“I shouldn’t have done it,” he confessed.
“Understatement of the year.” She stopped at the shore and dug her heels in the gooey sand.
“What’d we used to do around here, anyway?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Eat hot dogs. Watch fireworks. Build sandcastles. Play at the arcade. A million things.” But Tink knew it was more than that. It was going to the rusted old swings at the other end of the beach and seeing if your feet could reach the first branch of the nearby tree. It was getting so caught up in a game of manhunt, your heart would beat frantic in the dark. It was a water fight that lasted so long, you slept every night with a Super Soaker under your pillow.
Len seemed to know, too. “We used to have a lot of fun.”
“I can’t figure out what’s changed,” she said, but maybe that was a lie. She just didn’t want to admit it.
“We did.”
Tink and Len swung around, and there was Kimmy with her arms folded across her chest, speaking Tink’s truth right when she didn’t want to hear it. Kimmy was wearing a two-piece, and she didn’t have a speck of sand anywhere but on her two bare feet. Her fluorescent-pink-painted toenails glowed up from the sand.
Tink wondered when Kimmy had marched up to them, how long she had been standing there, and what she might have heard.
“I feel like this summer’s been great.” Kimmy’s smile was so big, her teeth practically glowed in the sun. “It’s Tink that’s been weird, right, Len?”
Len sighed. “I don’t know.”
“I’m the weirdo loner,” Tink announced. She kind of liked the sound of it.
Len smirked.
Kimmy’s voice turned all sour. “But, I guess, it’s Len who’s been suffering and enduring this summer, huh?”
So, she must have heard it all. Tink expected Kimmy to march off, but she stood there, arms now at her hips, looking for an explanation.
“Don’t look at me,” Tink said.
Len stared at the ground, and Tink followed his gaze to the little grains of sand, to Kimmy’s bright pink toes. He practically whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Kimmy sighed, then she grabbed Tink’s wrist. “Come on.” She yanked her arm, but Tink shook her head. She didn’t move.
“No,” Tink said, firm. “I’m not a part of this. I never wanted to be a part of this. I think you two have a lot to talk about.”
So it was Tink who walked away, leaving the two of them at the shore, staying the weirdo loner, which felt like the right person to be while she figured things out.
I rock back and forth, caught in the shallow tides. My hair slips beneath the sun. Sand scratches my cheek.
Everything is still.
There’s a small twitch at my fingers, then a hand nestles inside mine.
I open my eyes and stare up, expecting to see a wide stretch of sky. Instead, I look up at my bedroom ceiling. I’m awake and my hand is empty.
I stand at the bottom of the steps smoothing my hair when I’d usually leave it wild. With Elder being here, I feel like I can’t walk around in yesterday’s crumpled clothes or have my hair sticking out all over the place from sleep. When I said he could stay here, I really didn’t think it through. I’m in school clothes and my hair’s all brushed, and I even scrubbed my face with soap. Twice.
But Lindy’s like she always is, curled up in her seat at the kitchen table, her short hair in twisted bed-head spikes. She wears one of our T-shirts, a smiling clamshell talking on the telephone, with the speech bubble Shell-o! Coffee steams from her mug, and I know she’s not quite awake until she’s stared out the sliding doors to the deck for a while, until a few sips of coffee have kicked in, when she sleepily kisses me on the forehead and tells me to have a good day.
But Elder. He’s something else. Eggs sizzling on the stove, the smell of bacon suffocating the whole house, his elbows knocking chairs as he twirls around the kitchen, humming along to some invisible tune in his head. He drums a beat with a spatula, which I want to grab from him and take to his face.
“Good morning, Summer,” he practically sings as I make my way to the kitchen. And I feel like I’m walking some tightrope that’s about to snap, with Lindy all sleepy and serene, like she always is, Elder buzzing around like some kind of frantic bee, and me just toeing the line in between.
“Bacon and eggs?” he asks, opening the oven and rattling around a tray of something with his gloved hand. “The trick is to put bacon on a baking sheet in the oven,” he tells me. “Keeps it crispy. I saw it on Barefoot Contessa.”
Even if I washed my face a few times, I feel like I’m half-asleep. I still can’t figure out why he tells me things as if I care.
I manage words as best I can in all the commotion, making my way to the fridge. “I’ll have what I always have,” I say.
“Which is?” he wonders out loud.
“Toast,” I say flat.
“Oh, I threw out the bread last night,” he tells me. “Molded.”
My eyes grow wide.
“There was also some stale bread on the counter. You’ve really got to keep on top of your perishables,” he lectures.
I rush to the garbage. Even Lindy shakes her gaze toward the ocean and says, “Oh, Elder, no, that’s—”
“Is it still in here?” I toss the lid of the garbage can open.
“Is what?”
“The bread.” I stare at the bottom of the garbage bag. “The molded bread. The stale bread.” But all I see are cracked eggs and the greasy plastic package from the bacon. The bag’s empty otherwise.
“I threw it out last night. Today’s garbage day. I printed out the garbage days on this handy dandy little calendar from the town website. Right here.” He pats his hand on the fridge, where a sheet of paper dangles from a magnet I didn’t even know we had.
