Hugh Howey - The Shell Collector

“Fuck it,” I say. I leave my wine and head down the tiered patio. At the sand’s edge, I pull off my shirt, take off my bra, drop my shorts and then my underwear. “No regrets,” I say. And by the time I get to the water, I’m running and laughing. I’m remembering what it feels like to be free again.

The best kisses in the world take place at night, in the ocean, with two naked bodies coiled around one another, only the stars to keep them company. Weight disappears, and our bodies with it. Ness stands on his toes, me clinging to him, my arms wrapped around his neck and my legs around his waist, our lips tasting the salt on each other.

The water is warm enough that I barely feel it, heightening the sense of my loss of self. And when we move, microscopic sea life blooms green and gives off an ethereal glow. Above us, a path of dense light reminds me where the Milky Way got its name. The stars are intense. Like the sky is as alive and excited as every cell in my body.

We stay in the water until I can barely feel anything with my fingers, they’re so pruned. Our bodies hardly ever came apart the entire time, so that when the water flows between us, it chills my breasts and stomach, which have been against Ness for what feels like half an hour. I think I stayed pinned to him to avoid access to other parts of our bodies, and so he couldn’t see me in the bright starlight. As we exit the water, there’s no avoiding it. I can feel his eyes on me. Holding my hand, he leads me down the beach where a blanket has been laid out.

“Did you plan this?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “Gladys did, I guess. I saw her out here arranging something.”

“So you were kissing with your eyes open,” I admonish him.

“Guilty.”

There are towels on the blanket. Ness and I dry off. He wraps his towel around me and rubs my arms. The breeze is soft, but it chills my skin where it’s still wet. We lie down on the blanket, huddle under one of the towels, and Ness runs his hand over my hair as we watch the sea slide toward us and then away, over and over.

“You shouldn’t be shy,” Ness says. “You’re gorgeous. Women half your age must loathe you.”

“Everyone in New York is gorgeous,” I say, deflecting his praise.

“I’m serious. Inside and out, you are intoxicating. And you were right, I was coming on to you that first night. It wasn’t just the wine, either. I was excited that you agreed to come out and talk to me. Made me think you weren’t out to get me, you know? That you were interested in my story, interested in hearing the truth. It makes it easy to open up to you.”

I think about why I really went up to interview Ness, and my heart aches for him. But I bite my lip and don’t say anything.

“A lot of shooting stars tonight.”

I scan the sky. I haven’t seen one yet. We rub our feet together to keep them warm. I see a flash of light overhead and squeeze Ness’s hand. He squeezes back. “Make a wish,” he says.

“That would be greedy,” I tell him. “I’ll let someone else have it.”

And then, maybe because I’m fighting so many dark secrets about why I wrote my articles and why I went to see Ness, and maybe because I’m terrified to share something that will drive him away from me, but I’m terrified that if I don’t say anything he’ll know I’m keeping something from him, I decide to give him a dark secret that I’ve never given anyone before.

“I’ve got to confess something,” I tell Ness. I wiggle away from him and prop myself up on my elbow. He studies me intensely, brushes the hair off my face.

“You used to be a man,” he guesses. “I’m totally cool with that.”

I laugh. “I’m serious,” I say. “I’m about to tell you something I’ve never told another living soul.”

His hand falls still for a moment, and then he seeks out my hand. He waits.

“There was a time when I didn’t care about shells. Not one bit.”

Ness doesn’t laugh at how insignificant this sounds. And it does sound insignificant to me, saying it, but only because I’m not sure how to tell the rest of the story.

“My sister and I had a rough time in school. I guess the things society tolerates come and go, and so we had friends with two moms or two dads, but there weren’t any other mixed-race girls in our elementary school. Parents came in color-coded couplets. Except ours.

“Our parents talked about moving us to another school, but they didn’t. I think we stopped telling them how bad it was because we worried it was all our fault. And you know, looking back, it wasn’t like the school was against us. It was probably five or six kids. Everyone else was nice to us or ignored us. But at that age, you just remember the ones who are after you.”

Ness squeezes my hand.

“So anyway, I hated my skin. When I was six or seven, I would alternate between covering up and staying out of the sun, hoping I’d turn white, or I’d lay out in the back yard with no clothes on trying to get darker. Neither of which worked like I hoped. All I wanted was different skin. I would have killed to have different skin. I even used to have these dreams when I was a kid where I could step into a skin suit and zip it up and no one would know it wasn’t mine.”

I wipe a tear off my cheek. I feel bad for ruining the moment, but what started as an urge to share something, anything, wells up into a desire to really have this off my chest.

“So the reason I got into shelling—it has a dark history behind it. I’m almost ashamed of it. Which is difficult, because it’s become the thing I most love doing in the world. But it all started when I was nine. Like I said, for a few years there, I didn’t care about shells. I liked them when I was real young, because my parents and my sister did, but then I became consumed with this self-loathing, which is a crazy thing for a little kid to feel, and that’s all I thought about.

“Then one day, we were on a hike on the bluffs up from my childhood beach, and we came across this writhing ball of hermit crabs. Like two dozen of them. They were crawling all over each other. You could hear them crinkle as their little legs tapped on each other’s shells.”

“They were swapping,” Ness says.

“That’s right. I sat with my mom and watched crabs crawl out of one shell and into another. Some shells were empty. It was all this furious activity, hermit crabs leaving one home and jumping into another.”

“And you wished you could, too.”

I bob my head, my vision swimming with tears. My voice cracks as I try to get it out. “I told my mom— told her ‘I wish that was me,’ and she said—” Ness gives me a corner of the towel, and I dab my cheeks with it. “She said, ‘Why would you want to leave our house?’ and I said, ‘I want to leave me .’ And I don’t think she ever got it. But I was mesmerized with this idea. I never saw shells as anything other than rocks that came in pretty shapes. Didn’t realize what they were. But after that day, I wanted to find all of them. I thought there might be one out there shaped like me that I could just crawl into.”

I’m bawling by the time I finish. Ness grabs me and pulls me against him, letting me sob into the crook of his neck. He kisses my cheek, smooths my hair, and holds me. I cry so hard that I shudder, letting out this thing that I’ve contained all on my own for far too long, this dark secret to my passion, this ignoble reason for what I do and who I am.

“I think you’re perfect,” Ness says. “You are perfect just like you are. With every chip and ding. With the polish rubbed off. There’s nothing wrong with you in the world.”

I control my sobbing so I can hear him. And then I’m not crying anymore. I’m kissing him. And this time the kissing grows into something frantic, a rawness from having exposed myself, from becoming more than merely naked. Throwing the towel off, hot now, I straddle Ness and sit up in the breeze. I let him see me in the cast of starlight. His hands are on my hips. They trace up my waist, cup my breasts.