Small Town Hearts

by Lillie Vale

  Craggy rocks and cliff-bound lanes navigated us to the top of the hill. We had to pause every so often to haul our bikes onto the sidewalk whenever a car rumbled past.

  “Tired yet?” I called over my shoulder to Levi.

  “No way!” he responded. Then, after a long pause, “But we’re almost there, right?”

  I grinned, though he couldn’t see me. “Yes!”

  The houses broke away on either side until the only thing in front of us was a grassy slope up to the lighthouse. We had to pedal harder and faster until we reached the top, where the land flattened and we could slow down.

  “That was,” Levi said, his voice sounding strained, “exhausting.”

  I hummed, braking until I came to a slow and gentle stop. Levi glided next to me, his black-and-white sneakers landing in the close-cropped grass.

  “This is gorgeous.” He used the toe of his shoe to nudge the kickstand down.

  We stood next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, looking at the town below. We’d traveled in a C shape to come up the hill to the lighthouse. From behind, houses dotted the landscape, and below was the colorful town, each sherbet-colored building winking up at us.

  Levi started to unzip his backpack. “Can I set up anywhere?”

  “Anywhere,” I confirmed.

  I watched him set to work, pulling a complicated wooden contraption out of the bag and straightening it so it resembled a tripod, three legs settling into the ground. He placed a thin square of canvas against the easel, adjusting it until it was smack in the middle. The easel wasn’t pointed at the sea, but at the town below.

  “Is it okay that we’re here?” he asked, sticking a paintbrush in his mouth while he rooted through his backpack. He came up with a watercolor palette box, a small tub of water, and a sketchbook.

  “I should hope so,” I said, smiling. “I live here.”

  “You live—” He pulled the paintbrush out of his mouth and looked up at the candy-cane-striped lighthouse. “Whoa.”

  “Yep.” I shaded my hand against my face to block the bright sun. “Want something to drink? Juice, water, soda?”

  “Water’s fine,” he said. He was still gaping at the lighthouse in wonder.

  I wheeled my bike to the lighthouse wall, unlocking the door and pushing it open with my elbow. Inside, my home was dark. The only natural light came from the windows in my top-floor bedroom, but I was pretty used to the darkness, so I didn’t need to flip on the lights.

  The fridge was stocked with fruits and vegetables. I pushed aside a bunch of kale to grab a bottle of water for him and a homemade cranberry-lemon seltzer for me. The drink was of my own devising, one of the many cold beverages I liked to tinker around with in summer in hopes of finding the next yummy concoction to serve at Busy’s.

  The cranberry-lemon was a winner, but I had a feeling it would taste better as a syrup poured over ice shavings. I’d need a taste test and Tom’s go-ahead before moving ahead with it, though.

  On my way out, I squinted, immediately kicking myself for not grabbing a pair of shades while I was inside. One hand was shading my face, the other holding the bottles between my three middle fingers.

  “Want my sunglasses?” Levi asked. “Thanks,” he said as he accepted the bottle, overlapping my simultaneous “No, thanks.”

  We smiled at each other, both acknowledging the awkwardness of the moment, before Levi tore his gaze away to take a sip. My eyes trailed from his chin to his neck, and I swallowed hard. Before I could be caught staring, I sat cross-legged in the grass and turned toward the Oar’s Rest overlook. Sitting next to me, he began to sketch.

  If I’d met Levi a few days before, maybe things with Chad wouldn’t have gone down the way they did. Maybe I’d be introducing him to my friends, bringing him around Penny’s houseboat for one of her weekend parties. The four of us would be sipping Moxie on the beach, waiting for our smoky, buttery shrimp to come off the barbecue. We’d laugh, tell stupid jokes, get to know each other—some of us for the first time, some of us finding each other all over again. Talking, really talking. The way we used to.

  A fly grazed my arm before continuing on its journey. I watched it for as long as I could before I went almost cross-eyed. I wondered where it came from, where it would end up. Was it born here, in this place I’d called home my entire life? Or, like Levi, was it just a traveler passing through? Who knew where it would end up. Who knew if it would ever be back here.

