Small Town Hearts

by Lillie Vale

  The memory brought a smile to my face. As I sat down opposite her, I traced my fingertips over the paint streaks, remembering laughter and sweet kisses and badly painted nails—all courtesy of the three most important people in my life.

  Elodie was looking at the paint streaks as well. A half smile had tweaked her lips upward, but the moment she saw me looking, she let it drop. “We haven’t missed our summer, have we?”

  There was no right answer. Knowing exactly what to say when someone threw you for a loop was a myth. It didn’t exist. The right words were never there when you wanted them, only hours later when you had time to drive yourself crazy going over and over what you should have said. Words eluded me now as I stared back at her, at the face I knew so well. The pert, slightly upturned nose. The slant of her cheekbones, the stretch of collarbone I’d once peppered kisses across. The thickness of her lashes, the fullness of her lower lip.

  She stretched her hand across the table as if she expected me to reach for it. I was too knotted up, too held in place. What was she doing? I wanted to recoil. Looking at her too long was like staring into the sun.

  “You look good,” said Elodie after a long pause. She drew her hand back.

  So do you. But then, she always did. My lips tightened. I didn’t say a word.

  “I thought you wanted me to say hi.” Her voice turned light, coy.

  “Saying hi is different from ambushing me like this.”

  Her eyes widened. “Ambushing? That’s not what this is.”

  My mouth wouldn’t unstick for the longest moment. Finally, I managed to get out, “Why are you here?”

  Her finger traced the pink splotch. I wondered if she even knew that she was doing it. “For you,” said Elodie, just like that, like the last year hadn’t happened. Like my heart hadn’t been ripped out of my chest and thrown into the sea.

  I clenched my mouth—hard. My jaw began to ache from the pressure of my teeth. I hated the lilt of her voice, the earnestness in her face. I hated everything about this. “No, this is for you.”

  “What do you—”

  “This,” I said loudly. I gestured around my kitchen. “Coming here. Here, El. You’re still”—my breath caught—“hiding.”

  “No, that’s not—”

  “Like everything is the same,” I finished.

  “You’re the same,” she said. “I’m glad. I didn’t want you to be anything other than how I remembered you.”

  I stiffened. She didn’t seem to realize how entitled and unreasonable she sounded. I knew that I wasn’t the same. Not anymore. Not like she thought I was. Not like she wanted me to be. Because if I was the same Babe who was willing to hide her relationship, that would make it easy for her. And because I’d once loved her—loved her so much—I wanted to make it easy for her. But if I dug deeper, I knew that making it easy for her would only make it harder on me. And I was tired of things being hard for me.

  “I don’t think I am the same,” I said after a long pause. “I think you want me to be, because if I was, it’d mean you know how the rest of this goes.”

  “How would it go?” she asked quietly.

  “Like this.” I stretched my hand out to touch hers. Just for a second. “It would start with this.”

  “I sense a but.” She tried to twist her hand to capture my fingers, but I pulled back just in time.

  “I moved on, El. I moved on without you. You should, too.”

  “But … but I’m back now.”

  “You’ve been back for a while. It took you until now to come up here.”

  “It wasn’t so easy! You were so…” She paused. “Mean.”

  “Mean? That wasn’t mean.”

  “Pissed off, then.”

  I stared at her. She was deflecting, trying to unload the responsibility of her decisions on me. The moment was maple-candy brittle. “I don’t want to be anything, El. I’m just done. We’re done.”

  Elodie inhaled, but it sounded like a horrible, shaky gulp. “But I want to be with you.”

  “You say that, but for how long?” I challenged her. “I want more than a summer, El. I want more than keeping secrets and sneaking up here because you’re too scared to go anywhere else. I don’t judge you or hate you for not being ready, but I’ve been out for years. I’m not ready to go back in just so I don’t draw attention to you. I’m sorry.”

  “Do you want me to—”

  “No,” I blurted out, reading the question in her eyes. “I don’t want you to do anything you’re not ready for. Especially if you’d only be doing it for me. If you come out … it should be for you. But I don’t think I can do this again.”

  She shoved her chair back, hard enough to scrape, and stood, shoulders quaking. I was a bystander to her pain, too shattered myself to do anything to help. Tears streaming down her face, dripping from her chin, she streaked past me.

  I followed after her. She’d left the front door open on her way out. I wrapped my arms around myself as I stood in the doorway, eyes focused on the road Elodie had taken to return to town. My shoulders ached with renewed discomfort. The weight of a first love was no small burden. It was a heavy anchor. Looking out the window, at the beach tinged with the dusky pinks and purples of sunset, I knew my best thinking wouldn’t be done at home.

  * * *

  I could see the moon. The sky was a purple gray, and the houses of Oar’s Rest twinkled with light. Lorcan’s crab shack still boasted an impressive mini-army of couples and families within a twenty-foot radius.

  A book lay in my lap, a page fluttering in the breeze. Walt Whitman’s words swayed, an unintelligible rippling of letters. I dropped my finger from where it was keeping my place. Though I had been out here for a while, I was no closer to figuring out what to do.

