The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James

by Ashley Herring Blake

  Then I smile.

  “What are you grinning at?” she asks, but her mouth twitches too.

  “I surfed.”

  She lets out a long breath. “Yes, and almost drowned.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t. I’m okay. I made it on my own. Isn’t that why you brought me out here today?”

  She tilts her head at me and her eyes go gentle. “Yeah. Yeah, it is, Sunshine. You did good.”

  I laugh, but it feels thick in my throat, like it might turn into a big old cry any minute. My whole body hurts, but at the same time, it feels amazing. Alive. I’m alive.

  Lena’s still holding me, but I press my hand to my heart, a reflex. It’s pounding under there, happy and steady.

  “Oh god. Sunny, you’re bleeding.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your arm.”

  I bend so I can see my forearm and yes, yes, I am bleeding. A big red gash stripes my skin from my elbow to my wrist, which explains why that area feels like the fire of a thousand suns.

  “You must’ve cut it on a rock or something. Come on.” Lena sets me down and we swim toward the shore. “I’ve got a first aid kit in the truck.”

  We drag our boards onto the sand and then carry them to the parking lot. It’s still raining and the beach houses that dot the shore are covered in drizzly fog.

  After loading up our stuff, we get into the truck and Lena cleans my arm with hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin before she covers it with a large white bandage. Her brows are all furrowed and wrinkly while she does it, but I can’t stop smiling.

  When we’re heading toward home, I’m still grinning so hard, my cheeks start to ache.

  “I wish Quinn could’ve seen me,” I say. It pops out before I can stop it. I didn’t mean to say that. I don’t want to think about her at all, but what I said is true. I really do wish she could’ve been here as my BFF.

  “You can invite her to surf with us sometime,” Lena says. Then she winks at me. “I’d love to meet your Kissing Quest partner in crime.”

  “Um… yeah…” I feel my face go atomic red.

  “How’s that going?”

  I gulp, thinking about Quinn’s hand pressed against mine. I can’t think about being under that waterfall without my stomach going all butterscotch pudding-ish on me.

  “It’s… we’re… sort of taking a break,” I say, even though Quinn and I never said that.

  “Oh, no, why?”

  I don’t answer right away. I have questions about kissing and feelings and holding hands bubbling up, questions I’m not sure I want to ask because they’re all about Quinn. And I’m looking for a boy to kiss. Only boys.

  “Sunny?” Lena asks when I sit there like a zombie.

  “I don’t know,” I finally say, shoving the questions down until they’re practically in my toes. “Just because.”

  “Ah, yes. An excellent reason.”

  I roll my eyes at her, but she just grins. “You know, it’s okay to put this whole kissing thing off for a bit. Until you’re ready.”

  “How do I know when I’m ready?” I ask quietly.

  She gets this soft look on her face. “Oh, you’ll know. You won’t be able to stop thinking about it, about the person you like, and every time you see them, all you want to do is hold their hand or kiss them or just listen to them talk for hours and hours.”

  My pudding-stomach wiggles all over the place. “Is that how it was with my dad?”

  Her smile fades a bit. “Yeah.”

  “Have you… have you ever had that with someone else? Someone you… maybe shouldn’t like like that?”

  She frowns at me, just like I knew she would, because here I am being weird again. Laugh-worthy weird. Margot-whispering-behind-my-back weird.

  “Never mind,” I say before she can answer.

  “No, sweetie, what do you mean ‘shouldn’t like like that’?”

  But I just shake my head. We’re home anyway, bouncing up my gravel driveway, the top of the lighthouse completely covered in clouds.

  Except when Lena circles the car toward the front porch, there’s someone sitting there, right on the steps. Someone who’s not Kate. Someone who’s not Dave either. Someone who is most definitely Quinn Ríos Rivera.

  CHAPTER

  22

  Quinn stands up and looks at me. I look back at her. She waves at me with one hand. A black-and-purple-plaid backpack is hooked on her elbow. She doesn’t smile, though. Or, actually, she does, but it’s tiny and barely there. Nervous. God, why is she nervous? There’s no reason to be nervous, right?

