It should have been the perfect, most romantic experience ever. Until Zack sat up right in the middle of it all and pointed in horror at my arm. “Oh, god—Noa! Look at your arm!”
It was purple and swollen, the skin stretched to a shiny bubble. Two large dots oozed with blood and pus. “Now that’s weird,” I commented.
Zack was already off me and scrambling into his shirt. “It’s not weird, you were bitten by a spider! Noa, they’re venomous!”
In the end, I was given an antivenin from the hospital and a lecture from my parents. I could’ve died, they’d said. And they were disappointed in me for sneaking out of the house (of course, we left out the sex part). My mother cried that I was backsliding, until my father told her to shut up and sent me to my room.
Zack was on restriction for a week. Not only did you sneak out of the house, but you put Noa in danger! You know you can’t put her in those positions, Zachary! She’s not an average girl!
I knew his mother didn’t mean anything bad by that, but it still bothered me. Would he have gotten in so much trouble if it were someone else? Someone who could feel pain? Would he only have been scolded then? I found myself wishing I had actually felt the venomous spider bite.
Things fell quiet after that until a year later, with the arrival of Taylor Spells. Taylor moved to Chokoloskee from Tampa when her father’s contracting company began building condominiums in Naples, which happened to be the second week of our senior year. She was a junior, and she took our tiny coastal town by storm. Taylor was beautiful, confident, and rebellious. She hated the town and her parents for making her move there. The one thing she loved in that place was Zack.
For the first time in my life, I cried because the pain was unbearable. Words that never made sense to me were suddenly sparking with recognition behind my eyes— ache, burn, throb, sting—they filled my heart, screamed through my veins, festered in my mind and soul.
“It’s just been . . . really hard,” he’d said the night he shattered my life. “These last few years—I love you, Noa, but I can’t anymore. Always with the fear in my mind that something could be wrong with you and it’d be my fault if you didn’t catch it in time. I’m always checking to make sure you’re not bleeding, not limping, always having to monitor how hard you’re scratching your arm or rubbing your eyes—”
“I never asked you to do those things, Zack!”
“—making sure you’re going to the bathroom and eating every few hours.”
“Is this about Taylor?”
He said no, but it obviously was. They were dating by Thanksgiving.
Hurricane Taylor destroyed my heart and my senior year.
I went to the University of Miami and never looked back. The day I received my bachelor’s in communications was the day he proposed to Taylor, and I told my parents I wouldn’t be returning to Everglades City. I moved from the college dorms in Coral Gables to my lofty apartment on South Beach, got a great job working for a public relations company contracted by the Florida Department of Transportation, and posted selfies on the beach to showcase my perfect life.
It’s been ten years in the making, but I’m happy. I take clients to lunch at Houston’s, get drinks with my coworkers at Prime 112, and take dates to Mary Brickell Village, Lincoln Road, and Wynwood. I’m an independent big-city gal with a career and a social life.
I skip watching Netflix tonight and return my father’s call. He doesn’t answer, but my mother does.
“Zack’s daughter has been kidnapped,” is what she says in lieu of a greeting or an explanation of why she’s answered his phone.
“I saw. I had a missed call from Dad.”
“He’s with Zack and the family right now. He left his phone at home, you know him. But I know he wants you to come home, Noa. We both do. We’re all—everyone is so scared.”
The muscles in my neck tense, hands fisting. “Come home? Why?”
I wait as she blows her nose unabashedly. “We need you. We need all the help we can get.”
I hesitate. “But you know nothing has changed. I’ve never been ‘needed’ in that town. You know I haven’t spoken to Zack Flynn since high school, and now I’m just supposed to show up during the worst time of his life?”
My mother, on the other hand, doesn’t hesitate. “That’s exactly what you should do. This is bigger than a breakup, Noa. There is a child missing. And it’s not just Zack and Taylor you’d be helping. This is a community in crisis.”
“Mom,” I say softly before things start to escalate, “this community is also quite dramatic. You know as well as I do how they don’t connect with me. I would simply be a distraction. Number two on the list of things to gossip about besides the missing child.”
A child is missing, my mother repeats. Six years old. Her name is Skye, and she loves kittens and rollerblading. She has brown hair and beautiful eyes, just like mine. She said if she didn’t know any better, she would think Zack had a baby with me and not with Taylor.
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