Page 13

“Slow down!” Everett shouted from behind me. I barely heard him over the whooshing wind.

When I agreed to grab Sunset Scoop with Everett, I didn’t think it would transform into a bike race to the beach, but winners couldn’t complain. The wind was salty from the nearby ocean, humid from the summer evening, brisk from my growing speed on the bike. My muscles burned through every push, but I leaned forward and gripped the handlebars so tightly my knuckles lost color.

“In your dreams!” I shouted, but he was so far behind me that the wind stole the words before he could hear them.

I reached the top of a small hill. On the way down, I stopped pedaling and let the decline take me with it. The trees became an emerald blur. The sunlight blinked on and off through the leaves, leaving shadows like Queen Anne’s lace on the path ahead. The wind put its fingers around my lungs and squeezed. I put one hand out to catch the wind. I bet this was what it felt like to drop down a rollercoaster.

“Why’d you stop?” Everett screamed as he came up beside me. He pedaled with the downward momentum until I was the one chasing after his words like catching fireflies for a mason jar. He disappeared when he turned onto a road off the trail.

I kicked back into high gear, my legs ringing in protest. I almost won, but he passed the green Ocean Drive sign seconds before me.

“I win.” He skidded his Converses against the concrete.

“Barely.” I stuck my tongue out at him and hit the brakes. In the still air, sweat beaded down my back. I hoped I didn’t lose my mascara and lip gloss in the wind. “New challenge. Whoever gets to the bike rack slowest wins.”

“Did I tire you out?” Everett laughed at his own dumb line.

I rolled my eyes. “If that’s what you want to believe, then yes.”

“It’s fine by me. Ocean Drive demands slow biking.”

He was right; Ocean Drive boasted million-dollar houses with billion-dollar views, and palm trees were more abundant than mailboxes. Locals rented out these houses to ocean-starved tourists who wanted to wake up with the ocean outside their bedroom window. I understood; I was tourist adjacent, after all.

We biked so slowly it couldn’t really be called biking. I pedaled just hard enough to keep from wobbling.

He pointed to a house the blue color of Mason’s eyes. Three stories, a blinding white balcony off every door, grass as green as a street sign. “I bet a woman named Matilda Ainsworth lives here. Her husband is on a ‘business trip’ in Italy. While she waits for him to come back, she eats imported lobsters, fresh crab cakes, and oysters. It’s where she gets the pearls for her necklaces.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” I said, but I felt like I could crack my chest open and find a pearl where my heart should be.

“Come on, try it. Tell me who lives here.” He pointed to a house the color of dried pink roses. A row of pampas grass sprouted along the driveway paved with individual gray tiles.

“You’re such a dork.” I nudged his bike tire with mine but decided to play along. “Let’s see. His name is William. He made billions playing tennis. He spends his days drinking thousand-year-old wine and eating goat cheese and cucumber slices on his dad’s sailboat.”

That exact picture was on a billboard on the way to Piper Island. If there ever were a misleading advertisement, it was that one. Piper Island had a lavish side, but it was mostly an island for drinking homemade lemonade on pastel Adirondacks, wearing bikinis for bras or swim trunks for shorts, and spitting watermelon seeds into the grass in hopes that you could grow your own.

“There you go!” He pointed to a navy house. “That’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s house.”

“No way.” I pointed to the house next to it, a coral one with windows that reflected the blue sky back to us. “That’s his house. He would never own a navy house; it’s too much like the water the Titanic sank in.”

“I think you’re right. And obviously also a dork. And obviously can’t separate actors from their characters.”

“It’s what I do.” I shrugged and let Everett bike ahead of me until he ended up first at the bike rack. “I win.”

Everett didn’t protest. We steadied our bikes in the bike rack and headed for the shore.

I followed him down the stairs and to the sand. The ocean and the summer breeze roared in unison. My hair joined the rush, but I gave up taming it. Everett hobbled over the mounds to keep his balance. He was so focused that his eyebrows scrunched up. His hair blew in the wind, moving in and out of perfection until he settled on imperfection. The wind was a sculptor, turning his hair into disheveled-on-purpose art. I wished I were a sculptor, too, but I shoved my hands in my pockets. That feeling I could tame.

“Hey, Q, look.” Everett pointed to a pile of jagged gray oyster shells. “It’s Mrs. Ainsworth’s dinner. Her butler just threw them out.”

I put my hand over my mouth. “I heard she found a pearl.”

“I heard she found two,” he whispered.

We gasped so loudly Mrs. Ainsworth probably heard from her widow’s walk. It spilled into a fit of laughter so loud that I knew she heard it. I hoped it helped her miss her husband less.