I slam the lid to the garbage. “I need that bread.”
“I told you, it’s gone bad. I have English muffins, if you want that?”
I look, helpless, to Lindy.
“It was Summer’s science experiment,” she says. “On mold. She was comparing the moist, cold bread to—”
“The dry, stale bread,” I finish for her. Then I take off, barefoot, out the screen door, down the front steps, and across the patchy lawn to the garbage cans.
But they’re already on their sides, lids tossed, rolling around like empty barrels. The garbage truck already came.
I kick one of the barrels as hard as I can and watch it roll across the lawn. I don’t even bother to pick any of them up and drag them underneath the porch where they belong. If Elder’s so concerned about his precious garbage days, he can do it himself. Instead, I stomp up the stairs, slam the screen door, though I don’t even know where I’m heading because I’m still hungry and there’s the smell of bacon all over the house, and English muffins instead of toast, and I can’t understand how we are where we are.
“I’m sorry, Summer,” Elder says as I stand with my back to the door. I don’t know if I should be coming or going. I feel as stuck as I did when Lindy made me decide whether or not to let him move into this house. “I had no idea. When’s it due? How can I help?”
“You’ve been a big enough help already,” I sulk. “It took weeks to get the mold going, and it’s due this week and there’s no way…” I let my voice trail away. What’s the point in trying to explain?
Lindy picks up where I left off. “We could try something else?”
“We?” I wonder out loud. “What we?” I feel like I’ve been looking for our we ever since she asked Elder to move in.
“I could help. I mean, there’s never any guarantee in an experiment, right?”
“No,” I say. “There’s not.” I feel the heat rising from my insides, burning up my cheeks, and I feel my voice getting louder. “It’s like this dumb ‘Elder moving in
’ experiment, which I can’t believe I agreed to, because it has to be one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard in my life. Second only to the dumb idea of you two being together in the first place.”
Lindy’s voice is soft. “Summer.” She reaches out for my arm, but I pull away.
“You come in here, like you own the place,” I shout at Elder. “But you don’t. I thought we did.” I point my finger between the two of us, me and Lindy. “But I guess it was always just you. I guess I’ve only been a guest all these years.”
“You know that’s not true,” Lindy says, and her voice is so calm, I want to slap some sense into it. I want to send scalding-hot coffee across her lap and wake her up to everything she’s ruined.
But I don’t. I scoop up my schoolbag, push back on the door, and decide on going for good.
I walk through the motions of school, spinning the dial on my combination lock, slamming my locker closed, dragging my backpack from one class to the next, slipping into one cold metal seat, rising up and settling into another. I watch videos, scribble notes, swallow hard when Mrs. Grady excitedly announces our science project is due at the end of the week.
I try to stay numb to the morning. I think of Len and Kimmy and Tink on the beach, instead. An image that stays as the dream fades. The three of them in harsh sunlight. The uneasy feeling in my stomach as I move through waking hours and they stay frozen in time.
After school, I sit on the bleachers along the track with my homework and glance up every now and then to watch Jeremiah race around it. The track is this blazing burgundy color, and the kids look like a bunch of maggots swirling around a slab of meat.
“I don’t want to go home today,” I tell him as he finishes tryouts and plops himself next to me on the metal bleachers.
“Okay.”
“Wanna camp out?” I ask.
“All right,” Jeremiah agrees. And I’m glad for his easy way.
We bike to his place, and Gramzy eyes us both carefully when we tell her we’re staying on the beach for the night. “Lindy knows where you’re at?” she asks me.
I bob my chin up and down, real fast, too eager, I realize. “Of course.”
She grunts a little, with a stern nod, and I know she’ll be telling Lindy where I am.
It bugs me that I do care if Lindy worries. It bugs me more to know she won’t have to as long as Gramzy tells her where I am.
But that’s life in Barnes Bluff. Everybody knowing everybody’s business. It’s a wonder Turtle Lady managed to shut herself up inside a fortress of books. It’s a wonder I have no clear past for anyone to even gossip about.
A small thought starts chewing at me: Who else in Barnes Bluff has ever been able to appear and disappear?
“You wanna do the tent or just sleeping bags near the bunker?” Jeremiah asks as we fill my backpack with granola bars and a thermos of some fluorescent punch Gramzy’s got in the fridge.
“The bunker,” I choose. The bunker is what we call the three slats of old wooden fence that make a little shelter just past the dunes.
We walk through the hut and across the Pitch & Putt greens, then cross over the dunes to the bunker, steering clear of what looks like a big wet rock. But, when I catch the blob of paint marking it, my eyes grow large. I scoot down and watch as the rock steps forward and becomes what it’s always been: the shell of a turtle.
I check for the tag at its leg. “Four seven three!” I shout.
Jeremiah rushes over and crouches beside me. “It totally is.”
I look out at the Pitch & Putt over the dunes. “Made it all this way.”
“Pretty epic.”
We watch it creep forward.
“What do we do?” Jeremiah asks.
I think of Turtle Lady. “Just…let it be, I guess.”