  She doesn’t move closer to the truck. I don’t get out of the truck. I just sit there, totally not nervous, and breathe so loud and heavy I fog up the window.

  “Sunny?” Lena says as she cuts the engine. “Is that Quinn?”

  I nod.

  “Do… you want to get out and go say hello?”

  I nod, but I don’t move.

  “Okay, what’s going on?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” I say too fast.

  Stay cool, Sunny, I tell myself, but it’s way too late for that. I’m the opposite of cool. My heart is flopping around in my chest like a fish out of water and I’m sweating, my skin prickling.

  “Well, whatever this nothing is, you can handle it,” Lena says. “You just surfed, remember?” She nudges me with her elbow and opens her door. Then she jogs toward the porch and starts chatting up my BFF while I stare at them from inside the truck.

  I take a deep breath—or maybe a billion—and then I open the door.

  When I reach the porch, Lena and Quinn are both smiling and Lena’s asking Quinn all about her amazing blue hair.

  “I love the different shades of blue,” Lena’s saying when I walk up. “Sunny, isn’t her hair amazing?”

  I nod, because it is amazing. So is her smile and her dark, dark eyes and the black T-shirt she has on right now with little unicorns all over it. They have rainbow-colored tails and horns and are somersaulting all over the place. Those unicorns are amazing too.

  I’m suddenly super-aware that I’m in nothing but my bathing suit and a sand-covered rash guard. I fold my arms and clear my throat, wishing I’d thought to drape myself in a towel.

  “I’m going to grab your board, Sunny,” Lena says, squeezing my shoulder. “It was lovely to meet you, Quinn.”

  “You too,” Quinn says.

  Then Lena jogs off toward the truck and Quinn and I stand there in silence. Closer up, I notice that her eyes are all puffy and red, like she’s been crying or something.

  “So that’s Lena,” she finally says.

  “Yeah, that’s Lena.”

  “Did you go surfing?” Quinn asks, which gets a little smile out of me.

  “Yeah. I actually rode a wave,” I say. “Like a real one.”

  “That’s awesome!”

  “And I have a battle scar to prove it.” I hold up my arm, super-proud of the tiny dots of blood seeping through the bandage. I might need to get that changed.

  “Oh, wow, are you okay?” Quinn touches my arm gently. So gently, I barely feel her fingertips near the bandage, but I still get all goose bump-y.

  I pull my arm back.

  Quinn clears her throat and looks away. “Anyway. I came by because I thought, maybe…” She sets her backpack on the porch and unzips it. She digs around a towel and a pair of flip-flops and her grass-green bikini and finally pulls out two black bottles with the words Arctic Fox over the top.

  “This one’s called Girls’ Night,” she says, holding up one of the bottles with an image of a lavender fox on the front. Then she hands me the other. “And this one’s Aquamarine.” The fox on that bottle is, well, aquamarine, and then I remember that first day we met on the beach.

  “You want to dye our hair?” I ask.

  She smiles—that tiny, nervous smile again. “Well, I was ready to redo mine anyway, and you said I should do lavender, right?”

  “And you said I should do aquamarine.”


  “Yeah, exactly. I have the bleach and everything in my bag. It’s okay if you don’t want to. I know it’s a lot, to dye your hair, especially when your hair is dark like ours, and I can just go if you want me to, but…”

  She trails off, waiting for me to say something. And I’m trying. Oh, I am trying. It has to be the perfect thing so she knows I don’t want to kiss her at all, even though I’m the one who touched her face first under the waterfall. Even though I’m the one who said we should hold hands. Even though I’m the one who’s acted all weird ever since, when, if we were really just practicing, it shouldn’t feel weird at all.

  So, yeah, the next words I say have to be perfect.

  Which is probably why I keep blinking at her, my mouth opening and closing like a catfish’s. When I stand there, not saying the perfect thing for what feels like a millennium, Quinn’s face droops and she slips Girls’ Night back in her bag.

  “Okay,” she says. “It’s okay. I’ll see you—”

  “Let’s do it,” I blurt out. Not exactly the most perfect words, but they’re the right ones. I want to dye my hair. I want to do something that Old Life Sunny would never do, never even think about. Never wonder about. Never mention to Former Best Friend in the cone of silence. Before Quinn came along, I never thought about dyeing my hair.

