We were going to go to Iceland, the land of always winter, as we understood it. We’d never seen snow, couldn’t even conceive of it when lying burnt under a Jamaican sun. We’d build snowmen. Give them our nicknames: “Kingie” and “Junes.” We were going to be the first people to go to university in our families, but we weren’t going to do it here, oh no. We were getting as far from the land of wood and water and never-ending cycle of sadness as we possibly could. We were leaving. We were going to fall in love. Or already had. Who is sure of anything when they’re seventeen? Not us. We weren’t sure of who we were, or who we’d be, or even who had enough money to pay for lunch today, but we were sure we were going to do this life thing together, always.

 .

***

We were going 120 in an 80 zone on a bitingly hot day in July. We were screaming, which meant we were silent and imagined ourselves screaming. He turned on the radio to RJR. ...That’s 18 people dead in two days in Hanover, making a total of 114 murders in 20 days, island-wide. There have been over 800 people murdered since the beginning of the year and it’s only J—. He turned it off.

“Take it down to 80, or we’re going to bring the total to 20,” I said.

It wasn’t a funny joke, not sure I meant it to be one, but it was the only joke I knew how to tell in the moment. He pushed to 130. I held on, and clutched the bag closer to my chest. What else was I to do?

We were in a broken Honda CRV, one of the ones that still had the wheel on the back. Enough to say that the owner had money once, but not much of it these days. Anyway, it wasn’t ours. We had the windows down cause the air didn’t work, but when you’re going 130 up the North South highway, you roll that shit up. He rubbed his ear.

“Every time it pops it sounds like a gunshot,” he said.

I paused. I said, “That’s a funny thing to say.” We continued climbing.

***

The car overheated on the incline, so we pulled onto the shoulder. He popped the hood, because he knew about cars, and I sat on the railing, feet dangling over more than a hundred-foot precipice, because I knew about falling.

“We could just drop ‘em here,” I said, looking over the edge.

“Into banana leaves and goat dung?” he asked into the engine.

I shrugged. “The smell’s familiar.”

He shut the hood and sat beside me. We waited half an hour for the car to cool, or to settle, or to give us time to breathe because maybe that’s what cars did. We held hands.

“Drop it,” he said. But I didn’t, because he hadn’t let go yet. We kept climbing.

We reached Old Fort Bay, left the highway, and circled back into Ochi. From there, it was a guessing game. We drove down the winding street, lined with bushes and rock face, with trees overarching, casting us in shadows. Tourists walked from trap to trap, hair in braids with multicolored beads hanging from them. They flitted like dull hummingbirds from Dolphin Cove to Dunn’s River to Mystic Mountain. We drove aimlessly.

“Margaritaville?” I asked.

“And scare the tourists?”

We drove down main street, past Liu’s Wholesale, dropped in a pothole, almost clipped someone with the front end of the car, the boy cursed, we sighed, heard some Kartel blaring through a speaker, saw a man hit a woman with a baby in her arms, watched everyone watch, bought a patty at Tastee, continued driving, circled main street again, she put the baby on the sidewalk so she could fight back, then we turned into the parking lot for Turtle Beach.

“Turtle Beach?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It’s pretty.”

“It’s a Saturday in July. It’ll be owned by tourists. Plus, you got money to get in? We can’t hop fences here, and we spent all our cash on the toll.”

He looked out the wound down window. Sweat trickled down to the divot by his throat. I watched the line it made and thought to trace it with my finger. I touched his eyebrow instead, and so he looked at me. You love someone when their eyes are easy to look at. So, we stared, because we recognized something.

“Where then?” he finally asked. I wanted to say Iceland. Because we were hot and Iceland was not here, and those were the only motivating factors I needed.

“Blue Hole,” I said.

“Cover charge.”

He made a sweeping gesture to the four charter buses parked in front of us. “We don’t own this parish anymore, I guess.” We never really owned it in the first place.

“James Bond, or Bamboo, or…” I slumped, defeated. I put my feet on the dashboard and propped the bag in between them. We both stared at it. “I don’t know a strip of sand that isn’t owned in this town,” I said.

“He hated the beach,” he blurted.

“That’s cause he didn’t know how to swim,” I said

“Neither do I.”

“I’ll teach you.”

