This lodge is the boys’ cabin; the girls have another drive ahead of them. It seems silly to room a bunch of horny, distraught queer boys in one confined place, but Briggs is way ahead of my thinking: “Behave yourself, Mr. Major. Mr. Carrillo is head of this cabin, and he’ll report even the slightest hint of you boys acting on your…urges. And Mr. Carrillo is very loyal.”

“Got it,” I say, adding quietly to myself: Don’t bone anyone. Briggs scowls at my snippy tone, seething under his duty to return me home “without a scratch.” As the car falls into silence, Marcos devours his thumbnail and avoids my judgmental side-eye. How many boys has Marcos ratted out? It can’t have been many—we’re not supposed to stay that long. Still, a fidgety need to reconfirm this detail takes hold: “So, we’re…leaving in a few days, right?”

“Your time here is up to you,” Briggs says. “Put in the effort and go home.” I blink and almost miss it, but as Briggs speaks, Marcos and Darcy turn away from each other in unison. Cool, that’s suspicious.

As Marcos and I disembark, we land in two inches of rain and wave a drenched goodnight to Briggs and the girls. It’s shitty to separate from Molly after everything we’ve been through. Before Marcos shuts the door, Molly mouths something that looks like, “It’ll be okay.”

Maybe that’s what I wish she’d said. I wish I’d said that to her.

“Come on,” Marcos says, and we splash through wide, unavoidable puddles before finally escaping underneath a wooden awning at the top of the stairs. Puppy Boy makes like a puppy and shakes the rain from his slick surf wave hair. “I—don’t—like—being—wet.”

“Spotty glasses.” I point at his lenses smothered in raindrops. He slides them off, but his waterlogged shirt only smears around the rain.

“My shirt is soaked.” He laughs, throaty and deep; not like Ario’s honey-dipped giggle at all. A bracelet of wooden beads surrounds a small cross on his wrist; cruelly, I’m reminded of Ario plucking his rainbow bead bracelet after I pushed him away and ruined everything. “Like Briggs said, I’m Marcos Carrillo.”

“Connor Major.”

“Hey! M.C., C.M.” I smirk at the coincidence of our palindrome initials, but this must not have been a strong enough reaction because Marcos drops his head in embarrassment. Avoiding my eyes, he tugs down the wet shirt hugging his cuddly torso. Pretty self-conscious for a guy trying to pull off the cool fifties thing. “Anyway, it’s so kind of you to visit me in my loneliness.”

“What?”

Marcos instantly switches back to his jovial laugh. “It’s kind of you to visit me in my loneliness. It’s my ‘aloha.’ I say it whenever I meet a new camper or say goodbye to one going home. The Wicked Witch says it to Dorothy in Wizard of Oz…” Off some hidden realization about himself, Marcos’s eyes bulge behind his rain-smudged lenses. “Don’t tell the Reverend I quoted Wizard of Oz. We’re not allowed.”