  People were good at leaving. My mom, Elodie. They weren’t as good at coming back. Getting attached to Levi would only lead to my own heartbreak. With my mom, with my friends … I had roots. History. Years of shared experiences that tethered us together. If it was so easy for them to cut the strings, what chance did I have with someone new? Someone who had a past of his own, one that didn’t include me.

  Uncertainty ballooned in my gut, sickly and stale like day-old fries. Getting involved with a summer boy was dangerous. Because Levi Keller wasn’t mine to keep. I had to remind myself of that.

  This was supposed to be the summer of us. Of me and Chad and Penny. My palm brushed the grass, the blades tickling. I couldn’t get my friends back on track if I was distracted, not even if the distraction in question was inches away from me, sun skimming his cheekbones until he glowed. Even if he was looking at me with soft eyes, like he wanted to understand me, get to know me …

  “You’re quiet,” Levi said. “Penny for your thoughts?”

  I startled. My fingers closed around the grass, bunching it up tight in my grip. Hearing my best friend’s name sent a frisson of electricity down my back. “Just thinking how peaceful it is up here,” I said.

  “Your parents don’t mind?”

  “Don’t mind what?”

  He gestured to the lighthouse, our strong and silent sentinel. “You living here by yourself. Don’t get me wrong”—he grinned—“it’s beautiful, but also … there’s something a little solitary about it.”

  I acknowledged his words with a nod. “Some people do find it a little creepy. In the winter when the nights get darker, when the fog gets so dense you can’t see a foot in front of you…” I shook my head. “Don’t laugh, okay?”

  “I would never,” Levi promised.

  “I like the romance of lighthouses. The mystery.” I shot him a look to make sure he was not, in fact, laughing at me. “After almost being shipwrecked, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to his wife and said he was more likely to build a lighthouse than a church. Because the strength of a lighthouse is from its being alone. From being a beacon of light in the darkness, a finger showing you which way is home.”

  He was silent for so long that I began to regret my honesty. Had I made it weird? The lighthouse wasn’t just that thing looking over the town, not to me. It was history and romance and heartbreak and everything in between. It was my life. In every window I’d pressed my nose against while waiting for Elodie to show up. In every groan and creak the lighthouse made in winter, letting me know I wasn’t alone. In every memory that settled in between cracks and corners and crevices.

  Not everyone understood what it meant to love something that much. So they tried to make you feel a little embarrassed, downplayed your passion and made it sound silly or nerdy or weird. People had been like that in high school; dismissive and snickering about my interest in baking, about Penny’s interest in boats. So many of our friends were more like Chad, content to smoke and drink and lounge on the beach. Only Chad wasn’t like the rest of them, so that was why it worked. That was why the three of us worked. Or, at least, that’s how we used to work.

  Just when I was sure Levi wasn’t going to say anything, he cleared his throat. “I really like that,” he said. “Maybe it guided me here, too.”

  I lowered my voice cartoonishly. “Were you lost in the dark?” I meant to tease him, but his face grew serious, and I realized that maybe my words had hit home. I darted my eyes away.

  “I was, actually,” he said. “A couple of years ago, I sta
rted posting photos of my art online. Just for exposure. And because I wanted anybody, even if they were strangers, to notice me. I couldn’t share it with my friends. It wasn’t what they’d consider cool art. Landscapes, flowers, portraits? Yeah, no.” He laughed. “They were so bored whenever we had a class trip to a museum. They’d have laughed if I’d shown them—” He broke off. “Sometimes it’s easier to be the real you when you’re with strangers. You know?”

  I chanced eye contact with him. I did know.

  “I got noticed, I guess is the way you’d put it. People began talking about me. People actually in the art scene, professionals. Things sort of took off from there. My parents got involved, decided I should have an agent.” Levi shrugged. “I love creating art, but I want to go to college. I want to figure out if there’s something else I love, too.”

  “I sense a ‘but’ coming,” I said.

