Page 14 of The Dead of Summer

For the second day in a row, I awaken to the cry of seagulls.

I trudge downstairs in my shorts—that’s all I can find from yesterday’s outfit. The kitchen has been tidied already. Someone made tea—probably Elisa. Seeing her abandoned mug, I feel the fading sting of last night’s fight. I’m collecting fights like Gracie collects shells.

The deck and pool are washed in fresh brightness, and that’s where I find Bash doing his morning push-ups.

He notices me but doesn’t pause, forcing me to consider the sweat shining on the carved muscles of his back.

His phone faintly sings: Toss your dirty shoes in my washing machine heart. Baby, bang it up inside.

Mitski’s “Washing Machine Heart.” There’s another sting from last night—Elisa warning me about Bash’s lingering feelings.

The throbbing in my head sinks through me, pulsing low in my gut as Bash stands up and gives me a panting smile.

Conspiratorial, daring, and always a little too happy to see me.

It’s a smile I’ve thought about a lot this past year.

I snatch up my clothes from where I threw them around the pool. Bash hands me a mug of tea, fitting nicely into my silence as we both consider the seagulls above.

“Should we get into a fight, too?” I offer. “Just to get the rule of threes over with?”

“Give Elisa time. Suds stick together, right?”

“Right.”

His phone is still singing. Why not me? the song pleads. Why not me? Bash fumbles to turn it off, saying, “Cell service is still out and it’s the only song I have downloaded. Ha.”

I badly want to open up to Bash, but after what happened with Elisa, I don’t think it’s a good idea.

The deeper the emotions, the closer to the monsters we keep locked away, and what would I find under Bash’s playful act?

I can’t afford to ruin our hard-won equilibrium, but at the same time I feel drawn toward the danger.

What would it be like to kiss him one more time?

“Hey, Ollie, I was thinking …”

I stand up. Something is wrong with the sky. The seagulls are not flocking at random. Something on the beach has them wheeling in a frenzied vortex. I snatch up my shoes and pull Bash along the boardwalk leading through the dunes, out onto the beach.

I see it right away.

I see it, but it doesn’t make sense.

The coastline of Anchor’s Mercy is famous, always depicted as a beveled ribbon of white sand banded with glittering shells, seaweed fringe, and benches of bleached driftwood.

A little up the coast, the spray of surf indicates the rocky Slipper Shell Beach that Gracie calls the shell shop because of the tidal pools that form.

Down the beach is where the mainlanders set up beneath a rash of colorful umbrellas.

But this section of the beach is pristine.

It makes the hulking mass of black flesh all the stranger.

Bash gasps. “It’s a leatherback!”

We get as near to the beached turtle as we dare.

The seagulls fly so close I can feel the punch of air from their wings on my neck.

They seem eager to feast, but none of them want to take the first bite.

I don’t blame them—the creature is the size of a car, like something coughed out of the ocean’s most ancient depths.

“It probably washed up during the storm,” I say. “It looks like it’s been dead for a little bit.”

“What’s all that stuff on its back?”

The seagulls are interested in something growing over the turtle’s head and shell. It looks like many piles of tiny, encrusted volcanoes, each with a black pit of an eye. Within the black pit, pale tongues squirm.

“Barnacles,” I say. It’s gruesome, but common, that barnacles grow on the backs of turtles.

These barnacles seem to have fused right to the poor thing’s flesh, however.

They weep a familiar, iridescent mucus that beads in the sand like castaway pearls.

The smell reminds me of the marine rot at Singing House, too.

I step closer. A lone seagull has managed to alight on the shell.

I can see its twitching wing and a bit of its beak, but where’s the rest of it?

It takes me another moment to realize the bird is dead as well, the barnacles squelching over its body, fusing it to the turtle’s corpse.

“Goooooooood morning, campers! Who’s ready for a beach day?”

Bash and I jump. Sam has appeared at the top of the dune, bending below the weight of a rainbow umbrella, a rolled beach blanket, and the bright pink cooler. He drops it all when he sees us and the turtle.

“We should get back to town,” I tell Bash. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

We squeeze into Bash’s truck, Sam sitting graciously between Elisa and me.

I alternate between thinking of how to talk to Elisa and imagining insane catastrophes that might have occurred while we were out in the dunes.

