With the speed and the sun and my happy thoughts, our one-hour rental vanished like morning fog. We coasted back into the lot feeling like total Segway pros. In fact, having my own feet under me again made me feel slow and not very efficient. Like a turtle instead of a dolphin.
But despite that, when Lucas suggested a walk up to the summit that would take a couple of hours, I was the first one to second the motion. The two science geeks had had enough of all this fresh air, though. They opted to hang out at the snack bar until the next ferry came, which left Lucas and me, Lissa, Carly, Shani, and the ever-persistent Jeremy (maybe he did have a thing going for Shani) walking up the road in the opposite direction of the one we’d taken on wheels. Before long a sign appeared, pointing out a trail to the summit.
“Looks like a short cut,” Lucas said. “Shorter but steeper. Want to try it?”
“Not me.” Lissa slugged back some Evian from her backpack. I did the same while I had the chance. “I don’t even care about getting to the top. I just want a nice walk in the trees, admiring the view. No sweat. No muscle cramps. Just a nice, even calorie burn.”
“Right, like you need that,” Shani pointed out.
“She may not, but I do,” Carly said. “No short cuts for me, either. We’ll take the long way.”
Shani decided to go with them, and where Shani went, Jeremy went. I tried not to sound too eager or too delighted. “See you at the top, then.”
“If we change our minds and decide to go back down, we’ll be on the four o’clock ferry. Meet at the dock.”
See? We didn’t have to lose them after all. They walked off down the road and Lucas and I started up the trail. I’m not big into fitness, but half an hour of that and I was wishing I’d worked a little harder in Phys. Ed. But Lucas didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t have anything to prove in the manliness department—in fact, he seemed pretty happy to stop every once in a while so we could take in the view or just breathe the salty air.
“I love that smell,” I said. “Salt water mixed with old leaves and something else. What is it? Peppermint?”
“It’s like that stuff my mom put on my chest when I had a cold.” Lucas got up from the rock he was sitting on and pointed up. “That’s it. Eucalyptus.”
Sure enough, a stand of them spiced the air with the smell of Vicks VapoRub. In the warm sun, in that place, it just seemed right, you know? Or maybe I have a warped sense of the romantic. You go find your own olfactory memory. This one’s mine. Because what happened next pretty much cemented the time, the place, and the scent in my memory forever.
“Gillian?” He sat back down on the rock next to me.
“Mm?” I took another deep breath.
“Come here.”
I opened my mouth to say, “I
am
here,” and he leaned in and kissed me.
Oh, my.
My first real kiss—on Valentine’s Day to boot—just the way I’d been dreaming about it. The view, the sun, the rock . . . well, maybe not the scent of Vicks VapoRub, but that’s not exactly the kind of thing you script when you dream, is it?
His mouth was soft and warm, and I had no idea how experienced he was, because I had no experience to judge by. I just let the moment take me, and you know what? Experience didn’t matter. Living it did.
And I lived that moment a hundred percent.
He pulled away and I realized the cramped feeling in my chest was from holding my breath. I tried not to gasp as I filled my lungs. As far as I was concerned, they could bottle that smell and I’d buy gallons of it, just so I could return instantly to this moment.
“I’ve been waiting for that all day,” Lucas whispered, his lean face inches from mine.
I nodded, still trying to control my unsteady breathing. You’d think I’d have the hang of it by now—I’ve been doing it all my life. But one kiss from Lucas and my body’s most basic operations forgot how to work.
“Me, too,” I finally managed.
“True? You’re not just saying that?”
“No.” Gathering up my courage, I leaned in to kiss him this time. The secret to mastering anything is practice, right?
I even managed to breathe a little, so that when I pulled back I didn’t feel so light-headed. “I was wondering all morning how we were going to ditch the others,” I confessed softly. “But I didn’t know how you felt, so I couldn’t do anything.”
“I’m all for ditching.” With one finger, he smoothed my hair behind my ear. “Your hair has blue lights in it.”
“Yours has gold.” I smiled into his eyes. “Not a very well matched pair, unless you count the school colors.”
He grinned. “I think we are. You’re the smartest girl in school.”
“I don’t know about that. There are plenty of girls in my classes with SAT scores like mine.”
“So modest. When you have every reason not to be.”
