Page 43 of Room to Breathe

I didn’t want to ask Beau. He’d think I was hating on his girlfriend. I wasn’t. And if I was, it wasn’t for the reasons he’d think.

“Ask me what?” Beau said, joining us.

I started to change the subject when Ava said, “Indy wants to know if Harper is close with her family.”

“Yeah, why?”

“We were just talking about Thanksgiving,” I said.

“She came to ours after we went to hers,” Beau said.

They were going to each other’s Thanksgiving dinners. I didn’t know why that made them seem ten times more serious, but it did. After a few months? “Nice,” I said.

As if she knew we were talking about her, Harper ran over, jumping onto Beau’s back and nearly knocking him down. He managed to stay on his feet, though.

“Hello!” she said to us from her new perch. “Oh! Caroline. Have you met Luca? He’s here tonight. I want to introduce you.”

“Why me?”

“Because he’s a runner too and I think you’d like him.” Instead of jumping down from Beau’s back, she used his shoulders to steer him. “Go this way.”

And Beau actually listened, like he was her car or her horse.

“I’m not following,” Ava said as they walked away. “I am being drawn to the fire like an insect.”

I nodded and she wandered off. I was not drawn to the fire. I was drawn to the ocean, away from the crowd. I walked toward it. I was wearing flip-flops tonight, and with each step they kicked sand up onto the back of my jeans. I reached down and took them off. Sand pushed between my toes until I reached the section compacted by the water.

The ocean was different at night. Ominous. The rhythmic sound of the waves crashing on the shore felt like a threat versus an invitation. The only thing visible as I stared out into the water were the whitecaps of breaking waves and the distant horizon, a purple-blue color. Everything else was dark and endless. I rubbed at my arms as the cold breeze enveloped me.

“I’ll go in if you do,” a voice to my left said.

I looked over to see Cody. “Hey,” I said. “I almost didn’t recognize you without your skateboard.”

“I forgot your name,” he said.

“Not sure you ever got it,” I said, thinking back to our previous interactions. “You were calling me praying mantis or something.”

“Sounds true,” he said.

“Indy,” I provided.

“Indy?” he tried, as if he thought I was lying to him.

“Yes,” I affirmed.

“Short for?”

“Surprisingly nothing.” I imagined that most people with my name probably had a longer version—Indiana or Indianapolis or India—but I didn’t. I was just Indy. One-faceted Indy.

“Like Indiana Jones,” he said.

“Not really like that at all,” I replied, but he wasn’t the first to make that connection and he wouldn’t be the last.

He reached for the back of his hoodie and took it off, along with the T-shirt underneath, dropping them onto the sand. “So?”

My brows dipped.

“Are we going in?”