  And I miss Quinn. There, I said it. I miss her bad. Just as my friend, though. Only my friend. My friend who I think is cool and who has amazing clothes and who I sort of want to be like. But there were tons of times I sort of wanted to be like Margot too. Like, how easy it was for Margot to talk to boys and how she always had her nails painted all pretty. Whenever I painted my nails, they looked like I was bleeding pink or periwinkle or whatever all over the place.

  This thing with Quinn, it’s simple envy, that’s all. Though my stomach never got all tingly-feeling like this with Margot, but it’s probably because I’m hungry and I just surfed and almost drowned and I’m about to dye my hair for the first time ever. All that kind of stuff can really mess up a girl’s guts.

  Quinn’s hand freezes on her bag and she pulls the bottle back out. “Yeah? You sure?”

  I nod.

  She exhales loudly. “Good. That’s good.” Then she bites her lip and I just know she’s about to say something I don’t want to hear. Call it heart disease intuition, that sixth sense when my whole body can tell when someone needs to talk about something serious.

  “Look, Sunny, about the other day—”

  “What are you girls going to do for the rest of the afternoon?” Lena asks as she comes up the steps with my sand-covered surfboard. She sets it against the house, right next to the front door. I’ve never been so happy to be interrupted by a grown-up in all my life.

  “We’re going to dye our hair,” I say.

  Lena flinches. “I’m sorry, what?”

  I hand her the bottle of Aquamarine. “Won’t this look amazing on me? You’ll help us, right, Lena? Maybe we can do streaks, kind of like Quinn’s. She’s changing to this really pretty lavender.”

  Lena blinks at me, then rubs her forehead. She stands there for what feels like a long time, staring at the bottle of hair dye, reading the label, sighing. Quinn and I make eyes at each other. Not those kind of eyes. The kind that say, What the heck is happening?

  “You really want to dye your hair?” Lena asks.

  “Um… yeah.”

  “Why?”

  I glance at Quinn, who shrugs.

  “Because… it’ll look cool?” I say, but it comes out like a question.

  “Is that all?” Lena asks. “Really?”

  I frown at her and scratch my bandaged arm. Grown-ups are so weird sometimes, but as I stand there with sand in my swimsuit, I look at my beautiful, perfect surfboard, the sun right in the middle, and I know it’s more than looking cool. It’s more than just doing something new and fresh.

  “I guess I want to feel like me,” I finally say.

  Lena smiles but doesn’t say anything. She just hands me the bottle and jogs to her truck. She opens the driver’s-side door and takes out her backpack, then runs back through the rain, which is really coming down now.

  “You ready to rock some blue hair, Sunshine?” she asks.

  I glance at Quinn, who smiles at me, her blue hair curling into her eyes. She’s so pretty and my stomach gnarls and snarls, but only because I want to be that pretty too.

  That’s the only reason.

  I gulp a big breath and dig my house keys out of my bag. “I’m so ready.”

  My bathroom is pretty much destroyed. There are blue and purple smears all over the white countertop and on two of Kate’s fluffy white towels, which are now scattered over the clean white tile. Also, my scalp stings something fierce from the bleach, which smelled so terrible and made me so dizzy, Lena had to crack open the bathroom window.

  But.

  I have blue hair.

  Not just blue hair. Aquamarine, from my roots to the very ends. I decided against the streaks. I didn’t want subtle. I wanted a full head of beautiful blue hair. Quinn did the same and she looks amazing with the lavender. I was right, that day on the beach over a week ago. The color goes perfectly with her skin and eyes. She looks so pretty, now I’m thinking I should’ve gone lavender too.

  But then I look at myself in the mirror, a plain black tank top on now after my shower to wash off all the dye and sand, and I think I look pretty darn good.

  I look like me. My hair has always been pretty straight, but Lena put some kind of serum in it to make it super-shiny. It looks like the ocean under a summer sun.

