I didn’t speak. I think maybe in that moment I’d forgotten how. He held out his hand to me and I sat down next to him, silenced, and stared at the water. The old people’s swimming group was bobbing about in the concrete-colored waves in their bright caps with their straight necks, like some odd species of bird. I thought, That didn’t happen, there’s no way that just happened, and I could feel him smiling then, feel him watching me. So I turned and looked at him. I had no idea what I would do next, but his smile washed over me and all I needed to do was smile back. It was that easy. An old motorbike cut through the quiet with its opened-out mega-phone rattle, and up at the café someone dropped a load of plates and all the atoms of the sea crashed louder against the rocks, and the sky—that shell of atmosphere—was impossibly, ridiculously, groundbreakingly, life-changingly, earth-shatteringly blue.

ELEVEN

Memory is a distorted, persuasive thing and I can’t trust it, my own version of things, but I also have to, because it’s the only version I’ll ever have. I think about us, me and Novo, that morning on the beach, and at first it’s not so much what was said as what went on underneath that I remember best—tectonic plates moving together, a confirmation, the puzzle box sprung open. It happened fast, like everything does, and there wasn’t time to think about it except there also was, enough time that while we looked at each other, I could say to myself that this was something unexpected and easy and just perfect. A run of green lights, smoothest journey ever, so you can’t believe your luck and before you know it you’ve arrived. Alice down the rabbit hole. Edmund through the wardrobe. Us on the flattened sand, me and a tall, dark, magic, infinite boy with a quick smile and crumpled trousers and upturned palms. What did I say about the unknown? On its mark, getting set to happen. Go.

He sat close enough for me to feel the warmth of him all down my side, without touching, and while I thought about all the numberless charged particles crashing about in that slice of air between us, he asked me my name.

“Jude,” I said, and he told me that Jude the Obscure was the saddest, bleakest book he’d ever read. “Quite a thing to have to carry around with you your whole life.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “I’m just glad you’re not singing the Beatles at me over and over, like everybody else does. Longest song on earth, and let’s face it, not the best.”

He laughed, a match strike lighting up corners of the day I hadn’t even looked at.