I climb into the passenger seat and close the door quietly because my father is on the phone. It sounds like a business call. I reach into the back seat and slip the memory card into my backpack. When I face forward again, the two guys are exiting the indoor section of the ferry.
Marcos is on his phone and the other guy is staring down at the camera, still trying to put it back together as they make their way over to a car near ours. I sink into my seat, hoping they don’t see me.
They climb into a BMW two rows over, on my father’s side of the car.
My father ends his phone call and starts the car, just as the ferry begins to dock. Only half of the sun remains dangling in the sky. The other half is swallowed by earth and sea, and I kind of wish the sea could do the same to me right about now.
“Sara is so excited to meet you,” my father says, starting the car. “Other than her boyfriend, there aren’t a lot of regulars on the peninsula. It’s mostly vacation homes. Airbnb, Vrbo, things like that. It’s a lot of new people coming and going every few days, so it’s good she’ll have a friend.”
The cars begin exiting the ferry by row. I don’t know why, but I glance past my father at the BMW as it crawls past us. Camera guy is looking out his window now.
I stiffen when he spots me in the passenger seat.
We lock eyes, and his stare is unwavering as they pass. I don’t like that my body is responding to that stare, so I look away and glance out my window. “What is Sara’s boyfriend’s name?”
Everything in me is hoping it isn’t Marcos or his douchebag friend with the pretty eyes.
“Marcos.”
Of course it is.
FOUR
The house isn’t quite as extravagant as I had feared, but it’s still the nicest house I’ve ever been in.
It’s beachfront and two-story, built high up on stilts like every other house in this neighborhood. You have to climb two sets of stairs before you even reach the first floor.
I pause when we reach the top of the second set of steps before following my father into his house to meet his new family.
I take in the view for a moment. It’s like a wall of ocean and beach in front of us as far as I can see. The water looks like it’s alive. Heaving. Breathing. It’s both magnificent and terrifying.
I wonder if my mother ever saw the ocean before she died. She was born and raised in Kentucky, in the same town she died in last night. I don’t ever remember hearing stories of any trips she took, or seeing pictures of childhood vacations. That makes me sad for her. I didn’t realize what seeing the ocean would mean to me, but now that I’ve seen it, I want every human on earth to experience it.
Seeing the ocean in person feels almost as important as having food and shelter. It doesn’t seem farfetched to believe a charity should exist for the sole purpose of allowing people to afford a trip to the beach. It should be a basic human right. A necessity. It’s like years of therapy, rolled up into a view.
“Beyah?”
I look away from the beach and toward a woman standing in the living room. She’s exactly how I pictured her. Bright, like a popsicle, with white teeth and pink manicured nails and blond hair that looks expensively maintained.
I groan, but it wasn’t meant to be heard by anyone. I think maybe it came out louder than I expected it to because she tilts her head. She smiles anyway.
I came prepared to ward off hugs, so I’m holding my Mother Teresa painting and my backpack against my chest as a barrier.
“Hi.” I step into the house. It smells like fresh linen and…bacon. What a strange pairing, but even a linen/bacon combination is a nice change from the mildew and cigarette smoke our trailer always smelled like.
Alana seems confused as to how to greet me since she can’t really hug me. My father tosses his keys on a mantel above a fireplace and says, “Where’s Sara?”
“Coming!” A high-pitched, manufactured voice is accompanied by the sound of bouncing feet on the stairs. A younger version of Alana appears, beaming a smile with teeth somehow whiter than her mother’s. She does this thing where she hops and claps and releases a squeal, and it’s honestly terrifying.
She rushes across the room and says, “Oh my God, you’re so pretty.” She grabs my hand and says, “Come on, I’ll show you your bedroom.”
She doesn’t even give me time to object. I follow behind her and her swishy ponytail. She’s wearing jean shorts and a black bikini top, but no shirt. She smells like coconut oil.
“Dinner is in half an hour!” Alana yells from downstairs.
Sara releases my hand and pushes open a door when we reach the top floor.
I look around my new bedroom. The walls are painted a calming blue, almost the exact same color as the eyes of the guy from the ferry. The bedspread is white, with a giant blue octopus on it.
The bed is perfectly made with an offensive amount of pillows.
It all smells and looks too clean to touch, but Sara plops down on the bed and watches me while I take in the room. It’s three times the size of the bedroom I grew up in.
“My room is across the hall,” Sara says, pointing at the door we just came through. Then she tosses a hand toward two doors that open up to a balcony with an unobstructed view of the beach. “This room has the nicest view in the whole house.”
There must be something wrong with it if it has the nicest view, yet no one chooses to stay in this room. Maybe the beach is too loud and active in the mornings and this room feels the brunt of it.
Sara hops off the bed and opens a door, then flips on a light to a bathroom. “No tub, but the shower is nice.” She opens another door. “Walk-in closet. Some of my shit is in there, but I’ll move it out this week.” She closes the door.
She walks to the dresser and opens the bottom drawer. It’s full of stuff. “Junk drawer, but the other three drawers are free.” She closes it and sits back down on the bed. “So? You like it?”
I nod.
