People We Meet on Vacation

WE WANDER THE city of Victoria until our feet hurt, our backs ache, and all that sleep we didn’t get on the flights makes our bodies feel heavy and our brains light and floaty. Then we stop for dumplings in a tiny nook of a place whose windows are tinted and whose red-painted walls are elaborately looped in gold mountainscapes and forests and flowing rivers that serpentine through low, rounded hills.

We’re the only people inside—it’s three p.m., not quite late enough for dinner, but the air-conditioning is powerful and the food is divine, and we’re so exhausted we can’t stop laughing about every little thing.

The hoarse, voice-cracking yelp Alex let out when the plane touched down this morning.

The suit-wearing man who sprints past the restaurant at top speed, his arms held flat to his sides.

The gallery girl in the Empress Hotel who spent thirty minutes trying to sell us a six-inch, twenty-one-thousand-dollar bear sculpture while we dragged our tattered luggage around behind us.

“We don’t really . . . have money for . . . that,” Alex said, sounding diplomatic.

The girl nodded enthusiastically. “Hardly anyone does. But when art speaks to you, you find a way to make it work.”

Somehow, neither of us could bring ourselves to tell the girl that the twenty-one-thousand-dollar bear was not speaking to us, but we’d spent all day, since then, picking things up—a signed Backstreet Boys album in the used record shop, a copy of a novel called What My G-Spot Is Telling You in a squat little bookstore off a cobbled street, a pleather catsuit in a fetish shop I led Alex into primarily to embarrass him—and asking, Does this speak to you?

Yes, Poppy, it’s saying, Bye-Bye-Bye.

No, Alex, tell your G-spot to speak up.

Yes, I’ll take it for twenty-one thousand dollars and not a penny less!

We took turns asking and answering, and now, slumped over our black lacquered table, we can’t stop half-deliriously picking up spoons and napkins, making them talk to one another.

Our server is around our age, heavily pierced with a soft lisp and a good sense of humor. “If that soy says anything saucy, let me know,” she says. “It’s got a reputation around here.”

Alex tips her 30 percent, and the whole walk to the bus stop, I tease him for blushing whenever she looked at him, and he teases me for making eyes at the cashier in the record shop, which is fair, because I definitely did.

“I’ve never seen a city this flowery,” I say.

“I’ve never seen a city this clean,” he says.

“Should we move to Canada?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Does Canada speak to you?”

With the buses, and the walking between stops, it takes two hours total to get the car I informally rented online through WWT, Women Who Travel.

I’m so relieved it actually exists—and that the keys are under the floor mat in the back seat, just like the car’s owner, Esmeralda, said they would be—that I start clapping at the sight of it.

“Wow,” Alex says, “this car is really speaking to you.”

“Yes,” I say, “it’s saying, Don’t let Alex drive.”

His mouth droops open, eyes going wide and glossy with feigned hurt.

“Stop!” I yelp, diving away from him and into the driver’s seat like he’s a live grenade.

“Stop what?” He bends to insert his Sad Puppy Face in front of me.

“No!” I screech, shoving him away and writhing sideways in the seat as if trying to escape a swarm of ants pouring off him. I fling myself into the passenger seat, and he calmly climbs into the driver’s seat.This belongs © NôvelDra/ma.Org.

“I hate that face,” I say.

“Untrue,” Alex says.

He’s right.

I love that ridiculous face.

Also, I hate driving.

“When you find out about reverse psychology, I’m screwed,” I say.

“Hm?” he says, glancing sidelong as he starts up the car.

“Nothing.”

We drive two hours north to the motel I found on the eastern side of the island. It’s a misty wonderland, wide uncluttered roads lined in forests as ancient as they are dense. There’s not a ton to do in town, but there are redwoods and hiking trails to waterfalls and a Tim Hortons just a few miles down the road from our motel, a low, lodge-like place with a gravel parking lot out front and a wall of fog-cloaked foliage behind it.

“I sort of love it here,” Alex says.

“I sort of do too,” I agree.

