“Thomas opened the throttle all the way and passed me, I kid you not, a shiny brass telescope.“Seriously?” I asked him.“Ever since those pirate movies came out, they’re everywhere,” he said. “I’ve got a sextant, too.”“Any tent you have is a sex tent,” I muttered darkly, extending the telescope.Thomas smirked.”

“Say what?” Jenks blurted out. “You think those moss wipes are coming back?” “I wish,” I muttered. “I’ve got some serious hurt with their name on it.”

“I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert's dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind, until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them.”

“I don't want him hurt because he got out of hand with me.""Yet you would have shot him."I shrugged. "I never said I was consistent, just serious.”

“That is why I came to school here,” Connor said pointedly. “I don’t think I could stand being more than a few miles away from you.”“That and the football,” I said, grinning at him. He smirked back at me before kissing me lightly on the lips. “Yeah, that too, but if I had to chose, you’d win out over football any day.”

“Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night.”