“Good. I don’t know what kind of house you live in now, but I was hoping you didn’t have to downgrade.” She reaches to the nightstand beside the bed and grabs a remote control. “All the rooms have everything. Netflix, Hulu, Prime. You can just use our accounts, they’re all ready to go.”
She has no idea she’s saying this to a girl who has never even had a television. I haven’t moved or spoken since we walked into the room. She’s doing enough for the both of us, but I manage to mutter, “Thanks.”
“How long are you here for?” she asks.
“Not sure. The summer, maybe.”
“Oh, wow. Awesome.”
I press my lips together and nod. “Yep. Awesome.”
Sara doesn’t catch the sarcasm. She smiles, or maybe she’s still smiling. I’m not sure she ever stopped. “You can move, you know. Put your things down.”
I walk over to the dresser and set the plastic sack on top of it. I toss my backpack on the floor.
“Where’s the rest of your stuff?” she asks.
“The airport lost my luggage.”
“Oh, God,” she says, overly empathetic. “Let me get you some clothes until we can get to a store.” She hops off the bed and walks out of the room.
I can’t tell if the smile on her face is genuine. It has me even more on edge than before I met her. I’d trust her more if she were standoffish, or even a bitch.
It feels a little like the girls at my high school. I call them locker room girls. They’re nice on the court, in front of the coach. But in the locker room, it’s a different story.
I can’t tell if we’re on the court or in the locker room right now.
“What size are you?” she yells from across the hall.
I move to my doorway and can see her digging through a dresser in the other bedroom. “A two, I think? Maybe a four?”
I see her pause for a moment. She looks across the hall at me and nods tightly, like my answer disturbed her in some way.
Being as skinny as I am isn’t something I strive f
or. It’s been a constant battle trying to consume enough calories to maintain the energy I need for volleyball, while also not having as much access to food as most people. I’m hoping before the end of summer, I can put on some much-needed weight.
“Well, I’m not a four,” Sara says, walking back into my room. “Triple that, actually. But here are some shirts and two sundresses.” She hands me the stack of clothes. “I’m sure they’ll be baggy on you, but they’ll work until you get your stuff from the airline.”
“Thanks.”
“Do you diet?” she asks, looking me up and down. “Or have you always been this skinny?”
I can’t tell if that’s a backhanded remark. Maybe it’s because she has no idea why I’m as thin as I am, so it feels like an insult. I shake my head a little, needing this conversation to end. I want to shower and change and just be alone for a while. She hasn’t stopped talking since I met her.
She doesn’t leave. She walks over to the bed and sits down again, this time falling onto her side and resting her head on her hand. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No.” I walk the clothes to the closet.
“Oh, good. There’s a guy I think you’ll like. Samson. He lives next door.”
I want to tell her not to bother, that men are scum, but she probably hasn’t had the same types of interactions with guys that I have. Dakota wouldn’t offer a girl like Sara money. He’d just hit on her for free.
Sara hops off the bed again and walks across the room to the other wall of curtains. She pulls one open. “That’s Samson’s house right there,” she says, pointing out the window. “He’s super rich. His dad is in the oil business or something.” She presses her forehead to the glass. “Oh my God, come here.”
I walk over to where she’s standing and look out the window. Samson’s house is even bigger than the one we’re in. There’s one light on in his house, in the kitchen. Sara is pointing toward that part of his house. “Look. He’s got a girl in there.”
There’s a guy standing between the legs of some girl who is seated on his kitchen island. They’re kissing. When they break apart, I suck in a quiet gasp.
Samson is Douchebag Blue Eyes. Samson is the same guy who just tried to pay me twenty bucks to join him in a ferry bathroom.
Gross.
But slightly impressive. He works fast. He was on the same ferry I was on, which means he just got home ten minutes ago. I wonder if he offered that girl twenty bucks.
“That’s the guy you want to set me up with?” I ask as we watch his tongue explore another girl’s neck.
“Yeah,” Sara says, matter-of-fact.
“Looks like he’s taken.”
Sara laughs. “No, he’s not. She’ll be gone soon. Samson only makes out with the girls who are here for a weekend.”
“He sounds terrible.”
“He’s your typical spoiled rich kid.”
I look at her, confused. “But you want to set me up with him?”
“He’s cute,” Sara says with a shrug. “And he’s friends with my boyfriend. It would be cool if we all coupled up. Did stuff together. Sometimes Samson feels like a third wheel.”
I shake my head and walk away from the window. “Not interested.”
“Yeah, he said the same thing when I told him you might be here for the summer. But you could change your mind after you meet him.”
I have met him. And I’m still not interested. “The last thing I need right now is a boyfriend.”
“Oh, God. No,” Sara says. “I wasn’t saying you should date him like that. I just mean…you know. Summer fling, but whatever. I get it.” She sighs, like that saddens her.
I’m just waiting for her to leave so I can have some privacy. She stares at me a moment, and I can see her mind trying to come up with another question, or anything else to say. “My mom and your dad won’t be very strict since we’re out of high school. They just want to know where we are at all times, which is basically in the front yard, at the beach. We make a fire every night and hang out.”