And it doesn’t matter that it rains all week and we finish every hike soaked to the bone, or that we can only find two affordable restaurants and have to eat at each of them thrice, or that we slowly start to realize nearly everyone else we cross paths with is in the upper-sixties-and-older set and that we’re definitely staying in a retirement village. Or that our motel room is always damp, or that there’s so little to do we have time to kill one full day in a nearby Chapters bookstore (where we eat both breakfast and lunch in their café in silence while Alex reads Murakami and I take notes for future reference from a stack of Lonely Planet guides).

None of it matters. I spend the whole week thinking, This speaks to me.

This is what I want for the rest of my life. To see new places. To meet new people. To try new things. I don’t feel lost or out of place here. There’s no Linfield to escape or long, boring classes to dread going back to. I’m anchored only in this moment.

“Don’t you wish we could always be doing this?” I ask Alex.

He looks up over his book at me, one corner of his mouth curling. “Wouldn’t leave a lot of time for reading.”

“What if I promise to take you to a bookstore in every city?” I ask. “Then will you quit school and live in a van with me?”

His head tilts to one side as he thinks. “Probably not,” he says, which is no surprise for a variety of reasons, including the fact that Alex loves his classes so much he’s already researching English grad programs, whereas I’m muscling through with straight Cs.

“Well, I had to try,” I say with a sigh.

Alex sets his book down. “I tell you what. You can have my summer breaks. I’ll keep those wide open for you, and we’ll go anywhere you want, that we can afford.”

“Really?” I say, dubious.

“Promise.” He holds out his hand, and we shake on it, then sit there grinning for a few seconds, feeling like we’ve just signed some life-alteringly significant contract.

Our second-to-last day, we hike through the quiet of Cathedral Grove just as the sun is coming up, spilling golden light over the forest in little droplets, and when we leave, we drive straight to a town called Coombs, whose main attraction is a handful of cottages with grass roofs and a herd of goats grazing over them. We take pictures of them, stick our heads through photo-op cutouts that put our faces on crudely painted goat bodies, and spend a luxurious two hours wandering a market stuffed with samples of cookies, candies, and jams.

On the last full day of our trip, we drive across the island to Tofino, the peninsula we would have stayed on if we weren’t trying to save every possible penny. I surprise Alex with (perhaps worryingly cheap) tickets for a water taxi that takes us to the island I read about, with the trail through the rain forest to the hot spring.

Our water taxi driver is named Buck, and he’s not much older than us, with a tangle of sun-bleached yellow hair sticking out from under his mesh-backed hat. He’s handsome in an utterly filthy way, with that specifically beachy kind of body odor mixed with patchouli. It should be repulsive, but he makes it work.

The ride itself is a violent affair, the taxi’s motor so loud I have to scream into Alex’s ear, my hair slapping against his face from the wind, to say, “THIS MUST BE WHAT A ROCK FEELS LIKE WHEN YOU SKIP IT OVER WATER,” my voice thunking in and out with each rhythmic hit of the little vessel against the top of the dark, choppy waves.

Buck waves his hands like he’s talking to us for the whole length of the (much-too-long) ride, but we can’t hear him, which makes both Alex and me semihysterical with laughter after the first twenty minutes of inaudible monologue.

“WHAT IF HE’S CONFESSING TO A CRIME RIGHT NOW?” Alex yells.

“RECITING THE DICTIONARY. FROM BACK TO FRONT,” I suggest.

“SOLVING COMPLEX MATH EQUATIONS,” Alex says.

“COMMUNING WITH THE DEAD,” I say.

“THIS IS WORSE THAN—”

Buck cuts the engine, and Alex’s voice far overshoots it. He drops his voice into a whisper against my ear: “Worse than flying.”

“Is he stopping to kill us?” I whisper back.

“Was that what he was saying?” Alex hisses. “Is it time to panic?”

“Look out that way,” Buck says, spinning leftward in his chair and pointing ahead.

“Where he’s going to kill us?” Alex murmurs, and I turn my laugh into a cough.

Buck turns back with a wide, crooked, but admittedly handsome grin. “Family of otters.”

