summer sea foam

The first merit badge Adam ever earned was for canoeing. In the cage, he sometimes took Michael to that memory. Childish glee, splashing through water, the dry scrape of dragging canoes off the rack and into damp dirt, the rough texture of wet rope as they tied the boat to the docks, the breathlessness of getting his lifejacket tightened. Michael never fully understood why Adam loved it so much, why that was the one memory out of the near decade he spent as a boy scout he held most dear, but he sat with him in the canoe under the broiling sun all the same. It hadn’t been the real sun, of course, and the water wasn’t real either, and none of it was real when he was with Michael, but—It's real now. Adam wakes up.