Page 17

I’ve almost made it to dreamland where everybody floats—and hopefully nobody else dies—when a ding from my phone brings me back down to Earth. I’ve spent the rest of the day after the pier at home, trying and failing to write a poem about sunrise, but I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I hate waking from a nap just before twilight. The gauzy indigo window teases that night hasn’t yet fallen, but I already missed the good part. I might as well be a recluse for the rest of the night, succumb to my guilt, but the universe has other plans.

I fish my phone from between the couch cushions, illuminated by a candle on the coffee table and a science fiction movie I lost the plot to.

come outside

An ominous text if from anyone other than Haven, but this must be related to our itinerary. Instead of replying, I slide my sandals on to find her in her golf cart idling in my driveway. There’s no time to recluse with Haven on my side.

“Pinky promise this will be worth your time.” Haven’s still in her bikini from a surf lesson earlier, her hair choked into a claw clip four sizes too small. From her earlobes hang small earrings she made last week when she found two fraternal red scallops.

I buckle in. “It better be. I was about to have another one of my shelling dreams.”

“What shell?”

“A sand dollar as big as my hand.”

After eight whole summers, now on my ninth, I’ve still never found one. Haven has two on her dresser, which she credits to the freezing winter mornings on the beach she and Jorge brave in the off season.

Haven takes us on the back road that runs parallel to the sound. It’s my favorite stretch of the bike route we established as kids. We zoom past lawn ornaments we used to give silly names to, string lights making shapes of people’s balconies, and mine and Blair’s favorite book mailbox.

Past a small bridge over a patch of marsh, Haven slows as we reach our destination.

The exterior of Sunset Scoop is a bright pink, like someone dropped bubblegum ice cream on the roof to melt in the sweltering heat. I’m half tempted to play the game Blair taught me—get as many free samples as I can before they refuse—but I know what I want today.

Once we both order, we sit at a picnic table in the light of the neon sundae sign. Haven sets down a paper bowl overflowing with ice cream scoops. Try all the flavors at Sunset Scoop, one of her itinerary ideas.

“How many flavors have you had so far?”

She conducts roll call with her spoon. “Pistachio, triple fudge brownie, snickerdoodle, and coconut crunch, so this will make 27. I’ll have to cut into my college savings soon.”

I slide my cotton candy scoop across the table. “Make it 28.”

“How’d you know that’s why I brought you?”

I stick my tongue out at her.

“Now tell me what’s going on with you and Everett.”

I shove the spoon into the center of my ice cream scoop to ignore what hearing his name makes my chest do. “You brought me out here to eat my ice cream and interrogate me?”

She takes an innocent bite of my cotton candy. “No.”

I sharpen my eyes at her.

Finally, she shrugs her shoulders in defeat and rests her chin on inquisitive hands. “Fine. Everett was moody today when he came by to work out with Holden, so I figured something must have happened between you two.”

Haven’s my best friend, so even though all of me doesn’t want to talk about it, I explain everything to her. From my drunken blunder upstairs at Everett’s, to the very problem with me considering it a drunken blunder, to my unplanned sleepover, unplanned nightmare, and then Everett coming to and leaving the pier before the sun rose.

“Good for him.” She cups her hand over her mouth, eyes widened. “Sorry, but it is nice to see him put his foot down.”

“No, I know.”

“So, what’s the problem? Why couldn’t you just kiss him while the sun rose? That shit’s romantic and you know he wanted to.”

“I don’t know.” I groan with my head in my hands. “Everything was so fresh after my nightmare, and it feels like I’m living the same old story over again.”

She throws an assured hand in the space between us, lets it do the talking. “One time, when I was much wiser than I am now, I told you something that I thought would stick. Remember?”

Of course I do. She knows this too, but it’s more fun for her to play a part. “I deserve a rollercoaster,” I say like a mantra one begrudgingly tells a mirror.

“God, I was so smart, what happened?”

“You are much smarter now.” I smirk around my spoon to play my own part. I don’t have to say his name; she knows what I mean.

“I deserved that one, but my point still stands. Listen, I love you to death, so I feel like it’s okay for me to say you messed up. You don’t have to kiss him or anything, but you should at least explain yourself.”

“Explain why I can’t ride rollercoasters?”

She shrugs with her own smirk. “If that’s what you want to call it.”

“I deserved that one.”

After we finish our ice cream, Haven guides us to Beachy Keen, the gift shop next to Sunset Scoop. She’s on the hunt for a new one-piece for surfing, so I busy myself on a hunt for the most ridiculous item in the store.