  Penny’s words from this morning ran through my mind. Seconds later, they overlapped with Elodie’s until I couldn’t even hear the words anymore, just the barrage of noise. Penny wanted me to be different, but when Elodie came to the lighthouse, she was clearly counting on me to be the same. What was the balance? Did anyone know, or was this a struggle that only my own fucked-up life dished out? Everything I thought I knew about my friends, about myself, now it was just replaced by giant question marks. My world was shaken, unsteady. I still couldn’t believe Elodie’s gall in coming to the lighthouse, in thinking our relationship was suspended in the same place after all this time.

  Feet padded through the sand. Stopped right in front of me. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” The words came automatically. I looked up, squinted.

  Levi loomed above me, a large waffle cone in each hand. One was starting to drip. He folded his knees and sank into the warm sand beside me. He licked the white river of ice cream and held out the other one to me.

  I took it, held it uncertainly for a moment, then scooped the tip of the ice cream off. “Thanks. What’re you doing here?”

  “I was out for a walk. I saw you sitting here, so I went back to the ice cream shop to grab us a couple cones.”

  The vanilla was cold and sweet on my tongue, coating my throat. “What if I’d left?” I asked, unable to hold back my curiosity.

  He chuckled, the noise reverberating in his chest like the soft purr of an engine. “Then I guess I’d have eaten them both.” He saw my book and his smile deepened, his top lip thinning even further as his mouth stretched to accommodate his amusement.

  “This?” I lifted the book, closing the front and back. “I found it on the beach. Half buried in the sand, like maybe someone left it here, went for a swim, and forgot about it.”

  “You’re smiling.” He bumped his shoulder against mine. His eyelashes looked particularly golden in the twilight hour, the color of his eyes a haunted gray instead of a keen, piercing blue.

  I took a swipe of ice cream. “I am. I came here to think, be alone—”

  “Oh, sorry, I can just go—”

  “No!” I blurted out. “I didn’t mean for you to leave. I can be alone with you here.”r />
  We fell into silence, broken only by the low calls of gulls and strains of chatter from Lorcan’s. I looked at Levi from the corner of my eye, enchanted with the way the dying light played on his face, casting him in an ethereal glow. At the same time, I kept spying his glances at me. Furtive little things, not long enough to linger, but enough for me to catch the turn of his head and the angle of his nose.

  Now would be the time to tell him about Elodie and what had just happened. I ached to, but when I parted my lips, the words didn’t come. I didn’t want them to. And even if I did, how could I tell him without also outing her secret? She wasn’t ready for people to know—not then, not now. Even her family was in the dark. If I told Levi, I’d be shining a light on the very thing she wanted kept private. I had no right to do that to her. It wouldn’t matter that I trusted Levi to keep it to himself—even if it was my past, it was someone else’s secret.

  “Must be something big,” said Levi.

  Arrested, I swung to look at him. “What?”

  “Whatever you’re thinking about.” He lightly tapped my forehead. “You’re looking like it’s something big.”

  Under his gaze, any thought I had about anything else seemed insignificant and small. “Have you ever had a hard decision to make, but you don’t know how to make it?” I asked, licking a rivulet of ice cream that had snaked its way down my thumb.

  He thought for a moment, head endearingly cocked. “Yeah, but you know it already.”

  I turned his words over in my mind. “I do?”

  His eyes shone like sea glass. He didn’t look away when he answered. “Coming here. I knew I’d have to leave home one day, but it was still one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever made. The last year has been full of them. Side effect of growing up, I guess. But if I’d stayed in New York, my whole career would have been mapped out for me. The time in my life when most other teenagers are finding themselves … I’d never be able to figure out what I wanted, or who I am, unless something changed. Unless I made it change.”

  “You don’t think people can grow at the place they’re already at?”

  He paused for a moment before answering. “Maybe they can. I don’t think everyone has to actually leave their life in the rearview mirror like I did,” he said with a crooked smile. “What gets left behind doesn’t even have to be a place. It could be anything. A mind-set, a bad decision, a person—anything at all. I think the point is that I had to get out of my comfort zone.”

  Levi’s words tugged at me. What he was saying could have described me over the past few weeks. The push and pull between everything I thought I wanted and everything I wanted now. The before and the after. No matter what happened this summer, I knew that I would never be the same. He was right. Sometimes you just had to leave behind what didn’t fit.

  The corners of his eyes crinkled as he smiled, leaning a little closer toward me. “Like coming here. It was a good decision.”

  He didn’t have to say it, but I heard what was left unsaid: If he’d never come here, we would never have met.

  Levi used his pointer finger to trace doodles in the sand. “I wanted to get away, become someone new.” He tilted his head, looking sweet and boyish and a million other things I couldn’t put into words.

  I slipped my fingers through his. It seemed like the right thing to do. “I think you’ve done a pretty good job of finding yourself,” I murmured. “It’s like you told Elodie. You’re pushing the reset button. You’re losing yourself in order to find yourself.”

  He looked startled for an instant, lips parting like he was going to say something. I’d never seen him look taken aback before, even though I knew other things about him: His eyelashes went still when he was being serious, and his blinks would grow slow and measured with every answer. The side of his palm was almost always silvery with graphite. The higher up his wrist the smudge traveled, the more lost in his sketching he had been.