A very high-pitched and one-hundred-percent genuine squeal rockets out of me as I lurch to my feet and lean over to see the fuzzy little lumps of fur floating over the waves, paws folded together so that they drift as one, a net made of adorable sea creatures. Alex comes to stand behind me, his hands light on my arms as he leans over me to see.

“Okay,” he says. “Time to panic. That’s fucking adorable.”

“Can we take one home?” I ask him. “They speak to me!”

After that, the hike through the lush ferns of the rain forest, and the hot, earthy waters of the spring—though amazing—can’t quite compare to that spine-compressing water taxi ride.

When we strip down to our bathing suits and slip into the warm, cloudy pool within the rocks, Alex says, “We saw otters holding hands.”

“The universe likes us,” I say. “This has been a perfect day.”

“A perfect trip.”

“It’s not over yet,” I say. “One more night.”

When Buck’s water taxi delivers us safely into harbor that night, we huddle into the little time-warped shack the company uses as an office to pay.

“Where you guys staying?” Buck asks as he takes the coupons I printed out and manually punches their code into a computer.

“Other side of the island,” Alex says. “Outside Nanoose Bay.”

Buck’s blue eyes come up, cut between Alex and me appraisingly. “My grandparents live in Nanoose Bay.”

“It kind of seems like every grandparent in British Columbia might live in Nanoose Bay,” I say, and Buck lets out a bark of laughter.

“What are you doing there?” he asks. “Not a great spot for a young couple.”

“Oh, we’re not . . .” Alex shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

“We’re like nonbiological, nonlegal siblings,” I say.

“Just friends,” Alex translates, seeming embarrassed for me, which is understandable because I can feel my cheeks go lobster red and my stomach flip when Buck’s eyes settle on me.

They shift back to Alex, and he smiles. “If you don’t want to drive back to the old folks’ home tonight, my housemates and I have got a yard and a spare tent. You’re welcome to crash there. We’ve always got people staying with us.”

I’m fairly sure Alex does not want to sleep on the ground, but he takes one look at me and must see how into this idea I am—this is exactly the kind of spur-of-the-moment, out-of-nowhere surprise turn I’ve been hoping this trip would take—because he lets out an almost imperceptible sigh, then turns back to Buck with a fixed smile. “Yeah. That’d be great. Thanks.”

“Cool, you all were my last trip, so let me close up and we can head out.”

As we’re walking back down the dock afterward, Alex asks for the address so we can plug it into the GPS. “Nah, man,” Buck says. “You don’t need to drive.”

It turns out Buck’s house is just up a short, steep driveway a half block from the dock. A droopy, graying two-story house with a second-floor balcony covered in drying towels and bathing suits and shitty folding furniture. There’s a bonfire burning in the front yard, and even though it’s only six p.m., there are dozens of grungy Buck-types gathered in sandals and hiking boots or dirt-crusted bare feet, drinking beer and doing acro-yoga in the grass while trance music plays over a pair of duct-tape-ridden speakers on the porch. The whole place smells like weed, like this is some kind of low-rent, miniature Burning Man.

“Everyone,” Buck calls as he leads us up the hillside, “this is Poppy and Alex. They’re from . . .” He looks over his shoulder at me, waiting.

“Chicago,” I say as Alex says, “Ohio.”

“Ohio and Chicago,” Buck repeats. People call out greetings and tip their beers, and a lean, muscly girl in a woven crop top brings me and Alex each a bottle, and Alex tries very hard not to look at her stomach as Buck disappears into the circle of people around the fire, doing that backslapping hug with a handful of people.

“Welcome to Tofino,” she says. “I’m Daisy.”

“Another flower!” I say. “But at least they don’t use yours to make opium.”

“I haven’t tried opium,” Daisy says thoughtfully. “I pretty much stick to LSD and shrooms. Well, and weed, obviously.”

“Have you tried those sleep gummies?” I ask. “Those things are fucking amazing.”

Alex coughs. “Thanks for the beer, Daisy.”

She winks. “My pleasure. I’m the welcome committee. And the tour guide.”

