Ethan

My feet slid over wet rocks as water from the incoming tide splashed up onto my sneakers, soaking through into my socks. Every step squelched, but I could barely hear it over the thrashing of the waves amplified by the cliffs around me.

There was no turning back now. I’d been walking too long to get back to the beach before the tide swallowed me, and most of the route I took would be underwater by now. My only hope was that around this next bend, the cliff would fall away and the rocks would open up to a sandy beach, and I’d be free.

I’d tried calling my dad a few times, but he went to a movie with his girlfriend so his phone was off. He didn’t even know that I wasn’t still back at the holiday rental. It started off as nothing more than a casual walk on the beach, but I’d always been a wanderer. My parents kept the house on lockdown for the first several years of my life, because if I got out, I’d just be gone.

I wore sneakers to the beach because I don’t like the feeling of sand on my feet. The warm, wet, squishy feeling of my socks was even worse, but I’d stopped noticing it a while ago. My mind was like that sometimes—one day, the dusty feeling of potting mix on my hands or dirt under my fingernails would nearly drive me to a meltdown. The next, my dad would come to get me for lunch and find me in the middle of a major repotting endeavour, covered head to toe in dirt, completely unconcerned.

It’s a matter of distraction, I suppose. The intensity of my focus could make the things that normally bothered me melt away, but once it actually came to eating lunch still covered in dirt, it all tended to fall apart. I tended to fall apart. 

Internally, anyway. Usually, mostly. My emotions were a complicated thing, and I didn’t really like to get other people all tangled up in them. For many reasons. Dealing with my emotions was the one thing I could genuinely say I was better at than anyone else in the world. I was probably also the only person who would see that as any kind of feat or achievement, but that was because everyone else was a fucking amateur on the topic compared to me. They wouldn’t understand.

I edged closer to the cliffs as the spray of water from the incoming tide grew more intense. I was running out of space. I knew I should call emergency services, but I wouldn’t. Not until I was absolutely sure there was no other way out of this. By then, it might be too late, but I didn’t want to think about that.

This was going to make for a miserable headline. Autistic boy, 18, drowns after getting caught out by high tide. Everyone would tut at my dad for leaving his poor, helpless, disabled son unsupervised. They’d think I didn’t know I was in danger. That I didn’t know what to do.

But I wasn’t stupid. I made many stupid choices, but I was smart enough. I did pretty okay at school, and if you needed to know anything at all about plants, I was your man. 

Well, no, that was a lie. I didn’t want to be asked about plants. But I did know a lot about them.

I finally rounded the corner, and all I could do was let out a short sigh as I stared out at endless, towering cliffs. I felt like there should have been some kind of prominent warning about this. Was I just stupid? Would anyone else have been smart enough to turn back before things got this bad?

As I took another step forward, a voice cut through the sound of water crashing against rocks and I had to windmill my arms to keep from falling. When I looked up, I saw a teenage boy sitting atop some rocks that jutted up along the cliffside.

“Hey!” he called out again. “You okay?”

Was I okay? What did I even say to that? I was exactly as okay as I seemed. I wasn’t a fan of questions that felt all tangled up and wrong like this.

“Uhh,” was the best I could offer, and I knew he couldn’t hear me over the water all the way at the top of his rocky throne anyway. I was not going to shout.

He took his backpack off and set it down carefully on the peak of the rocks, then he climbed down as I squinted my eyes, ready to squeeze them shut if he slipped. I didn’t want to see him go splat.

But he made it to the ground and then he was approaching me, feet far more graceful as he balanced across the rocks than mine had been.

“You okay?” he asked again now that we were close enough to talk without shouting. He had round, dark eyes that I really wanted to look at, but I also didn’t want to make eye contact, so… it was tricky.

He was being very nice and I felt a little bad that the question still irritated me so much. I decided that my best move was to ignore it entirely. It felt wrong, but neurotypical people seemed like they didn’t even notice when you did that half the time.

“Do you know how to get out of here?” I asked instead.

“Ah, well…” the guy glanced towards the rocks he’d been sitting on, then back to me, “you’re out of time to get anywhere until the tide goes back down. You’ll have to wait it out up on those rocks with me.”

“I’ll fall and die.”

He laughed, but it petered out when he realised that I was not laughing. “It’s your only option. It’s half an hour to get past the cliffs the way you’re going, and further the way you came from. You’ve only got ten minutes before the water gets high enough to start being dangerous.”

“Are the rocks high enough?”

The guy nodded. “You don’t want to try this during a king tide, but today? Yeah, we’ll be fine.”

I didn’t want to try this ever again under any circumstances, but it reassured me that he seemed to know what he was talking about. I didn’t know why he was an expert on these rocks and the tides, but it was exactly what I needed to not drown. But I might still fall and die.

I eyed the rocks again. I did think I could get up, but I was less sure I could get back down again. I might fall, but I might just break a leg or something instead of dying. I’d definitely just drown if I stayed down here, where the water was going to be.

I sighed. “My phone is in my pocket. If I fall, you have to promise to call an ambulance for me. Okay?”

The guy’s head tilted, the kind of smile forming on his face like he wasn’t quite sure if I was joking or not. But that was the thing about me. I was joking and not joking, because I was aware of my own absurdity. I was a ridiculous creature and nobody knew that better than I did.

