I pull some strings and manage to convince the ferryman to get us back to the dock. Donovan is waiting for us. He looks pissed, though I can’t tell if he’s mad at me, or Otto, or both.
“Kenzi’s waiting at the house,” he says. We get in the car.
The excitement of the whole thing kept me warm, and I don’t realize how cold I am until I’m in front of the car heater. I put my hands on the vents and glance in the back seat. “You warm enough back there?” I ask him.
“I’m fine.”
Otto is somber in the back seat. He stares out the window with the eyes of someone ten times his age.
“I know it’s rough, buddy,” I tell him. “What you’re going through…it’s a lot for anyone to handle. But running away isn’t the answer.”
“Yeah,” Otto says, his voice small. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Donovan adjust his hands on the steering wheel.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask.
He’s quiet for a minute. Then, finally, he says, “Sometimes, I feel like it’d be better if I wasn’t here. Then everyone wouldn’t have to worry about me so much.”
“I understand why you’d want to escape. But sometimes it’s good to just think about it, you know?” I continue. “Take a moment. Breathe. Have you tried meditation?”
Suddenly, Donovan hits the brakes, and the car gives a lurch forward. I brace myself with a hand on the dash and look at the road, expecting to see an animal. Nothing. It’s empty.
But Donovan’s jaw is tight, knuckles white on the steering wheel.
“Hey, you okay?” I ask him.
He exhales tightly. “We’re not meditating. We’re taking a detour.”
“Where?”
But he doesn’t answer. He just turns the car around.
He pulls us off the main street. We drive the strip of road that follows the coastline for about five minutes until he pulls into a patch of empty dirt on the side of the road.
“Everyone out,” Donovan says.
The three of us climb out. I recognize where we are—we’re on the other side of the boatyard, which is closed up for the season. The side of the road is covered in browned and frozen-over dune grass, and Donovan leads us down a small path through the elm trees. It takes us out to the edge of a cliff. We’re on the north side of Hannsett, nothing out here except a long stretch of water and red and green buoys blinking in the distance.
“What’re we doing here?” I ask.
“This is the Screaming Rock,” Donovan says matter-of-factly.
“Why do they call it—?”
Donovan moves to the cliff’s edge, buckles down, and screams. The sound he makes is a scream I’ve only heard once before—when I had to do an emergency amputation on a man who’d gotten tangled in a propeller. It’s the sound of limb being severed from muscle, of losing something you should never have to lose, and it sends a chill through me.
Then he stands, immediately collected again, and takes a step back.
“You okay?” I ask him.
He gives me a look—like I’m crazy for asking that question, like it’s perfectly normal to have that much pain bottled up inside of you. “Your turn,” he says to me.
I shake my head and cross my arms. “I think I’m good. I don’t have…all of that.”
His mouth turns downward. “Your parents are ruthless. You got married and divorced in the same year. And no matter what you do, you’ll never make your father proud. But you’re right. You’re good.”
Alright. He has a point.
I shuffle to the edge. Below, I can see waves crashing against the rocks, sending up white foam. He’s right. No one can hear you out here.
I take in a deep inhale. I think about Donovan’s words. I think about my father, most of all. I imagine I’m inhaling every yes, sir and no, sir. Every word I held back when he uttered bigoted phrases. Every time I repeated his own words to other people—people like Donovan.
And then I let it out. I scream. I can hear the sound carry across the water, echoing back at me.
It’s a powerful feeling.
The act feels exhausting and invigorating at the same time. I step away and move back beside Donovan.
“Better than meditating?” Donovan asks.
“No comment.”
“Your turn, Otto,” Donovan says.
Otto stares at the cliff for a second, eyes wide. I sway beside Donovan. Our shoulders brush. “You think we might’ve scared him?”
But then he lets out a shout of his own. It’s a shrill, pitchy noise, but it’s a damn good scream. He doesn’t stop there, either. He takes a rock out of the ground, chucks it at the water, and shouts, “Screw you, Kevin!”
Donovan and I exchange a look, and immediately, I know we’re on the same page. We take Otto’s lead and reach down, unearthing small rocks from the hardened ground beneath us. We chuck them at the water, and all three of us shout at the top of our lungs:
“Screw you, Kevin!”
Our voices echo and carry. I imagine them skipping like stones across the flat surface of the ocean, traveling who knows where. Far away.
Otto sniffles. When he turns back to us, I can see his cheeks are splotchy red and wet with tears. “I think I’m ready to go back home,” he says.
This kid is so brave. So strong. And my heart cracks wide open in my chest for him.
I give his back a rub. “You’ve got it, buddy.”
We pile in the car, and Otto is still quiet. But he seems in a better mood somehow. He doesn’t have that faraway look in his eyes.
The screaming took it out of all of us—him especially—because he falls asleep against the window.
It’s getting dark outside now, and Donovan has to put on the headlights on the way to Kenzi’s. The weather is picking up a little. Small white snowflakes sparkle in the car’s beams.
“That was a good idea,” I tell Donovan.
“Yeah, well. The Screaming Rock has been good for me over the years.”
“So, what. You’d just go out there and scream?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I’d curse people out. Or things. Fuck you, MCATs was a popular refrain for a minute.”
I can picture it: teenage Donovan, the kid who smiled as he cleaned other people’s yachts and then went home to a trailer behind the marina. Peddling his bike out to the cliff edge at sunset and screaming his heart out.
A thought nags at me. “Did you ever scream my name?”
His eyes flash over me briefly before latching on the road again. “In your dreams, Hotshot.”