We watch it for a few moments, sneaking forward an inch at a time. It looks at us. Or past us. It’s hard to tell. Turtles have this bored way of looking at the world.
I set the sleeping bag on the sand next to it and plop down on top of the itchy cotton.
Jeremiah lies down next to me, hands behind his head. “Elder threw them both in the garbage?” he asks, like he just woke up from a sleepy conversation we had after practice.
“Mm-hmm.”
“What are you going to do for the science project now?”
I shrug. “Maybe I’ll be gone before that.”
“So dramatic,” Jeremiah says. “Gone? Where would you even go?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been farther from here than the lighthouse,” I say.
“But that’s as far as you can get on the island anyway.”
“Right.”
“You could head the other way,” Jeremiah suggests.
“The city?”
He nods. “Sure.”
“You think I could bike all the way there?” I ask.
“Course.”
“But how would I even get there?”
“I mean, I don’t know, you just keep going. Follow the ocean to the other end.”
He’s making some sense. I scrunch up my nose. “That’s where Elder’s from.”
“What’s he doing here, then?”
I sigh. “Trust me, I’m asking myself the same question.”
The ocean creeps up toward us, then runs back to where it came from. There’s a line that marks the tide from the morning. Brushwood sits in a neat row, just a few feet from the bunker. I imagine the tide reaching us tonight, just another way for the ocean to let me know it’s left something of itself behind.
“How are things going with your dad?” I ask.
“It was all fine. I kind of didn’t mind him after a few days. But he can’t be telling me to quit hanging with you.”
“He’s still on that kick?” I ask.
He nods. “Gramzy’s telling him to simmer down. She’s trying to get him to concentrate on me running track. He’s never even been to a meet.”
“He’s missing out.”
“That’s what happens when you abandon your kid, Summer.” Then he swallows hard. “I mean, you know. Somebody’s always missing out.”
I nod, even if we’re both looking up at the night sky. The sun has officially slipped away. “It’s worse to not even know what you’re missing out on.”
“Or maybe it’s better?” Jeremiah poses the question.
“I don’t know.” And that seems to be the only answer to everything these days.
I close my eyes and listen to Jeremiah unzipping his sleeping bag, a sign he’s moving toward sleep. I settle into my own sleeping bag, my feet poking at its saggy bottom, because I’m outgrowing the kids’ size. My head barely covers the cushion, with my hair spread out in the sand. Most people who don’t like the beach don’t like it because of the sand, how it gets in every nook and cranny of their bodies. But I’ve always loved it. It’s how Lindy found me. She said I was sitting up in my bathing suit, building mounds of shapeless castles on the beach.
I yawn, listening to the tide’s easy back-and-forth, my head sinking deeper into its cradle of sand.
Tink sat on the back porch, curled up in her nightgown on a rusted old patio chair. They had long finished dinner at the big, round table, where Kimmy did not try to squeeze herself right next to Len for the first time all summer. Tink had even managed to ignore any whispered conversation that Kimmy tried.
A leftover pile of unused napkins rolled up and over the rock that held them down from the wind. Everyone was getting ready to sleep. Tomorrow would be their last day in Barnes Bluff, and it was a tradition they’d take the early ferry to Shelter Island for the day.
But Tink had sneaked down while Kimmy was brushing her teeth, and she would stay there until she heard Alexis slam the car door again, after another night out with Coop, their last night, Alexis had sig
hed, while running mascara over her dark lashes and smacking her lipstick between her lips with a breathy pop. Some people looked trashy in red lipstick, but Alexis managed to look fierce and strong. Tink wondered if she could manage the look someday. Probably not.
She waited, wanting to re-create the night of that midnight dip in the ocean, with the nagging feeling that things like that couldn’t actually happen every night, that the moment had come and gone already, but like a little kid, she hoped she could have it back once more.
She brought her knees up to her chest and looked out at the empty Pitch & Putt next door. It was getting cooler the closer they all edged toward September, but, like always, she’d leave before she ever knew this place in the cold.
The screen door opened, and Tink swung around in her seat. She saw the little black tank and short shorts, and heard the sparkling jelly sandals clack across the deck.
Of course it would be Kimmy. Of course she’d be cornered this late at night.
But it wasn’t like she could avoid her forever. They’d be trapped on an actual island, even, the next day.
Kimmy wrapped her arms around her chest. “Was wondering where you went.”
Tink shrugged. “Waiting up for Alexis.”
“Is she out with Coop?”
Tink nodded.
“Must be nice to spend the summer with someone who actually likes you back.” She groaned and squeezed into another mismatched patio chair.
Tink knew Kimmy expected her to respond, but she wasn’t sure what Kimmy wanted her to say. So they sat in their pajamas. Kimmy squeezed her arms tighter across her chest. “I can’t wait to go home.”
Finally, something Tink could agree with. “Me too.”
“Look. I know you expect me to apologize for stealing Len away this summer, but I’m not going to.”
“I don’t expect anything.”
“Good.” Kimmy’s voice went quiet. “It’s not like I don’t know it should have been you two.”
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