“Oh, do you live here too?” I ask.

“Sometimes,” she says.

“Who else does?” Alex says.

“Hmm.” Daisy turns, scouring the crowd and vaguely pointing. “Michael, Chip, Tara, Kabir, Lou.” She gathers her dark hair off her back and pulls it to one side of her neck as she continues. “Mo, Quincy sometimes; Lita’s been here for a month, but I think she’s leaving soon. She got a job as a rafting guide in Colorado—how far is Chicago from there? You should look her up if you’re ever visiting.”

“Cool,” Alex says. “Maybe so.”

Buck reappears between me and Alex, with a joint tucked in his mouth, and slings a casual arm around each of us. “Has Daisy given you the tour yet?”

“Was just about to,” she says.

But somehow, I don’t wind up on a tour of this soggy house. I wind up sitting in a cracked plastic Adirondack chair by the fire with Buck and—I think?—Chip and Lita-the-soon-to-be-rafting-guide, ranking Nicolas Cage movies by various criteria as the deep blues and purples of twilight melt into the deeper blues and blacks of night, the starry sky seeming to unfurl over us like a great, light-pricked blanket.

Lita is an easy laugher, which I’ve always thought was a criminally underappreciated trait, and Buck is so laid-back I start to get a secondhand high just from sharing a chair with him, and then I get my first firsthand high when I share his joint with him.

“Don’t you love it?” he asks eagerly when I’m a few puffs in.

“Love it,” I say. Truthfully, I think it’s just okay, and moreover, if I were anywhere else, I think I might even hate it, but tonight it’s perfect because today is perfect, this trip is perfect.

Alex checks back in on me after his “tour,” by which point, yes, I’m sitting curled up in Buck’s lap with his sweatshirt draped around my chilly shoulders.

You okay? Alex mouths from the far side of the fire.

I nod. You?

He nods back, and then Daisy asks him something and he turns away, falling into conversation with her. I tip my head back and stare up past Buck’s unshaven jawline to the stars high above us.

I think I could stand it if this night lasted three more days, but eventually the sky is changing color again, the morning mist hissing off the damp grass as the sun peeks over a horizon somewhere in the distance. Most of the crowd has drifted off, Alex included, and the fire has burned down to embers when Buck asks me if I want to come inside, and I tell him yes, I do.

I almost tell him that going inside speaks to me, then remember that’s not a worldwide joke, it’s just one of mine and Alex’s, and I don’t really want to say it to Buck after all.

I’m relieved to discover that he has a room of his own, even if it is closet sized with a mattress on the floor dressed in nothing but two unzipped sleeping bags rather than bedding. When he kisses me, it’s rough and scratchy and tastes like weed and beer, but I’ve only kissed two people before this and one of those was Jason Stanley, so this is still going great in my book. His hands are confident if a little lazy, to match the rest of him, and soon we’re climbing onto the mattress, hands catching in each other’s seawater-tangled hair, hips locking together.

He has a nice body, I think, the kind that’s mostly taut from an active lifestyle with a little pudge from indulging in his various vices. Not like Alex’s, which has been made in the gym over years with discipline and care. Not that Alex’s body isn’t great. It is great.

And not that there’s any reason to compare the two, or any two bodies, really. It’s sort of messed up that the thought even popped into my head.

But it’s just because Alex’s is the man-body I’m most used to being around and it’s also the kind I expect I won’t ever touch. People like Alex—careful, conscientious, gym-fit, reserved people—tend to go for people like Sarah Torval—Alex’s careful, conscientious, yoga-bunny crush from the library.

Whereas people like me are more likely to wind up making out with people like Buck on their floor mattresses on top of their unzipped sleeping bags.

He’s all tongue and hands, but even so it’s fun, to kiss this near-stranger, to have fervent, appreciative permission to touch him. It’s like practice. Perfect, fun practice with some guy I met on vacation, who holds no bearing on my real life. Who knows only Poppy Right Now, and doesn’t need any more than that.