I would, and he’d learn, and he’d teach me how to settle a car so you can breathe easy for a while, and I’d learn. We’d grow together.

“There’s a spot Aunty Peta-Gaye used to take me to. It’s not too far,” he said.

“Is that enough time?”

He furrowed his brow and looked at me in confusion, so I stroked it back to understanding. He shrugged. “It’ll have to be,” he said.

We kept driving.

***

The beach was called Pleasure Cove, though who knows why. It was tucked into a corner beside a tourist resort, but it was free. We had to drive up an unpaved, rocky hill, and then climb back down to find the sand. There was a bar to the back with a piece of board beside it to hide the lone toilet that was the bathroom. A woman sat on a stool behind the bar playing cards with a man. They didn’t look up as we walked past them.

“One day, we’re going to make twenty,” he said.

I didn’t know what he meant. Or rather, I didn’t want to know.

We were silent, which is to say we were screaming, voices scratchy and bellowing into the nothingness of a horizon we could never touch.

“Your dad took me to the beach once,” I told him.

He turned sharply to me and his face finally broke. It was sad and it was beautiful, and our eyes met and we recognized something. “When?” he asked.

I looked back to the ocean. “I was nine. You were at your mum’s, but I didn’t know, so I went to your house to visit you. My parents were at it again.”

“When were they not?”

I tilted my head in acquiescence. “I was doing that thing where I wasn’t crying, but my face said I wanted to be. He didn’t say anything, just grabbed my shoulder and walked me down the road. He took Cleaver’s bike and we rode till we found ocean.”

He took my hand and put it on the back of his neck and hung his head. I turned into his side and held him. I whispered into the curled tight locks of his hair. “We ended up at Palisadoes and threw rocks into the ocean. We didn’t say a thing. I don’t know if he liked it.”

“We’ll never know. Not until we make it 20, I guess.”

“I shouldn’t have said that. Even though he wasn’t part of that 18, it was still insensitive.”

“But he was part of some 18. Part of that 800. Just a number.”

We crossed the shallow pool until we could start climbing the jagged rocks at the side. The pin point edges pinched into the callouses of my feet. He held the bag in one hand and helped me climb with the other. The man and the woman at the bar looked out at us. I couldn’t see their faces, but I know they had no expressions. It was just a Saturday in July. We were just two more people making a journey already made.

We rose higher along the juts of rock until we were several feet from the shore and around the curve of the cove. We could see the vast expanse of everything and nothing at the same time. It was just water and it wasn’t. We sat, knees touching, on the most uncomfortable surface I’ve ever encountered. I don’t know why it felt good.

“He wanted a lot for me. Used to beat my rass silly if I didn’t make the right grades in school.”

The water slapped into the rocks and splashed high in the air. A few drops landed on the bag.

“It’s weird that he’s in there,” I said. “We die and we fit into a bag.”

“I learn how to ride a bike and we go down Mandela,” he said.

I traced the faded sweat line from the divot of his neck, up the apple of his cheek, and along the curve of his eyebrow. “Until we reach Hellshire, only stopping for papaws.”

“We make snowmen in Iceland and forget how to connect feeling to the word hot.”

“They’ll be Kingie and Junes.”

I waited for him to say the third proclamation, but he didn’t. He looked at me like I had an answer to a question he couldn’t ask. He looked at me like he didn’t like the answer or the question.

“He didn’t like the beach,” he said.

“He wanted to be buried,” I said.

“He got himself dead. He doesn’t get a choice.”

“Say it,” I asked him. He lifted his finger and traced my lips. It was the closest we

ever got.

At sunset, we threw his father’s ashes into the ocean. They landed with a final thunk on the hard water’s surface. He rubbed his ear. Everything sounds like gunshots once you know the sound.

“You still haven’t said it,” I said.

“I can’t anymore.”

We looked at the ashes falling further into everything and nothing. It was just water and now it wasn’t. He let go of the bag and started to climb down. When we reached the shore, he stood by the edge of the water and used his toe to write in the sand. I won’t tell you what it said. It didn’t last anyway. The water got to it too quickly.

He put his arm around my shoulder and curled me in. The waning sun cast us in the softest orange glow.

“I’m going to die here,” he said.

“You don’t have to,” I pleaded.

He looked at me, held gaze and recognition. “We don’t have a choice.”