“I won’t leave you,” the guy promised, which was not actually a promise to call an ambulance. I got the impression he meant it to be a more heartfelt promise than the one I’d asked for, though, so I accepted it with a nod even if sitting there and watching me bleed out wouldn’t be very helpful.

He led the way to the rocks, the taller waves already splashing onto its base, and then he stayed at the bottom to give me helpful instructions my brain was completely incapable of processing as I scrambled my way up. I reached the top and he followed with far more grace.

There wasn’t much room at the top of the rocks. We had to shuffle around to make it work, and when we settled, we were just about shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh. I tilted my body to look down at the water. How long were we going to be stuck here? Hours?

“I’m Rue, by the way,” the guy said.

“I’m Ethan,” I said as I began to unlace my sneakers. I made a face as I pried the shoe off, the swell of the water in my socks adding extra resistance.

Rue was wearing slip-on water shoes, a far better choice for this adventure we had somehow ended up on together. He had no damp socks to wrinkle his nose at as he peeled them off and his feet probably weren’t nearly as waterlogged and pruny as mine were. 

Did his legs feel as gross as mine did? Did they have the same sticky, itchy, slightly stingy sensation, courtesy of all the sand and salt water they’d been covered in? I was never quite sure if people were experiencing the same physical sensations as I was. They sure didn’t act like it. Rue looked totally unbothered.

“So, do you live around here?” Rue asked.

I shook my head. “Just visiting.”

“Is it school holidays?”

I shrugged. “I’m eighteen. I’m not in school.”

Rue nodded. “Same, actually. I’m eighteen as well. Are you here with family? Friends?”

“Family.”

“We don’t get many people visiting in the winter.”

I could already see how awkward the next however many hours were going to be if I continued with my economical conversation style. I did know how to talk to people, sort of. I’d had lessons. I scrounged around in my head and pulled out a tip: volunteer unnecessary personal details.

“My dad owns a nursery,” I explained as I began unlacing my other sneaker. This one was on the side he was on, so I kept bumping against him, but he didn’t seem to mind. “We’re less busy in the winter.”

“A nursery? Like for babies?”

“No, like, a plant shop,” I explained. Really it was more of a plant shop than a nursery, since we didn’t grow many of our own plants. I’d been trying to, more and more, but my dad always made it so complicated. “Plants grow slower and people garden less in the winter.”

“Ohhh,” Rue said. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

Rue’s body was a single line of warmth alongside mine. We were shaded by the cliffs and I was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts that were now moderately damp. I’d been fine when I was walking in the sunshine, and when I was panicking as I hopped from one wobbly rock to the next, but now I felt like the air around me was sucking heat from my body at an alarming rate. Rue wasn’t any better dressed for the cold than I was, but he seemed unbothered. 

“Hm,” Rue said, his shoulder brushing mine as he sat back slightly. “We could watch videos on my phone, but my plan doesn’t come with a whole lot of data.”

“The cliffs would probably block the signal anyway,” I said before he could suggest watching stuff on mine instead. I didn’t really want this guy seeing what videos YouTube might decide to recommend for me today. Maybe he’d find out I was gay. He’d definitely find out that I was way more into plants than I was any human. Just a huge fucking plant nerd.

“Oh, yeah,” Rue said. “Uhh… you got any games on your phone?” He paused, then laughed at himself. “Man, I sound like such an iPad kid.”

“Only the ones it came with. I mostly just use it to take pictures.”

“Oh!” Rue said. “Can I see your pictures, then?”

I pulled out my phone, doing a quick mental review of every picture I’d ever taken, but I really was a pretty unadventurous person. He wasn’t going to find a picture of my cock on there or anything. He would definitely find out about the plant nerd thing, but I wasn’t actually that embarrassed about that.

I unlocked my phone, opened up my gallery, and handed it to him. “They’re pretty boring, though. Mostly just plants. What about yours?”

“Oh.” Rue pulled his own phone out. He did a quick scroll through of his own images before passing it to me. “Mine are probably even more boring, but fair is fair, I guess.”

I had to agree that his pictures were quite boring. The first several were what appeared to be his attempts at taking pictures of a leak under a sink, and he hadn’t bothered to delete the blurry ones, so there were a bunch. Then there was a picture of a bus schedule followed by a huge, dirty double-headed dildo on the ground outside. Presumably he merely found and documented it, but I didn’t want to ask, so I scrolled to the next picture quickly as he turned to look at me.

“I didn’t even know you could take pictures like this on a camera phone,” he said, and when I glanced over I saw he was looking at the close up picture I’d taken of a ladybug devouring an aphid.

“I have a macro lens attachment for my phone.”

“Oh, cool,” he said. “So you’re, like, a photographer?”

I shrugged. “Everyone kind of is these days, I guess.”

“Well, I’m not, as you can see.”

I said nothing, but I couldn’t exactly disagree. His style was overwhelmingly utilitarian. The only pictures I’d come across so far that didn’t seem to serve any practical purpose were a few of some scruffy cats eating kibble off the ground next to a dumpster.

And the dildo one, of course.