  “You look like a rock star,” Quinn says. She’s not looking at me, though. She’s pawing through Lena’s makeup bag, which has so much cool stuff in it, it’s overwhelming. Lena said we could pick out some things we wanted to try while she took a shower in Kate’s bathroom. She was a mess after helping us, hair dye all over her arms and even a little on her face.

  “I do?” I ask.

  Quinn nods and takes out a tube of blue lipstick. It matches my hair perfectly. “You should try this color.”

  “I didn’t even know they made blue lipstick.”

  “They make all kinds of lipstick.”

  “Green?”

  Quinn smiles and rummages around in the bag some more before pulling out another tube. She uncaps it and rolls up the bottom, revealing a dull apple-green color.

  “Wow,” I say. “That looks like… puke.”

  Quinn cracks up and tosses it back in the bag. Then she hands me the blue. “Come on, you try this and I’ll try”—she digs through the sea of eye shadows and liners before pulling up another lipstick—“this one.”

  It’s bright lavender, the exact shade of her hair. She turns toward the mirror, sliding the color onto her mouth perfectly. I’ve never seen her in makeup before, so I have no idea how she knows how to do that. I’ve never put lipstick on in my whole life, but how hard can it be?

  I uncap it and roll it over my mouth, just like I would with ChapStick. Which… turns out to be a mistake. It’s everywhere. It looks like my mouth is just a giant circle of blue instead of anything, you know, mouth-shaped.

  “Oh… wow,” Quinn says, laughing.

  “Shut up.” I grab a hunk of tissues from the box on the back of the toilet and start wiping. What’s worse, my cheeks are fluorescent red.

  “Have you never put on lipstick before?” Quinn asks.

  “Obviously not,” I snap, tossing the used tissue into the garbage.

  “It’s okay,” she says quietly. “I can help you if you want.”

  I take a deep breath and try to relax. I don’t know why I’m suddenly so annoyed. It’s just lipstick. It’s just Quinn.

  “I’m sorry I laughed,” she says.

  I shrug.

  “You looked cute,” she says. “I wasn’t laughing at you. I only know how to do all this stuff because my mom lets me wear it when I’m at home. Just for fun. She won’t let me out of the house with it on. It’s
okay that you’ve never worn it.”

  I glance at her and she’s looking at me with these big wide eyes that look really sorry. I hand her the lipstick and sit on the bathroom counter. “Okay, show me how it’s done.”

  She smiles and then gets really close.

  Like, really, really close. Her stomach bumps against my knees and her face is right in my face. Then her cheeks look a little flushed, but maybe it’s just the heat in the bathroom. It’s still steamy from showers and hair dryers. Plus, the window is open, letting in all that salty, balmy air.

  I wonder if my cheeks are red too. They probably are, because they feel like they’ve been set on fire. I smoosh my hands against the counter and feel the cool granite on my palms.

  “Can I?” Quinn asks, her fingers hovering near my chin.

  Oh god. I can’t do this. She’s going to touch my face. Again. But I don’t really want to say no either. Maybe if she does it again, and I don’t freak out, I’ll get over… whatever this feeling is that I feel when I’m close to Quinn Ríos Rivera. Because, if I’m being honest, this roller-coaster sensation in my belly has been there from the first time I ever saw her floating like a mermaid under the ocean. But who the heck wouldn’t have a sloshy-stomach feeling when meeting a girl underwater? Especially a blue-haired girl in a cool bikini who’s traveled the world.

  Right?

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” I manage to say. Quinn’s fingers touch my chin. She angles my face here and there, peering into my eyes, then looking at my lips, then looking in my eyes again.

  Then she smiles, showing her white teeth and her pretty purple lips, and my mouth is all dry and I can’t breathe. We had PB&Js before we dyed our hair, so I tell myself it’s because I don’t want to expel my peanut-buttery breath in her face. I tell myself a lot of stuff.

  “You’re really going to look like a rock star with this on,” she says, then touches the blue color to my lips.

  “We should get a picture,” I say, but moving my mouth makes her hand slip and smear some lipstick down my chin.

  “Oops.” Then she wipes it off with her thumb, and my stomach is not calming down. At all. It’s supposed to be chill by now.