Page 66 of Exchanged

“Probably not,” I say. “Why, are you worried he’ll try and scare you off or something? He doesn’t own a shotgun.”

“Just hunting rifles.”

“Really,” I say. “He won’t care. He’d be happy for us.”

Garrett nods. “But can we hold off on telling him? Just for now?”

“Sure,” I say. “But, Garrett, it’s okay to be messy with him, too.”

Late that night, as I sit at my Casio in the glow of my desk lamp and computer screen, I realize something: I no longer struggle to create music of my own, no longer sit for hours in the unsettled clutches of writer’s block. The imaginary judgmental audience that once prevented me from writing has dispersed. I think my mom was in that audience, and maybe a version of Dad, but now they’ve been replaced by Aunt Liz and Emma and Katrina and Garrett—and by the real version of Dad, who believes I can do this.

I’ve worked and I’ve learned and I’ve practiced. I have original things to say.

So tonight, when I place my fingers on my keyboard, melodies stream out as if they had already been there, like a story I already know but haven’t yet written.

It’s the first time I think of myself as a composer.

NINETEEN

A week passes, and Garrett doesn’t pull away, each day filled with evidence of the new reality that exists between us: small touches and kisses and actions and glances, all solidifying that we have moved on to a different version of our relationship. I walk into his bedroom one evening to find him splayed on his bed, watching Gladiator II on his laptop. I can’t see the screen, but I hear Harry Gregson-Williams’s reworked version of the original movie’s theme drifting from the speakers.

“I think I liked the first one better,” I say.

He pauses the movie and looks up at me. “How did you know what I was—” His jaw drops as he realizes the extent of my soundtrack knowledge. “Impressive.”

“Not really,” I say. “That theme is pretty iconic. But,” I add, before I can stop myself, “you should rewatch the battle scene from the first movie sometime and then compare it to the first fight scene in Pirates of the Caribbean. The similarity between the two scores is wild.”

He laughs, eyes bright. “I’m sure it is.”

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m being a nerd.”

“You’re being cool.”

I grin at the compliment, and a beat of awkward silence falls as I hover in his doorway.

“I was wondering,” I say, deciding to get it over with, “if you—if you don’t have anything else going on—do you want to go on a date tomorrow?” I swallow, worried that I have misread the last week and that he’s about to turn me down before sending me slinking to my room across the hall.

“Yes,” he says with incredulous certainty, as if there is no other possible answer.

So the following evening, I lead him along the Lake Superior shore, hiking a narrow path between bare birches and young pines. The cold, clear day is drawing to a close, and the sun begins to dip low in the horizon, painting the sky in periwinkle, pink, and gold. To our left, down a rocky slope, the lake cuts into the land in a wide bay, large parts of which have frozen over.

“Can we walk on it?” he asks.

“Not unless you want to fall through, get hypothermia, and die.”

He looks at me sideways. “I feel like falling through the ground and dying is becoming a theme for a lot of the places you take me.”

“I try to be consistent.”

The path rounds a corner, veering us away from the sheltered bay and toward the open, wild waters of the lake. It spreads in front and around the peninsula where we stand, a frigid blue black. The waves crash ashore, sending a constant, heavy mist into the trees that were brave enough to plant themselves along the shoreline.

When we find the spot, Garrett stops.

“Amazing,” he breathes.

Before us stands a grove of pine saplings, only a few feet taller than us, where the freezing water spraying up from the lake below has solidified on every needle. The weight has caused the trees to bow together, forming a dome of solid ice.

On the side facing us—the one away from the ravaging force of the lake—a small space opens like a low doorway into the dome. Garrett drops onto his hands and knees, looks at me over his shoulder, then crawls inside. I follow, and then the two of us are together in a sculpture of branch and ice and snow. I settle next to him, the ceiling inches above our heads.