My hands are full of ripe grapes, their skins full, strained ‘til they burst — they’re that sweet inside.  Jonah is sixteen and I’m seventeen, and while we’re outside, he acts like the grapes are little bullets. When he misses me they splat against the dirt, staining the earth. I think he’s missing me on purpose. It is the late-summer of 2011. My hands are full of grapes and leaves and vines and I run them down the length of the vines looking and reaching and dodging grapes and tumbling in the grass and Jonah and I are laughing until we’re pink.

We collapse in the burnt green grass under the oversaturated sky with the grapes all around us. We pop them into our mouths one by one. We suck out the fruit from the skin as if it were an oyster. We spit out the seeds and let them collect around us — they are our little pearls now.  For a moment, we let our hands touch.

Jonah gets scared. He says he has swallowed a seed and it is too small to get choked up on but it is just small enough that it could grow into something big. I ask, have you eaten any dirt, for it to grow? And he says, a little dirt might have gotten in my mouth when we were over there, but I don’t think enough. We think about all the things that would have to happen and decide it can’t get stuck or grow into anything, it’s not bubble gum. He tags me with his hand so we have to start running away from the shapes of our bodies left by an outline of grape seeds and skins.

Jonah gets tripped up. You’re it, and I tag him with my palm on his back. But when he gets up, there’s nothing he tripped on, it’s just that his toes look green, and then we see the little leaves peeking out from under his toenails. Jonah is not about to cry but his eyes look watery because it feels like he has stubbed his toe. Be still, I say it like my mother when she’d cut my toenails when I was little. I start to pluck the leaves off like I had plucked grapes from the vine — they grow back one by one.

Jonah gets my mom. She speaks with a hush-hush voice and says use your inside voices, and, here let me look at that, and oh didn’t your mother raise you to be mindful of seeds.

We get all the leaves off him for a minute but they keep coming back and the vines on the inside have stretched him out so much that he is at least eight feet tall, and his eyes have dark green crescent moons under them. He doesn’t cry and he can’t look at any of us, just keeps repeating I’m sorry, I’m sorry, really I am sorry. After my mom has hung up the phone with Jonah’s mom, I overhear her whispering to my dad that, with a kid like him, it was bound to happen at some point.

We wait for his mom to pick him up in her minivan. It’s just us sitting on the front porch steps. My mom said she would be in the garage with my dad in the meantime. When she tells me we have 15 minutes at the most, she’s really telling me, I taught my daughter better than to get close to boys like him.

Jonah is clasping and unclasping his hands around his knees pulled up to his chest, which gets more and more difficult to do with every minute that passes. The sun is starting to soften in the sky, and soon everything will look like it’s on fire. When I try to say something, he won’t look at me. I should’ve never come here, he says while letting the hand closest to me drop towards the ground, his palm open with a few new leaves branching out from each of his fingers. I put a hand on his back instead, say, I’m the one who’s sorry.

I want to tell him that it will be ok but I don’t really know that it will be. He’s turning a deeper shade of green as the sky turns pink. We can see the minivan coming towards us on the dirt road, kicking up clouds of dust on either side until it stops in front of the house. When his mom gets out she slams the door, and we walk from the steps with heads bent. Jonah is trailing lengths of vines that I try to avoid tripping on. I’m scared to step on the ones coming out of his heels in case that hurts him.

He is so tall now they have to fold all the seats so he can lie down with his feet on the center console between the driver and passenger and his head in the trunk. I try not to stare at my friend there on his back. Yet, I can’t help but watch as they drive back down through the clouds of dirt, away from my house, away from the yard where we spent too little time together, away from the little row of grapevines nearing the end of their fruit-bearing season. I watched from my place until they turned a corner and there was no chance he could check to see if I was still waving goodbye.

Everyone in town knows Jonah had to leave. At first, they whispered to each other that he had left for rehab, then they started saying he was going to be gone permanently. Apparently, he’s somewhere in Florida now. I wanted to tell all of those whispering people that I had picked and even eaten the fruit too, that all he did wrong was hold my hand while it was still light outside, and that I’m not in Florida — I still live where I always have. But it made more sense to everyone that he had gotten some girl pregnant out of wedlock, was addicted to hard drugs, or needed the discipline of the unforgiving swampland. Boys weren’t supposed to grow to the size of beanstalks and the color of curling vines. The Florida story was more palatable for everyone, a fact we swallowed as effortlessly as seeds from the sweet muscadine grapes I’ll still eat, if they’re ripe enough, this upcoming August.