It’s while walking through the aisles in the gift shop that I get the idea. Not from the shot glasses with boobs, the pool float ash trays, or the beach towels with the marijuana leaves print. No, it’s the tray of mood rings that speaks to me. It isn’t the silliest item by a mile, but it reminds me of Everett and our day at the aquarium. So, my hunt shifts from the most silly item to the most Everett item, which isn’t difficult; tonight, just about everything reminds me of him.

I pick out two mood rings. I have reason to believe they’ll change from opalescent green and settle on dark blue—supposedly for calm, but actually just average body heat. I fill an entire bag with pi?a colada taffy and hide one buttered popcorn among it. I finish off my spree with an Almond Joy and a postcard of the Piper Island Fishing Pier.

Haven does a fashion show with the bathing suits she picked out. After much deliberation, we settle on an ugly tie-dye one guaranteed not to fall off in a nasty wave. My mood ring that started green has slowly eased into deep, ocean blue even though I’m far from calm with all the reminders of Everett in my hoodie pocket.

Haven offers to drop me off at Everett’s, but I want to arrive alone—this is my mistake to fix, after all—so I board my bike and plan the conversation in my head. A few times, my throat lets a few words out, but there’s only the fleeting wind to hear.

I don’t give myself time to think when I get to Everett’s. I set my bike down and march to the front door, past the hammock from last night and the recycling bin likely full of beer cans.

The door opens to Liezel, who smiles at me like Everett hasn’t yet told her about this morning at the pier. “Quinn, hello! Everett’s not here, but I have something of yours. Come in?”

I nod and follow her to the entryway. The house smells like pistachio and vanilla. It looks different with the lights on, different since I have the time to take it in. Hank sits at the kitchen table over a half-assembled jigsaw puzzle. Liezel’s empty chair, two glasses of wine, and a steaming tray of purple cookies tell me I’m interrupting something. Hank raises an eyebrow at me, but he smiles and tells me Everett is at the pier with “everyone,” then gets back to sifting through the puzzle box.

Liezel comes around the corner with certainly more grace than I did last night. She holds out her palm, where my teardrop earrings gleam in the entryway light. “I found these in the guest room. Yours?”

I grab them like concealing them in my palm will erase her memory of them, but this action is confirmation enough that I slept over without their knowledge, so I nod and thank her for keeping them safe. I can’t bring myself to look at them anymore, but I manage brief eye contact and another smile before I turn for the door.

“Quinn, wait.” Liezel grabs my arm gingerly, stuns me in place with beckoning brown eyes. She has eyes that make you want to stop and listen, just like Everett’s. The wrinkles that hug her eyes feel like home. She walks to the table, wraps a small plate of the purple cookies in plastic, and places it in my arms. “Yam cookies. For you and Blair.”

I nod and my heart splits in two. “Thank you.”

It feels like an eternity since I was on the pier this morning. A day of nothing does that to your perception. Shame also mucks it up, but hopefully I can do something about that.

Halfway through my walk down the pier, I find what I’m looking for; all my friends are at the end of it.

Haven sees me first and waves me over, her lips red from a slushy. Holden has a rod cast into the water, absentmindedly reeling in for line tension. Mason slices bait fish with Holden’s pocket knife. Jorge bites his tongue against a fish-have-feelings-too speech, tapping his foot with his arms crossed.

My knees are almost trembling as I stand on wooden planks over the roaring ocean.

Everett either doesn’t see me or is avoiding my gaze, instead watching Mason until a fish starts to bleed, then he looks to the blur of water past the blue orb of the floodlights, the gibbous moon hiding behind stray clouds.

This morning’s roles are reversed. With my hands in my hoodie pocket, I walk over to Everett and fish for his attention. “Can we talk? Somewhere private?”

He nods and stands up.

Nobody else notices the tension, or maybe they pretend not to. Haven finally steals a glance my way with a sly but encouraging smile.

Neither of us says anything on our way off the pier, which is the direction we both silently agree to. The pier isn’t private enough. Not with families out for late night fishing, people-watchers strolling with their slushies, couples holding hands since their heads are screwed on right. Not in the nosy blue gaze of the lamp poles.

Just before the doors to the pier shop, I turn for the stairs to the sand. It’s also crowded down here, but in the shadows, everything feels private. I sit in the dry sand beneath the pier. Everett follows suit, but he leaves a mound of sand between us. Above us, solar-powered string lights hang from the rungs, so artificial stars listen in. I let them.