  He dropped his eyes, stared at the outline of the lighthouse he’d drawn. The sketchbook lay in the grass between us, but he made no move to reclaim it. “Dad thinks college would be a waste of money. He never went, and he figures that I don’t need to, either. Not if I already found what I’m good at. And Mom … she doesn’t really listen to me anymore. This agent she found, some sleazy dude who only cares about making money, told her I should limit my output of paintings so I look more exclusive. That’s … that’s not the kind of artist I want to be, or the kind of art I want to create. It should be for everyone. It is for everyone.”

  There was a kind of nakedness in his eyes as he spoke. Heat furled in my stomach. It was easy to talk to people, to talk a lot but not actually say anything, and fool yourself into thinking that was enough. But with Levi, I was talking about real things. Things that mattered. I’d forgotten how much I missed being able to talk like this with someone. The last person had been—

  Elodie’s face wisped into my mind, and I savagely blew it away. Like a gust of breath on a dandelion, I banished her. I didn’t want to think about her in this moment.

  “Then you should,” I said impulsively. “Share your art. Share it with the world. Do it your way.”

  He smiled, crooked and sweet. “You think?”

  Without thinking about it, in a touch as casual as any I’d shared with Chad and Penny, I lightly touched his knee. “I do.”

  His eyes practically twinkled at me. “Thank you.” He made a move as if to grab his sketchbook from the grass, but instead, he covered my hand with his.

  My heart strummed deliciously. There was no denying it. I was attracted to him. There’d been chances over the years to get involved with summer boys and girls, but I’d never once been tempted. I thought about Chad and his fear of being alone, his wanting to replace Penny with me just so his world didn’t go out of orbit. Was I like that, too? Was I trying to use Levi to replace what I had lost? Though his hand was warm against mine, I felt a chill at the idea of Levi as a stopgap.

  Navigating back to safer waters, I pulled my hand free and handed him his sketchbook. As I looked back at the lighthouse, I said, “And, um, you asked if my parents minded.”

  He nodded.

  “It’s just me and my mom. I don’t have a—well, I mean, I do have a dad, somewhere. I just don’t know him.”

  He stayed silent. Gratitude thrummed through me. He never rushed to fill the silence. He waited, he listened. He let me come at my own pace.

  “We never talked about him much. It never mattered to me, though. I didn’t need him. All I could get out of Mom was that he was a summer boy, too.”

  He picked up on that last word. “Too?”

  “Like you.”

  The breeze lifted his hair, teasing the golden waves until they fluttered back down to his forehead. He swiped them aside.

  “She works on a cruise ship,” I continued. “I think she was thrilled when I turned eighteen, so she could go off without the guilt. She gave me some money, and I put it toward getting this place at the end of my junior year. I always loved the lighthouse, and when the opportunity came up to rent it … it was a no-brainer. I’ve only been here a year, but I already can’t imagine being anywhere else. There’s a saying about this town. Kids learn it in school every Founders’ Day.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “That Oar’s Rest is a place to rest your oars. It’s home,” I said simply.

  He was quiet for a long moment. Then, “I’m jealous,” he said, so adamantly that I was taken aback.

  My laugh was startled. “What?”

  “You’re living in your literal dream house. Do you have any idea how rare that is?” Levi couldn’t look away from the lighthouse, face glowing from more than just the sun. “My mom’s always talking about getting out of the city, moving to upstate New York and building a house. I remember this one weekend as a kid where she convinced my dad to drive up there and look at houses. But we never actually did it.”

  I could hear the regret in his voice. “Maybe she still will.”

  He shook his head. “Nah. For most people, I think that’s the point. The dream stays a dream.”

  Considering that, I tipped my bottle toward him. “Then here’s to the dream.”

  “And to the dreamer,” he said, returning my toast.

  We fell into companionable silence, watching the gulls soar over the water and a long row of cars get backed up on Main Street. White crests of cerulean-blue waves crashed, the wind carrying muted squeals of delight from a young family on the beach.