“The Lord doesn’t like pride, remember?”
“Yeah, but at Spencer it’s hard to find a girl who doesn’t think it’s all about her.”
“Maybe. Personally, I think it’s all about us—my friends.
Our
friends.” I smiled at him. “I don’t know Shani very well yet, but from what I’ve seen of her, she’s nice. Funny, too.”
He kissed me again. “Are you trying to set me up with her or what?”
I smiled. “Of course not. Jeremy would probably give you some competition anyway.”
He huffed out a breath in a laugh. “I wondered where he came from.”
“He hangs out at our table sometimes. He likes to listen to my stories.”
“That’s one of the first things I noticed about you.”
“What, that I was loud?”
“No, silly. That it was hard to get near you for the crowd. Always entertaining.”
Was that a problem? “I like telling stories. Stuff just seems to happen to me, and people like to listen when I tell them about it.”
“Do they?”
“Sure.” I hesitated. “At least, I think they do.”
“It just seems funny, that’s all.”
Had I done something wrong? “What?”
He slipped an arm around me, and I lost my grip on what we were saying.
“Seeing an Asian girl at the center of attention, you know? Lacey Takamoto and Vi Truong are in my calculus class, and I can barely get a hello out of them. It’s like they’re pathologically shy or something.”
“Or they listen to their grandmothers better than I do.” My tone was wry. “She’s always telling me I’m too loud, too disrespectful, that I get in people’s faces too much.” I heard my own words dissolve into the clear air. “Do you think she’s right?”
He settled his arm more comfortably around me. “You are not disrespectful.”
Uh-oh. He agreed with Nai-Nai on the other points, obviously. Oh, wow. Maybe it was true. Maybe I really was an overbearing loudmouth and people listened to me not because they were interested, but because they couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
Hot blood crept into my cheeks, burning as it went. Why hadn’t anybody told me? Why did Lissa act like it didn’t matter? Why did Carly put up with me? Was that why she was so quiet? Because with me around, nobody else got a chance to talk?
“Hey.” He gave me a little squeeze. “Don’t beat yourself up. Ready to go?”
I got up. “Sure.” More than ready to walk away from myself. I was really going to have to watch it, or I’d find that not only would I lose my friends, I’d chase Lucas away, too.
Father, thank You for using Lucas to show me what a jerk I am. Help me to do better, Lord. I’ll pay attention to Nai-Nai from now on, I promise. I want to keep humble in Your sight, so I guess that means not being the center of attention. Help me put other people first, Lord. Amen.
I felt a little better after putting it in God’s hands. We climbed up the lower part of the hill and came out on the far side of the island. Below, I could see a pink dot and an orange one: Lissa and Carly. They were headed to some beat-up looking buildings that stood wearily at attention around a little cove.
“What’s that?” Lucas asked. “A museum?”
“Maybe.” Instead of leading the way to join my friends, I hesitated. Guys liked it when you asked their opinion first, didn’t they? “Want to check it out?”
“Sure.”
We met up with the two girls at a sign that informed us this was the Quarantine Station and a tour would leave at one o’clock.
“Quarantine for what?” I wondered out loud as we went to find the meeting point. “Malaria? Smallpox?” Maybe this place had been a leper colony or something. Yikes.
“Where’s your other friend?” Lucas asked Lissa.
“Who, Shani? We lost her and Jeremy somewhere along the way.”
“Or they lost us, more like,” Carly put in. “I’m starting to get a complex.”
I exchanged a glance with Lissa and something in my expression made her eyes widen. She looked from me to Lucas and raised her brows. When I nodded, she sucked in a breath and gave me a not-very-subtle grin that, thankfully, Lucas didn’t see.
At one on the dot, the guide met us and we found out in the first couple of sentences that these buildings weren’t for quarantining sick people.
They were for quarantining Asian people.
Immigrants. Families coming to Old Gold Mountain to make their fortune. Men, women, and little kids stuck in these uncomfortable barracks with their iron beds and laundry strung from one to the other, able to look out the windows and see freedom but not have it. Because the government was busy interrogating them, holding their papers, deciding whether or not they could stay.