“I’m sorry.” I rest my hand on his arm, a lifeline, proof of my words in my actions. “For making you think I only want you when I’m drunk.” It might be the hardest thing I’ve ever said to his face, but I mean it, so my gaze doesn’t waver from him. “I do want you. Especially when I’m sober.”

The creaky pier and staticky waves fill the silence. I think I even hear my heart croak.

Everett’s in a trance on a banded tulip shard between us, but he breaks it to look up at me. He chews the inside of his cheek. I try to read his emotions—the bite of apprehension and the taste of acceptance right after. With a curl of his lips, he says, “Pinky promise?”

He laughs, proud of his ice-breaking joke. I know it’s a joke, but I still pull his pinky from the sand into mine. My chest springs to life like it’s lit up with string lights.

“Of course. I know it doesn’t seem like it sometimes, but I think about that night all the time.” Talking about it is teleportation. Here, under the pier at eighteen, I’m seventeen again, consumed by karaoke chords, cotton candy cheeks, fumbling nerves inside Ferris wheel lights. All the best parts of seventeen, without the other feelings that usually arise when I think about that night.

“Me too,” he says.

We’re still holding pinkies, like time elapsing will make the promise stronger. This vulnerability makes it easier to keep my eyes on his, easier to say things I don’t really know how to put into words. “I’ve been feeling guilty about my own happiness,” I whisper.

I hear how it sounds coming out, and this is why I’ve kept it in for so long. Deep down, I know there’s no correlation. It’s not rational. It’s not right. I shake my head, knead my other hand over my face.

“I understand.” Everett turns to me, kills the sand mound between us with his knee to wipe the tears from my eyes.

Together, we’re a closed circuit. We’re linked by more than just our pinkies. Our souls are connected, spindly beings. One of us could get struck by lightning and it’d kill us both.

“You think the universe is transactional.” He makes an internal transaction with the information.

Everett’s found the words for my sleepless nights, given a face to my night demons. Over the goosebumps on my thighs, I make circles with my thumb like I’m a psychic making sense of a crystal ball. It whispers to me that, yes, yes, the universe is transactional. The universe has to balance its checkbooks. If you’ve gone too long without a tragedy, you must be overdue for another.

I nod. “How do I stop my thoughts? How do I stop drowning?”

“I don’t know. The world is unfair, but that also means there’s no rhyme or reason to what happens.”

“I’m trying to believe that. I want to believe that.”

“I know. Listen, I don’t want you to do anything that doesn’t feel right. I shouldn’t have left you this morning.”

“No, it’s okay. I wasn’t saying the right things. I do want this.” I smile and hand him the Almond Joy. “I’m going to make it up to you.”

He rips it open and holds it out to me first. He doesn’t have to ask; I bite the almonds off to make a milk chocolate Mounds out of it for him. The chocolate makes the almonds even better.

“For what it’s worth, I do,” he says between bites. “Like you, I mean. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“You probably should just run for the dunes. Take off down the sand right now and you’ll make it to Sapphire Beach for sunrise.”

“Eh, I’ve heard the sunrise isn’t as good there. And I’d miss everyone too much.” He gestures to me with the deformed Almond Joy. “You know, the twins and Jorge and Mason.”

I throw my head back with laughter that’s a little too loud, intruding on the moment. I can’t help how it escapes me. “Obviously.”

Everett notices something, then taps the teardrop earrings I slipped on before I left his house. “You got your earrings back?”

His touch zaps through me. “I went to your house to find you first. I think I interrupted something.”

“Oh, God. They’ve started making me leave the house on Friday nights. I think they’re a little too excited to be empty nesters.”

He chuckles and finishes his Almond Joy as I pull out the postcard. If he already has this one in his room, he doesn’t say so. Back at Beachy Keen, I scrawled on it with a dying ballpoint pen at the register:

Everett, You are my rollercoaster, and somehow also my moon. Two things that are constant but never stay the same. Two things that glow even when it’s dark. One day I’ll be a rollercoaster and its moon, too. Quinn.

He reads it in the string lights, then smiles at me.

The mood rings glisten in my palms, waiting for him to finish reading. I have to wear mine on my thumb because they’re so big, but he slides his on his ring finger. I start to tell the story of when we studied these at the aquarium, and of course he remembers, filling in the ending—that they always end up the same blue color. We’ve always shared that theory. They’re a sham, but it was never about that.

And maybe it’s a trick of the light—or lack thereof—but I think my mood ring finally boasts a new color.

Violet, like my cheeks under the moonlight.