough to discover Adam’s unsuspected talent for it, admiring the turquoise jewelry at the little booths, eating more cotton candy than is good for anyone. But what I really remember—what I will forever remember about the day—is what came at the end. When the sun was setting and the light was leaving and I had forgotten to be afraid.
It started right as the shadows began to settle. Jaz and I were playing horseshoes against Adam and Brooklyn, and I was waiting my turn when I suddenly felt someone behind me. I turned to see Kason walking up.
“Hey, Jenna?” He glanced at the others, then back at me. “Can you come with me a minute? I want to show you something.”
“Sure.” I touched Jaz’s shoulder as she prepared for her next throw. “I’ll be right back.”
Without waiting for her to reply, I followed Kason as he weaved through the crowd, making his way to a low stone wall that bordered the dusky perimeter of the park. He hopped onto it and turned to give me a hand, and as I scrambled up beside him, I gasped.
“You like it?” He grinned as he swung his legs over the wall and sat. “I wanted you to see it. The sunset on the longest day.”
The western sky was streaked with flame, the purples and reds and oranges like desert wildflowers rioting across the sky. “It’s beautiful.” I lowered myself next to him, the stones still warm under me. I didn’t want to breathe, didn’t want to destroy the magic.
“All the colors are so—big. So—unafraid.” Kason glanced at me quickly. “I guess that sounds weird.”
“Not at all.”
His shoulders relaxed. “I was thinking about something today, while we drove.”
“Yeah?” The music and energy of the party were faint now. As if we were beyond the fringes of that world.
“I have a new theory.” He stroked a finger over the shadow of softened stubble on his chin. “What if all these arches are really portals?”
The colors were running like watercolors in the sky. “Portals?”
“Yes. Like doorways.” His voice lifted with that excitement, that electric sense of wonder that tingled over me too. “Doorways to other worlds.”
The band finished their set, leaving a hush broken only by the stroking of cicadas all around us. I took a deep breath of the mysterious evening. “It could be.”
“So many worlds out there.” His glasses caught the shine of the last light. “So much more…”
I nodded, because I knew that now. I’d been drawn through my own doorway, straight into a world I’d never known existed. And somehow nothing had ever felt more right than sitting here with him, watching the sun yield to the stars.
Behind us, a loudspeaker suddenly crackled to life. “Welcome to the solstice celebration, Moab!”
Cheers erupted from the crowd.
“We’re going to switch to some slower songs now. Everybody grab a partner and get ready to dance.”
Kason glanced over his shoulder, then back at me. “Want to?”
I blinked. Surely he wasn’t—“Want to what?”
“Want to dance?”
I opened my mouth to tell him that I never had. That Gran thought dancing came from the devil. That even if I were willing to sin, I couldn’t do much more than trip over my own feet.
But what came out was, “Yes.”
He swung off the wall and took my hand again, leading me back through the crowd. When we reached the grassy area, couples were already beginning to take positions. Jaz and Brooklyn were leaning in the shadow of some cottonwoods. Brooklyn was biting her lip and peering around nervously. Where was Blake?
“Jenna!” Jaz loped toward me. “Hey, want me to show you how to dance so that—” Her eyes moved to Kason beside me, and a sudden knowing flashed into her face. She scooted backwards. “I mean—later! I’ll see you later!”
Great. This was already awkward.
My shoes squeaked against the dew-wet grass as Kason led me into the gathering crowd. Around us, couples snuggled into each other, bodies flowing together like the music itself. I just felt stiff. Unnatural.
“Never danced before?”
So Kason could tell how uncomfortable I was. I bit my lip. “Uh—no.” Now he’d realize what a mistake it had been to ask me.
But instead he just laughed softly. “No problem. I’ll teach you.” His arms came around me, gently drawing me closer. “Put your hands on my shoulders.”
He was close. Close enough that I could catch the spicy-earthy smell that always seemed to hover around him. Far too close, but I couldn’t escape now. I settled my hands on his shoulders. Gran would completely freak if she could see this.
“Relax, Jenna.” His words breathed near my ear, and he began swaying gently, inviting me into the rhythm of the song. “Trust and let go, okay?”
Above us, the first stars were appearing in the purple sky. I didn’t have to see the lines of light to know they were there too. I drew in a deep breath, opening myself to the song, letting myself soften into the gentle movement of us, together. “Okay.”
“You never showed me your henna.”
I turned my arm so the design caught the faint light from the lights around the park. “What do you think?”
He paused for a moment, studying it with the same reverent intensity he gave to everything in his world. “It’s beautiful, Jenna.” He brushed his thumb over it, sending a wave of shivers along my skin, then gazed at me with understanding. “Stars.”
“The lines of light.” I could feel the heat rising in my face, but I held his gaze. Wanting him to know that I stood behind those words. That I finally believed them now.
“Yes.” He pulled me closer again, once more settling into the comfort of the dance. “I love it. It looks like you.”
I hadn’t thought it possible, but my cheeks heated even more. “What do you mean?”
“I mean—” He cleared his throat. “The stars. The moon. It just—I don’t know, it just makes me think of you. It’s—searching but hopeful.”
That was the way he saw me? My soul swelled upward. “Maybe it’s the way I want to be.”
“And I think that’s wonderful.” He leaned back just enough to meet my eyes. “I think—you’re wonderful.”
The pull between us was like gravity. Like all the separate parts of my soul settling into orbit around him. I let myself move closer, let myself lean into his solid warmth. His arms tightened around me, and we lost ourselves in the rhythm together, both of us catching the song of the summer night.
“Jenna—”
“Yes?” I breathed the word. I didn’t want to think. Didn’t want to look too closely at this moment, didn’t want to move beyond this magical blurring dusk where things didn’t have to be clear.
He pulled back again, his eyes searching into mine, and suddenly, there in the cool dusk, I could see the way he was looking at me. It was the way he looked at the stars and the meteors and the doorways he saw in the sky. It was with a look of wonder. Of understanding. Of delighted joy.
“I—” He stopped. Swallowed. “I—well—I wanted to say that—”
Before I could begin to trace the trajectory of his words, before I could whisper any of what overflowed my own heart too, he bent his head. And then his lips were on mine.
And for a moment, the gravity held and the stars were aligned and everything unsettled in me came to rest in a single perfect moment.
And then shock sizzled with the sharp smell of lightning, and suddenly I was back in the real world, feet firmly on the ground, and what was going on and what was I doing?
I jerked back, so suddenly that I almost fell, a dizzyingly confusing storm of emotions ransacking my heart.
“Jenna—” Kason’s eyes were wide, his jaw loose as if he too had felt the lurch of the lightning. “Jenna, I—I’m sorry—”
“No—I mean—never mind.” I took a step back. And another. And another. Anything to deny the notion that Kason was right about the portals, that I had just tumbled through one I definitely couldn’t close.
“Do you—” He bit his lip.
“I have to go.” The words burst out, a frantic grab for sanity. I had just kissed a boy. I had just kissed a boy.And not just any boy, but the boy who was my friend. The boy who was my friend’s brother. The boy who was, most definitely, not my crush.
Some broken shadow fell over his eyes. “Jenna, wait.”
He reached toward me, but I turned. And I did the one thing I was good at. The thing I’d perfected all my life.
I ran.