We kiss until my lips feel bruised and our shirts have come off and then I sit up in the dawn-dark, catching my breath. “I don’t want to have sex, okay?”

“Oh, right on,” he says lightly, sitting up against the wall. “That’s cool. No pressure.”

And he doesn’t seem to feel any hint of awkwardness about this, but he also doesn’t pull me back to him, kiss me again. He just sits there for a minute, like he’s waiting for something.

“What?” I say.

“Oh.” He glances toward the door then back to me. “I just thought, if you don’t want to hook up . . .”

And then I understand. “You want me to leave?”

“Well . . .” He gives a sheepish (or sheepish for him, anyway) half laugh that still sounds kind of barky. “I mean, if we’re not going to have sex, then I might . . .”

He trails off, and now my own laugh catches me by surprise. “Are you going to hook up with someone else?”

He seems genuinely concerned when he says, “Does that make you feel bad?”

I stare back at him for a three full seconds.

“Look, if you wanted to have sex, you’d be, like . . . I’d want to. Like, I definitely do. But since you don’t . . . Are you mad?”

I burst out laughing. “No,” I say, pulling my shirt back on. “I’m actually really, really not mad. I appreciate the honesty.”

And I mean it. Because this is just Buck, some guy I met on vacation, and all things considered, he has been something of a gentleman.

“Okay, cool,” he says, and flashes that laid-back grin of his, which almost glows in the dark. “I’m glad we’re cool.”

“We’re cool,” I agree. “But . . . you said something about a tent?”

“Oh, right.” He slaps his hand to his forehead. “The red-and-black one out front’s all you, girl.”

“Thanks, Buck,” I say, and stand. “For everything.”

“Hey, hold on a second.” He leans over and grabs a magazine off the floor beside his mattress, digs around for a marker, then scribbles something on the white edge of a page and tears it out. “If you’re ever back on the island,” he says, “don’t stay in my grandparents’ neighborhood, okay? Just come stay here. We’ve always got room.”

With that, I slip out of the house, past rooms that are already—or still—playing music and doors through which soft sighs and moans emanate.

Outside, I pick my way down the dewy porch steps and head to the red-and-black tent. I’m fairly sure I saw Alex disappear inside the house with Daisy hours ago, but when I unzip the tent, he’s fast asleep in it. I carefully crawl inside, and when I lie down beside him, he just barely opens his puffy-with-sleep eyes and rasps, “Hey.”

“Hey,” I say. “Sorry to wake you.”

“’S okay,” he says. “How was your night?”

“Okay,” I tell him. “I made out with Buck.”

His eyes widen for a second before shrinking back to sleepy slivers of hazel. “Wow,” he croaks, then tries to swallow down a spark of sleepy laughter. “Did the curtains match the very troubling drapes?”

Laughing, I give his leg a shove with my foot. “I didn’t tell you so you could mock me.”

“Did he tell you what he was saying that whole time on the water taxi?” Alex asks through another rattle of laughter. “How many people were in the hammock with you?”

I start to laugh so hard there are tears leaking from the corners of my eyes. “He . . . kicked . . .” It’s hard to get words out between wheezes of laughter, but eventually I manage, “. . . kicked me out when I told him I didn’t want to have sex.”

“Oh my god,” Alex says, sitting up on his elbow, the sleeping bag falling down from his bare chest and his hair dancing with static. “What a dick.”

“No,” I say. “It was fine. He just wanted to get some, and if not from me, there are easily four hundred more girls on this half acre of sinking woods.”

Alex flops back down on his pillow. “Yeah, well, I still think that’s kind of shitty.”

“Speaking of girls,” I say, smirking.

“We . . . weren’t?” Alex says.

“Did you hook up with Daisy?”

He rolls his eyes. “Do you think I hooked up with Daisy?”

“Until you said it like that, yes.”

Alex adjusts his arm under his pillow. “Daisy isn’t my type.”

“True,” I say. “She’s nothing like Sarah Torval.”

Alex rolls his eyes again then closes them entirely. “Go to sleep, weirdo.”

Through a yawn, I say, “Sleep speaks to me.”