“That’s it,” he said, giving me a little half smile.

“Was that not what you needed?”

“If it wasn’t what I needed we’d keep going,” he said.

AFTER I’D DRESSED, HE WALKED ME BACK TO LONNIE’S ALONG the beach. It was too dark to see each other. He passed me a flask by pressing it into my stomach, so I could find it. The air was damp and cool, and I was cold, but it felt good—a natural cold, not manufactured by machines. I hadn’t felt that since the Adirondacks.

I took off my shoes and carried them. The sand was damp and as we walked little sparks spread out around my feet. The water crashing on the sand had a ghostly glow about it.

“Noctiluca,” Carlow said. “Does that happen in Oregon?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it this concentrated, though, where you can see it in the water.”

“There must be some kind of bloom right now.”

“We used to bring those ground bloom fireworks to the beach at night,” I said, “light them, and throw them in the water. They don’t burn out right away, they make the water glow for a minute. It seems really obnoxious now—we were just throwing trash into the ocean.”

“My parents had a summer house in Michigan for a while when I was growing up,” Carlow said. “The Upper Peninsula. The house was near Lake Michigan, past these dunes with all this marram grass. When I was eleven my parents had a party to go to and they left my little sister and me home alone for the first time. We decided we were going to do all of the things my parents never let us do. We were drunk with power, I guess. We decided to light a bunch of matches—that was one of the rules, you know, we were never allowed to actually light matches, we had to let my parents do it. Well, we knew it was dangerous, and we weren’t looking to burn the house down, so we decided to go outside. We ended up burning up about three miles’ worth of beach grass before the fire department came and put it out. It was kind of devastating for the landscape; we were on the news.”

“Oh my God! That’s terrible!”

“My parents didn’t leave us home alone again for years, I can tell you that.”

I laughed and took another sip from the flask.

“You know, Elle,” Carlow said. “I like you a lot. You have only one flaw.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“You think you’re different.”

“Different from what?”

“Different from whoever you’re with. Any room you walk into, it doesn’t matter what room—you think you’re different from everyone there. You’re trying to be different.”

“And I’m not?”

“No,” he said simply. “Not really.”