Jonah and I sat on his living room couch one day and complained about the color of the curtains.

            "Mustard," I said.

            "Brown."

            I shook my head.

            "Rotting bananas," Jonah decided.

            "Rotten."

            "No. Rotting."   

            He watched the curtains, frowning at the nauseating way they cast sunlight like rotten bananas. It was the inexactness that bothered him; he could live with brown, with fruit turned mushy—in fact, he preferred it. But this, this almost-color, upset him.

            The curtains were pasty and brushed the floor, gathered dust at their ends, and despite the color, they moved with a purpose, casting shadows against Jonah's face. They were like phantoms shifting the weight on their feet, like mothers rocking heavy infants.

            “Let’s get out of here,” Jonah told me as he slapped his palms against his knees and stood up. But he stayed there for a minute before going to look for his dad’s old pipe in the shed, before picking up his skateboard and rolling out the door. He stayed there a minute, looking over at a bin overflowing with crumpled newspapers and empty prescription bottles, beneath a boarded up window and a cross hanging above on the wall, covering a crack like plaster. It was slightly tilted in one direction and seemed loose against a thin nail, but I knew it would never fall; Jonah’s faith could hold it up. But none of that mattered then, because the curtains were so overbearing, so yellow-brown.

            Like we were neck deep in a graveyard.

            “Rotting bananas,” he repeated. 

            Jonah turned fifteen September of that year, a beautiful boy with peachy skin and red cheeks, a ghost of the earth and a man all at once. Yet beneath all of that, he was still the same God-fearing boy as always.

            But one day in particular was different, when he skipped the half-pipe and went straight to the beer, chugged down can and after can and then went home to tear down curtains in his living room. Later he would stumble back and say that the man in the sky should try something different, like smoke a joint or become a trapeze artist. “Stuck up there with nothing to do. What a shame,” he said.

            “You’re tired,” I responded, and he looked at me with sullen eyes, half-awake and probably drunk. But that was okay. He felt happy. He felt immortal.

            In the fall of that year, a storm began pushing up against the edges of our Oak, carving it back so that it caved into itself, or at least that’s what Jonah thought. Everyone on the island was forced into lockdown because at the rate of rainfall, we could have become floating people by the end of it, slowly pushed around by an Atlantic storm. A thin sheet of water came over everything, and the whole place, usually parched, started to sink slowly. And we began to sink in it.

            That was the first time I saw Jonah drink. The sky was more brown than anything and the moon seemed nonexistent behind bruised clouds.

            “You know what I think, Benji? I think we should get out of this place. We are the future of the world—let’s get out and start living.” He had beer stains on his T-shirt and a droplet slipping down from his nose, sliding past his mouth and around his jaws.

            He had come to me the day before with a wine bottle dangling from his fingers as though he were already drunk. He told me he had made love to a tourist girl with fair skin and hair like braided jump ropes, that it was “Spiritual, brother. No doubt about it.” We sat beside his bed, with legs extended out in front of us, and he brought the bottle to his nose, circling it around three times before looking straight ahead and taking a quiet sip. He didn’t even cringe, like he wanted to prove something, or like he knew what he was doing. “Spiritual,” he whispered.

            But now, he was taking swigs carelessly, saying, “I mean, there’s so much we can do. So much to do.” He thought for several moments, pulling down at his cross like a noose and sliding it back and forth against the necklace. “We could be magicians—musicians.” He looked off of the porch towards the flooded garden. Cracked flower pots and roof tiles decorated the surface. Trash bins, tires, and dead squirrels.

            After a few minutes, the storm picked up again with a deep grumbling of bubbling water and rain puncturing the liquid slate. Rapids sliced through the flood. The porch began to sway. We were rocking on a ship in the middle of an ocean, but all I could think about were Jonah’s perfectly white teeth, and all he could think about were yellow-brown curtains, or at least I imagined.

            He took off his shoes and stood up.

            “What are you doing?"  I asked, but he waved away the question, moving his hand at an angle, his knees quivering beneath him. 

            “You know, people can walk on water,” he said. “It’s happened before.”

            “Sure.”

            I pulled at his shirt, trying to get him back down, “we need to get back inside,” but he forced me back with the palm of his hand.

            “You have to start living, brother,” Jonah tried again. He dropped a can that he was holding one finger from the tab. “God is great.”

            “Jonah, sit down.”

            He took another step forward to where his toes peeked in and out of rushing water. “We aren’t gonna to get anywhere if we stay here forever. You need to try harder, Benji. Try to do something with your life. Like me. I know what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna walk on water.”

            I could tell things were shifting around down below: mailboxes, lampposts, tin roofs, bits and pieces of unmarked metal, entire gardens and turtle populations, and it was as if everything had been flipped, the water now solid, and Jonah and I, more fluid than ever.

            “I mean, put it into perceptive.”

            “Perspective,” I said, still tugging at his shirt.

            “You need to decide what you’re gonna do. Do you wanna go to Europe? Do you wanna become a bouncer? It doesn’t matter what it is unless you have a plan. See this water? This is my plan.”

            “Sit down, Jonah. You can’t walk on water,” but I’m sure I said this with uncertainty, because the unmistakable determination beneath his searching eyes scared me.

            “At least not barefoot,” I joked, but he moved closer to waves, wiggling his toes. “Jonah, put your shoes back on and sit down.” My hands were wrapped around his ankles now, pulling.

            “You need a plan. For your future I mean.”

            “Jonah,” I shouted.

            “Well, think about it. By the time I get back I expect you to have something good,” he told me.

            I did not want to see him barefoot on water. Shoes could protect him from the storm, or I liked to believe it would. But now, as he stood out in front of me, I could see the blisters at his heels.

            Before I could speak again, he stepped forward.

            For that split second, I wondered what it would be like if he went in. He could become a part of the solid and let me stay up here on my own. I’d become one of the floating people, and he could just swim around at the bottom, bumping into window shutters and garden gnomes, but for that simple time, a moment too instant to understand, I think I saw him on top. And I think I saw the storm bow at his bare feet, completely fall around him like the ground had opened up and taken it all back in. And I know none of this happened, but I wanted to see Jonah up there where he belonged.

            Instead, it ripped him straight to the side, and he went in with arms flailing up and his body limp like a rag doll.