  The pier was missing planks in a few places, and orange safety cones cordoned off the area. Even from this distance, I could make out two men in yellow hard hats and blue overalls walking along the pier, one swinging a toolbox while his partner carried new slats of wood over his shoulder.

  They wrenched the old and broken wood out and replaced it with the new boards, hammering them into place and testing the weight. The scrapped wood would go toward building the model boat on the beach that the whole town would help to construct, only to set it on fire at the end of summer. Another old founders’ tradition, this one would reclaim Oar’s Rest at the end of tourist season.

  The minutes passed with the warm breeze on my cheek and the soft scratches of his pencil rasping against the canvas. All I could see of the preliminary sketch were boxy outlines of houses. He used feather-light strokes, the pencil faint against the white of the canvas, and made even fainter by the glare of the sun. His right arm moved all over the canvas while his left intermittently raised the water bottle to his lips.

  I almost hated to break the serene moment, but a question had popped into my mind. “Out of all the places in the world, why Oar’s Rest?” I asked.

  The pencil touched the tip of his nose. “Would you believe me if I said I just closed my eyes and shoved a pushpin into a map?”

  “No.” I paused. “Is that what you did?”

  He smiled. “Yeah. My dad had this huge map in the den where he put little pins on all the places he wanted to visit. He got so mad at me when I was little and pulled some out. I just got so … I hated that stupid map. And when my parents kept insisting college wasn’t the right place for me right now—for my career—I hated it even more. So I grabbed some of Dad’s red pushpins and the first one landed on Oar’s Rest. I loved the name. It sounded unreal, and when I looked the town up online and saw the artist residency program, something just clicked.”

  “Did you tell your parents you were coming here?”

  He shook his head. “I left a note. Told them I needed to clear my head. If Dad looks close, maybe he’ll notice the extra pushpin where it’s not supposed to be.” There was an undercurrent of bitterness to his voice.

  I didn’t know what, if anything, I should say. I lay down on the grass, hair fanning out under me. I started to let my iPhone’s most-played song list begin to play, only to frown and switch to a different song.

  After I did that about three times, Levi said, “You’re one of those, aren’t you?” He turned around, the paint box in his hands. Inside
were at least fifty small wells of watercolors, all of them well-used, because I could see white plastic peeping out from the nucleus of each one.

  “One of who?”

  “Those people who love all the songs on their iTunes until it’s on shuffle and then they can’t stand them.”

  “I’m the freaking president of that club,” I replied, laughing. I turned off the music, gazing up at him. Sunlight settled in the hollow of his throat, in the curve of his ear. The cutest freckles were starting to form on his nose.

  “Do I have—” Levi immediately glanced down to check his shirt for paint spatter.

  “No.” My cheeks burned.

  “So you were just checking me out?” he asked, sounding not at all weirded out by it.

  Without a beat, I said, “No, I was ogling your art.”

  His lips twitched. He didn’t believe me.

  Unease strummed along my spine. The connection I’d made with him couldn’t go beyond friendship. He was a summer boy. I wasn’t made for temporary and fleeting—I wasn’t good at it.

  “Honest,” I said, pretty sure I was fooling no one. Cringing inside, I was relieved he didn’t press me on it before he began painting. Every so often he would pause to clean his brush in the tub of water he’d brought with him, and the swishing sound threatened to lull me into a doze. Soon, the bottom corner of the canvas was speckled with the colors of Oar’s Rest.

  While his back was to me, I raised my phone and took a photo of him. It felt silly, but I didn’t overthink why I wanted to immortalize the moment. Maybe I just wanted something to hold on to when the inevitable happened and he left, too. Or maybe—

  No, I wasn’t going there.

  He swung around just as I dropped the phone in my lap. “Thanks for bringing me here.”

  “You’re welcome,” I murmured, scooping my hair away from my neck. The sun was making me hot, the inside of my hair getting wet from sweat. I propped my arm under my cheek and curled up, watching him work. There was something hypnotic in his movements, the way his back moved as he scattered color over the canvas. Something I committed to memory, just in case. My eyes closed just for a second.