It just occurred to me that this girl knows my father’s parenting style better than I do. I hadn’t thought about that before this moment. I know his name is Brian, his leg isn’t broken and he’s a financial planner. That’s about it.
“Where do you want to go shopping for new stuff tomorrow? We’ll have to go to Houston, all they really have here is a Walmart.”
“Walmart is fine.”
Sara laughs, but when she sees I’m not laughing, she bites her lip to stop her smile. “Oh. You were serious.” Sara clears her throat, looking hella uncomfortable now, and this might be the moment she realizes we’re nothing alike.
I don’t know how I’m going to last an entire summer with a girl who thinks Walmart is laughable. I’ve shopped at thrift stores and garage sales my whole life. Walmart is a step up for me.
I feel like I’m about to cry and I don’t know why.
I can sense the tears coming. I suddenly miss my old house and my addict mom and my empty fridge. I even miss the smell of her cigarettes, and I never thought that would happen. At least that smell was authentic.
This room smells rich and sophisticated and comfortable. It smells fraudulent.
I point toward the bathroom. “I think I’m gonna shower now.”
Sara looks at the bathroom and then at me. She realizes that’s her cue to leave. “Try to hurry because Mom likes to have dinner as a family on the weekends.” She rolls her eyes when she says family, then she closes my bedroom door.
I stand in the center of this unfamiliar room, feeling more than a little overwhelmed.
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more alone than I do right now. At least when I was in the house with my mother, it felt like I fit there. We belonged there together, no matter how mismatched we were. We learned to navigate and weave our lives around each other, and in this house, I’m not sure I can invisibly weave around any of these people. They’re like brick walls I’m going to crash into at every turn.
It feels claustrophobic.
I walk over to the balcony doors and I open one of them and step outside. As soon as the breeze hits my face, I start crying. It’s not even a discrete cry. It’s an almost twenty-four-hour-delayed-sob.
I press my elbows onto the railing and cover my face with my hands, trying to suppress it before Sara decides to pop back into my room. Or worse, my father.
Nothing works. I just keep crying. Five whole minutes probably pass while I stand and look out at the water through blurry, tear-filled vision while I sob.
I need to tell my father what happened last night.
I inhale several breaths and wipe my eyes, mustering up every ounce of resolve in me in order to regain control of my emotions. I eventually wipe enough tears out of my eyes so that I can actually appreciate the view of the ocean under the moonlight.
The girl Samson was kissing in his kitchen earlier has just crossed over the sand dune between the two houses. She joins a crowd of people gathered around a fire. They’re all young, probably in their late teens and early twenties. They’re likely all rich and carefree and confident. This is probably what Sara does every night, and those are probably her friends.
More people I have nothing in common with.
I don’t want anyone to see me up here crying, so I spin to go back into my room.
I freeze.
Samson is standing alone on the balcony next door. He’s staring at me with an unreadable expression.
I stare back at him for two seconds, and then I walk into the bedroom and close the door.
First, he sees me eating bread off the deck of a ferry. Then he offers me money, and I’m still not sure of his motives behind that offer. Then I find out he’s my new neighbor for the summer.
And now he’s witnessed the first breakdown I’ve had in years.
Great.
Fuck this summer.
Fuck these people.
Fuck the whole current state of my life.
FIVE
I had my first kiss when I was twelve.
It was a Saturday morning. I was standing at the stove about to cook scrambled eggs. I didn’t hear my mother return home the night before, so I assumed I was in the house alone. I had just cracked two eggs into a pan when I heard my mother’s bedroom door open.
I looked over to see an unfamiliar man walking out of her bedroom holding a pair of work boots. He paused when he saw me at the stove.
I’d never seen him before. My mother was always in a new relationship or a new breakup. I did my best to stay out of her way, whether she was falling in love or getting her heart broken. Both were equally dramatic.
I’ll never forget the way the man looked at me. It was a slow gaze, from head to toe, like he was hungry and I was a meal. It was the first time a man had ever looked at me like that. I instantly felt the hair on my arms rise and I immediately turned my attention back to the stove.
“You not gonna say hello?” the man asked.
I ignored him. I was hoping if he thought I was rude, he’d leave. But instead, he walked into the kitchen and leaned against the counter next to the stove. I was focused on stirring the eggs. “You make enough for me?”
I shook my head. “We only had two eggs.”
“Sounds like just enough. I’m starvin’.”
He walked over to the table and started putting on his work boots. I had finished scrambling the eggs by the time he had his boots on. I didn’t know what to do. I was hungry and they were our only two eggs, but he was sitting at the table like he expected me to feed him. I didn’t even know who the hell he was.
I transferred the eggs to a plate, grabbed a fork and tried to rush out of the kitchen toward my bedroom. He reached me in the hallway, grabbing my wrist and pushing me against the wall.
“Is this how you treat guests?”
He grabbed me by the jaw and kissed me.
I was struggling to get away from him. His mouth was painful. Stubble dug into my face and he smelled of rotten food. I kept my teeth clenched tight, but he just kept squeezing my jaw harder, trying to pry my mouth open. I finally hit him upside his head as hard as I could with the plate of eggs.
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