We stood where the waves stole shells from the shoreline, where the sand looked like coffee grounds. How long would it take the sand to swallow us whole? Probably an hour, maybe thirty minutes. During the rewind of a wave, a litany of coquina clams showed themselves before they shimmied away from the sunlight.

“Is that the shell on your necklace?” Everett asked.

I nodded. “They’re called coquinas.”

“Where do the holes come from?”

“Moon snails. The clams close up when they get scared, so the moon snail drills a tiny hole in the shell and sucks the clam right out, Matilda Ainsworth style.” I touched my necklace, felt its coolness on my fingertips. “Then the shells are left behind, ready to make necklaces with.” I’d checked out a few books about shells during trips to the library with Blair and Hadley. I had to know more about the shells I carried like summer around my neck all year round. “So, technically I’m wearing a crime scene around my neck and calling it summer.”

He laughed. “The best kind of summer.” He picked up one with a hole in it. Coral lines orbited it like Saturn’s rings, its underbelly the color of rose quartz. “It’s hard to believe something died in this.”

“Well, that’s life. Sometimes ugly things happen and leave beautiful things behind.” I shrugged and studied the shell in his palm. “It’s nice.”

He looked at me. I couldn’t read the expression in his face, but then he shrugged and put the shell in his pocket.

A patch of seagulls flew overhead, then landed halfway between us and the pier. I wanted nothing more than to disturb their peace, run as fast as my feet would let me, watch them fly away.

“Tag, you’re it!” I tagged Everett, then took off.

The wind blew through my hair, sending blonde strands down a trackless rollercoaster. I whipped around mid-run, catching a glimpse of Everett taking off for me and the seagulls. The seagulls were farther away than they looked, a mirage against the flat, dark sand. This scene demanded a flowy white dress and long, wispy hair. I didn’t have either, but I did have my legs and breathless laughter and my hair clipped at my shoulder blades but still flying. I ran open-armed across the sand where the wind and sun and salt air opened their arms back for me.

For us.

For the sun that pecked at everything. For whatever that feeling in my chest was when I looked at Everett. I screamed and refocused my attention on the path ahead. The seagulls took off like an explosion across the sky, splitting before our very eyes, gone in an instant.

I let him catch up, spinning on sandy heels. He tagged me but miscalculated his force, sending us both tumbling down to the sand, like dandelion puffs in the air after the wind made a wish. We were dizzy and out of breath and smiling at each other on the same patch of cold, itchy sand. It was still early summer, so the heat hadn’t yet killed all the things that swayed thin in the air like dandelions.

Did the wind wish for love or joy or stability?

Would I have wished for the same things?

“What’s something nobody knows about you?” Everett asked.

The bike trail was alive with the magic of a summer night. Insects chirped from the canopied trees. A purple sky peered through the leaves. The air pressed like cool oyster shells against our skin. After golden hour at the beach turned to twilight, it was time to head back home. We grabbed our bikes, but neither of us bothered to hop on. We set off on foot from Ocean Drive to the dark, secretive bike trail.

We weren’t likely to beat the streetlights home, but I’d tell Blair we lost track of time.

I didn’t feel like talking to the wind this time.

Not with Everett walking beside me.

“Summer is the only time I really feel alive,” I said casually, like I wasn’t baring my soul.

“I think I already knew that.” He laughed. “You’re like if summer were a person.”

I laughed, embracing the feeling of summer, warm and endless in my wake. Clammy air, purple twilight, insect songs. “Then my plan is working.”

He smiled. “I love summer, too.”

Then my plan is really working. “What else do you like?”

His eyes left mine and focused on the winding trail ahead. This was serious business, talk of grander things than summer itself. “Standing ovations.” He snickered like that was supposed to sound silly. “And then when the applause starts to sound like something entirely different.”

Today our only applause was the buzz coming from the trees, cheering for two teens about to miss curfew but slowly meandering anyway. “I like when people crack their knuckles before they do something important.”

“I like when people are bowling and they do that little lean to try to move the ball.”

“I like the crunch of pine cones on the road.” I made the noise with the front tire of my bike, hopping over a fallen pine cone.

“I like finding shapes in the clouds. My mom started it once on a long road trip and it kept me busy the whole time.”

I thought of the day at the Boardwalk last year, the shapes we made from the clouds, and how they gave me glimpses of him like a Rorschach test. He saw roses instead of thorns, flames as a magical source of warmth, moon jellies instead of sea monsters.

He viewed the world like it hadn’t yet betrayed him. Maybe it hadn’t.

“I like the word ‘quintessential’ because it sounds like my name. I always use it during the name game at school,” I said.

“Quintessential Quinn,” Everett said ceremoniously. Red splotches emerged on his cheeks.

What image would they conjure up if they were Rorschach inkblots? What would I see if I were Everett?