  How had I noticed all the little things about him and ignored the big one? He was a summer boy, which meant that no matter how eloquent and handsome he was, there was one thing he would do at the end of his residency … and that was leave.

  “What are you doing?” he asked as I began to dig in the sand with one hand.

  “Putting the book back.”

  He laughed. “You should keep it. No one is going to come back for it. It’ll just get waterlogged and someone will throw it away.”

  “This is where I found it,” I explained. “I kinda like the idea of giving it back to the beach. And we’re far enough away from the water that it won’t get ruined. Probably someone just forgot to take it away with them. I want them to find it if they come back, but if it’s still here tomorrow, I’ll take it to the lost and found.” Sand was getting under my nails, but I kept digging until the hole was large enough. I put the book in and then pushed sand in to fill the depression, supporting the book so it wouldn’t topple the moment I took my hands away.

  Levi hummed in response. When I turned to look at him, he’d almost finished his ice cream and had started taking small nibbles of the rim of the waffle cone.

  We ate our ice cream in silence, watching as the sun went down and the tide started coming in. The tang of salt water was sharp and just a little bit acrid. I took a deep breath of it, savoring it like my mom relished her Chanel No. 5.

  It struck me then that no matter what choice I made, he would always be one step away from leaving. This wasn’t his life. He’d said it himself—this was paradise. And one day, Levi would leave paradise behind and go back to the real world, to his Usual Self. His time here was fleeting, temporary. He wasn’t for keeps.

  “I love it here,” he said, breaking the silence with the timbre of his voice. He drew his knees up and hunched forward, wrapping his arms loosely around his legs.

  I chomped on the soggy bottom of the cone. “What’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen?”

  “Mavora Lakes,” said Levi. “Definitely.”

  “Where’s that?”

  He grinned. “Remember Fangorn Forest, where Merry and Pippin escaped from the Orcs?” At my nod, he said, “This was the filming location.”

  “No way. You were in New Zealand?”

  “Yeah, a couple of years ago during Christmas break with my friend’s family. Dad was, like, a step away from asking if he could come with,” he said with a faint laugh. “He was more excited than I was. There’s a few pushpins in New Zealand on his map.”

  Not sure what to say, I settled for a nod.

  “What about you?” Levi asked. “What’s the most beautiful place you’ve been?”

  “Honestly? I haven’t been to a lot of places outside of Maine. Once to Disneyland, and once to DC on a school trip.”

  He shrugged. “If you could, though. Go anywhere. Where would it be?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Indecisive or evasive?” he asked with a grin.

  I gave him a look. “Indecisive. There’s not much that I try to hide, you know. I’m the definition of an open book.” Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t the truth.

  “I don’t know if I would agree with that,” Levi said easily.

  I arched an eyebrow. “No?”

  Levi’s eyes smiled down at me. Really smiled. The kind of smile that was absolutely genuine because it wasn’t just muscles moving lips, but reached his eyes, too. “No,” he said simply.

  “How do you figure?” I tipped my head back, smiling.

  “Do you remember in English class we learned about the story pyramid thing?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, here’s my thinking.” Levi leaned forward. “We’re eighteen—”

  “I’m nineteen,” I said.

  “We’re still teenagers,” he said. “So if life was a plot structure, we’d still be in the rising action stage. Our lives are just beginning. Your big aha! moments are waiting for you. Mine, too. Somewhere out there.” He grinned. “In baking terms, I guess you could think about it lik
e a cookie that isn’t done baking.”

  I liked the way he put it, like I was the hero in this story and not just someone else’s sidekick. Like somewhere beyond imagining, plot devices were murmuring among themselves, wondering when to kick in and to set me off on my hero quest. I’d given up on thinking I’d have one ever since I turned eighteen and no one showed up to tell me I was the Chosen One.

  Part of me wanted to laugh it off, minimize how much I liked his fanciful analogy. Because suddenly, it all felt too real. The more I let him in, the more I let him mean to me … the harder it would be to let him go. Let him go. My stomach twisted. I would be doing to Levi what Tom did when he went fishing—catch and release.

  Could I do that to him? To myself?

  “You never know,” he continued. “Maybe we were meant to meet. I mean, what were the chances that the waitress at Busy’s also happened to be my landlady?”

  “I love that you think it’s fate,” I said. “Not everyone believes in it.”

  “Well, I do,” he declared. His eyes darted over my shoulder, forehead scrunched like he was trying to focus.

  I twisted around. “What is it?”

  “I think I see something over there,” he said, pulling his hand loose. His pinkie hooked around mine for just a second. “Hold on, I’ll get it.”

  I swallowed my surprise as I watched him get to his feet and amble toward an abandoned plastic pail and a miniature spade with a broken handle. It had been there for weeks, too old and broken for any of the children to touch. Levi crouched down, brushed the crusted sand off them, and then returned to me, loot in tow.

  “You want to make a sandcastle?” I asked, amused.

  He grinned at me. “Up for it?” The pail dangled from his pointer.

  “Always.”

  We got to work, and in silence, we created a messy imitation castle. It leaned a little to the right, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but remained standing.