“After the facility was decommissioned in 1940,” the guide explained, leading us over to a wall covered in a piece of Plexiglas, “these barracks were preserved, primarily because of these poems carved into the wall.”
I leaned closer and blinked. In the silence, a gull called as it wheeled over the cove below. I felt Lucas’s warmth next to me. “Can you read it?”
“
Bright moon
,” I said softly, touching the hard plastic over the characters, which had been carved in with a passionate yet careful hand. An educated hand. A hand that maybe had to settle for building a railroad or doing some rich person’s laundry to make a living, instead of painting graceful characters on rice paper.
“
The morning breeze and bright moon linger together
.” My translation was as slow and halting as a child’s.
“
I think about the native village far away
Cut off by clouds and mountains.
On the little island,
The wailing of cold, wild geese can be faintly heard
.”
“Geese?” Lucas’s voice broke the silence.
“Maybe it was fall,” Carly said. “This is where they go when they fly south.”
I read the rest of the poem to myself and murmured the last line. “
Why else do we come to this place to be imprisoned?”
But they’d already turned to go, and I don’t think anybody heard me.
A
LL RIGHT, GIRLFRIEND.”
Lissa grabbed me and swung me around so that I flopped onto my bed next to Carly. Shani pushed a pillow up against Lissa’s headboard and settled against it, and Lissa sat at the foot, Indian style. “You hardly said a word all night and we’re dying, here. Tell us about the kiss. Every last detail.”
“You’re worse than my mother.”
We’d gone out for supper at a little seafood place in Tiburon, but with half a dozen people yakking it up at the table, it wasn’t exactly the place to reveal your innermost secrets. Besides, I’d made up my mind to watch my mouth from here on out, which is probably why everyone else was doing the aforesaid yakking.
What a concept. Lucas was right.
But here, in our dorm room, it was different. These were my friends, and they wanted every word in a bad way.
“We hiked up almost to the top of the hill,” I began, “and sat on this flat rock to look at the view.”
“The view.” Shani nodded at Lissa. “Uh-huh.”
“Shut up.” I leaned across and whacked her on the knee. “There were these eucalyptus trees that smelled like Vicks VapoRub.”
“I
so
don’t want to hear about smelly trees,” Carly said. “Get to the good part.”
I sighed. “That’s called setting the scene, you uncouth wenches.”
“What Carly said.” Lissa made a rolling, get-on-with-it motion with her hand.
“So I was sitting there saying something inane and he said, ‘Come here,’ and I was all, ‘I
am
here,’ and he leaned in and kissed me.”
“What was it like?” Carly wanted to know.
“I, uh . . .” Okay, did they really need to know it was my first kiss? That I didn’t have anything to compare it to?
Lissa leaned forward. “What she means is, can the guy kiss? You never know with these brainy types.”
“The guy can kiss,” I said firmly. “Intense research proves it beyond any doubt.”
“Woohoo!” Shani leaned over and gave me a high five.
They were so honestly happy for me that I figured it was safe enough to confess my dark secret. “To be honest, it’s my
only
research.”
The laughter died into amazed silence. Oh, great.
“You mean . . .” Carly began.
I nodded. “First time. Except for, like, relatives. Which don’t count.”
Carly clasped her knees. “That is
so
romantic. I bet he organized the whole day just so he could kiss you up there in that beautiful spot.”
“I don’t know about that.” But what if it was true? What if he had engineered the whole boat trip and hike and everything, just so he could find the perfect moment for our first kiss? “No way. Guys just don’t do stuff like that.”
“Ninety percent of guys don’t bring you roses when they screw up a date, either,” Lissa said. “Think about it.”
I was. Intensely. “Wow,” I said. “This must be the real thing, then. Even if he does think I talk too much.”
“You do not.” Carly was so sweet.
“Oh, I think I do. Didn’t you notice how everyone got a chance to talk at supper because I kept a lid on it for once?”
Lissa eyed me, puzzled. “We talked about as much as always. Even Jeremy, when he wasn’t staring at Shani all googly-eyed.”
Shani threw a pillow at her. And Lissa threw it at me. I grabbed a couple of silk ones from Thailand off the head of my bed and chucked them back. And then a full-scale pillow fight broke out, with Shani swinging my down-filled one at Carly, who defended herself with a fat one with an elephant beaded on it.