“I like when people talk about the weather when they don’t know what else to say.”

“I like when it rains at night and the streetlights look all smudged on the windshield,” I say.

“I like the voice people use when they talk to dogs.”

“Is there anything you don’t like?”

He looked at me like I’d snuffed out the magic, but he answered anyway. “I don’t like when there’s cool stuff to look at in the checkout line but the cashier stares at me so I feel like I have to buy something. I bought a turtle figurine with a top hat at the pier once because of that.”

I remembered our time at the aquarium a couple days ago. In the gift shop, we’d looked through the mood rings to the dismay of the cashier. It felt wrong to try them on and not buy them, but I just wanted to see how accurate they were. I hoped mine would turn pink for romantic, but both our rings turned dark blue for calm. I was anything but, so I chalked it up to the warmth on our fingers.

“I love when the trees sound like summer,” I said, snapping back to the present as the symphony around us reached its emotional peak. It sounded like a rain stick, applause, buzzy conversations we couldn’t hear the words of.

Everett stared at the darkening sky and laughed, warm like weather we didn’t need to talk about. “Would you think I was weird if I told you I know which insect makes each sound?”

If my face were a mood ring, it would have turned whatever color indicated hot skin. I knew there were different species, but they sounded the same to me—a glorious conglomerate of summer night sounds lighting up the bike trail. “I would say, ‘Enlighten me, Dr. Bishop.’”

He listened for a moment, mulling over the noises hidden in a clump of trees. “The locust is the easiest to hear. It’s the one that starts and stops and starts and stops.” He held his hand up and yo-yoed with the air like he was conducting their song. Following his hands, I could hear it for myself, the sound of someone pulling on a lawnmower that wouldn’t quite crank. It sounded like if ocean waves could emit radio static.

“The cicada is more constant. Think of it like the background noise. If you’re not listening, you’ll lose it.”

I tuned my ears away from the undulating sound of the locusts. Layered beneath it was a low, twinkling whir. There was variation in the sound, but it was small enough to consider it background noise.

“Like a white noise machine,” I said.

He nodded. I could barely make out the outline of his cheek from the leaves behind him. Summer nights fought as hard as they could, but when they finally came, they struck like a November sunset—fast and all-consuming.

“What about katydids?”

“It’s the third sound. With katydids, you can hear each individual one. They don’t drown each other out.” He waited for a single katydid to make a comment from the trees. “There. Hear it?”

I did, then the katydid after it. They sounded like squeaky boots conversing about whatever squeaky boots conversed about. The sound wasn’t constant like the locusts or cicadas. I couldn’t count on the same chorus every time.

Thanks to Everett, the sounds of summer no longer blended together. I could make out the locust from the cicada from the katydid, and I knew I always would. It wasn’t something you could forget. Nothing shared on the bike trail could be forgotten. My favorite call was the locust—the most distinct. Most people attributed the summer night sound to cicadas, but if they stopped to listen like Everett, they’d know it was the locusts.

“I didn’t know Dr. Bishop was a summer insect specialist,” I said.

“I wasn’t until last summer. Nights in Chicago don’t sound like this, so one night when I couldn’t sleep, I listened really closely and finally heard them as different sounds. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep if I didn’t sort it out. I watched videos of their calls and memorized what made them different.”

Everett conjured the vision for me—him lying in bed, plagued with the mystery of night sounds enough to do something about it. The thought was cuter than even his cheeks and his beauty mark and the way he licked his lips when he was in deep thought.

“Summer will never sound the same again.” I listened closely to the sweet music in the trees.

In the ending credits of the day, I didn’t feel lost in its darkness—not with Everett next to me, not with the distant fireflies lighting our way home. The bugs told each other secrets all night long. They were privy to ours, but they’d never tell.

“Today was mesmerizing.” Everett broke the silence. “You’re mesmerizing.”

My cheeks got hot again, presumably cherry red in the twilight. I’d never heard that word before. Boys at school might have called me pretty or cute every once in a while, but mesmerizing had to mean something else entirely.

I gulped down the urge to ruin the moment.

“Nobody’s ever told me that before,” I said.

“Well, then nobody’s ever paid attention.”

“You’re…effervescent.” I laughed despite the chasm in my chest. “Effervescent Everett. Like the name game.”

“I haven’t heard that one before,” he croaked.

I felt like I’d been shaken up in a sand globe, grains of sand swirling around me like summer stars in a time lapse of the night sky, my stomach churning against it. A dark night drowned out by firelight. The sunlight peeking through the perfect curl of a wave. The twinkling sound shells made against themselves.

I was mesmerizing.

The thought of being noticed made me want to grow and shrink at the same time. To be noticed was to matter; I didn’t usually matter.

But on the bike trail, I did.