I feel a delayed guilt about not checking on Gracie, and I have to remind myself that her plan all along was to shove me off on my own adventure.

I’d be surprised if she even noticed I was gone.

The ride into town is dead quiet.

Town, however, is not quiet at all.

There are couples walking dogs and dads grabbing coffee.

Bash fires off salutes to a few familiar faces reclining on porches, or watering their flower beds, or trading gossip over hydrangeas.

My eyes dart into alleyways between houses and under porches, searching for swept-away calamity, but everything here looks so … normal.

“I knew it. I freaking knew it. Stop the car,” Elisa orders. “I’m heading to check on the shop. Alone.”

Bash pulls over and Sam and I scramble to let Elisa out. Instead of getting back in, I run after her.

“Elisa, wait!”

She’s a meteor. People fling themselves out of her way.

“Elisa, can we talk?”

She spins around, and instead of the anger I expect, she looks exhausted, like she barely slept at all.

“Where is it, Ollie? Where’s the big apocalypse?”

Ironically, we’re in front of the library, where the doomsday people sometimes protest. They’re out today with their big, angry signs, sitting in lawn chairs while their kids play on the lawn.

In past years they’ve advertised just a general sense of doom aimed at the debauchery of Anchor’s Mercy, but I see now that the signs have gotten an update.

END DRAG QUEEN STORY HOUR. WENDY PRETENDY IS GOING TO HELL .

At the mention of apocalypse, a few of the people give us a friendly wave.

“Maybe our plan worked,” I say, hating how childish I sound. “Crisis averted.”

Elisa laughs. “Crisis averted? Ollie, most of the island doesn’t have any power still, and as if that isn’t bad enough, you caused a mass panic because of a little summer cold. The doomsday people are having a picnic! That’s not a good sign.”

“I didn’t say there wasn’t stuff to deal with. That’s what I was trying to say last night! There’s something wrong with the island and everyone knows it, but never talks about it! I just think if you were being objective—”

“Objective!” Elisa spits a laugh at my face.

“Did you know that over eighty percent of the houses are empty during the offseason? Yet people who grew up here can’t find a place to live.

So they leave. And did you know that the island’s freshwater supply is being salinated because we’re pumping too much from the aquifers to quench the thirst of the summer crowds?

Half the people who have managed to eke out an existence beyond downtown can’t drink water from their own wells. So guess what, Ollie? They leave, too.”

This isn’t about me. It’s about Elisa’s need to chew on something worth her teeth.

“Oh, and don’t forget the shit show of trying to keep a business afloat.

Food prices are skyrocketing. Shit is always breaking.

We run out of lumber constantly. And even if we had the food, and we had the lumber, where do you get workers?

Oh, surprise, surprise, they left, too! All around us things are falling apart, but there’s no time to rebuild any of it because summer is coming—summer is constantly coming—and we need to slap a Band-Aid on all our problems so we can be ready for the ferries full of people expecting a good time.

Because if they don’t have a good time, they make our lives hell.

And even when they have the best time, do you know what happens anyways? Say it with me, Ollie.”

My voice comes out a whisper. “They leave.”

“Always,” Elisa snaps. “The worst part is, you have no idea how right you are when you say something is wrong here. Everything is wrong. But do you know what makes it so, so, so much harder to fix? When the people on this island look at all this, and instead of building up the courage to tackle it bit by bit, they turn it all into conspiracy. Of course people are getting sick, Ollie! We can barely keep doctors at our shitty little clinic! Our medical staff attrition rate is the highest in the state, so of course our rates of illness are crazy high, too! Like, fucking duh . But reality is too scary and overwhelming, right? Let’s all just believe in a secret governmental boogeyman!

How convenient and spoooooky !” She wiggles her fingers in mock fear.

“And I get it, I truly do. The best thing about conspiracies is that they can’t be solved, which means you get to play with them forever and ever, never sparing a moment to un-fuck actual reality because you’re too busy hunting down a mythical, toxic unicorn that you’ll never catch, because you’re making it up at the exact same time! ”

I’m not sure I’m breathing. What air is there left to breathe with?

“Okay. I’m sorry. Just tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it.”

Elisa’s diatribe has only one punch line. Leave. I wait for her to tell me to go, but instead she takes my hand.

“I want you to help , Ollie.”