Page 32

We’re already baking in the mid-morning sun.

Everett leads the way on the sand, both of us trudging forward like we’re stranded and hoping to be saved.

The wind is so strong I have to fight against it, but it’s a relief in the intense gaze of the sun.

It wouldn’t be this hard if my ankle wasn’t still on the mend.

Neither of us anticipated how long a mile feels on the sand.

He asked me last night if I was up for an adventure, then told me to be ready to leave by 7am.

I didn’t think we’d drive so far to the state line, turning just before South Carolina for Sunset Beach.

We’ve already stopped four times for water, but Everett insists it will be worth it.

I’ve stripped down to just my shorts and bikini top, beads of sweat accumulating on my forehead.

Everett is just as sweaty. He stuffed his shirt into his bookbag a few dunes back. “If we make it to the jetty, we’ve gone too far.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see. Is your ankle still okay?”

“If I say no, will you carry me?” If I could, I’d rock on my heels to indicate just how much I’m joking. My ankle does hurt, but only because the sand is concrete in the middle of the shoreline. But it’s nothing I can’t handle.

He lets out a chuckle. “If you really needed me to. I suppose it’d be my punishment for bringing you here.”

It feels like walking in a dream with no end in sight.

The dunes have looked the same for the past thirty minutes, tufts of grass and sunken sand where the wind blew too hard.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think we haven’t made any progress, but when I look back, the Sunset Beach Fishing Pier shrinks into the horizon.

We walk where shells are haphazard raindrops, broken on impact.

We’re too far from the water to find any newly washed-up ones, but Everett finds a perfect auger for Liezel.

Pin shells sparkle like purple fans.

Pocket slippers hold water in their palms. Butter clams taunt me with the color and general shape of a sand dollar, so I search with my head held high for any indication of where we’re going.

Everett pivots to trudge to the dunes.

At the top of the dunes lives a black mailbox secured to a piece of driftwood.

Boxy, white stickers spell out “Kindred Spirit” in black lettering.

Everett opens the mailbox.

Stacks of wilted notebooks rest inside, a pile of ink pens and pencils beside them.

“This is the Kindred Spirit mailbox.

For decades, people have come here to write their hopes, dreams, secrets, and letters to loved ones.”

So that’s why the red flag points up; there’s always mail in here.

That’s what infinity looks like.

Kindred Spirit has weathered storms, kissed the sun, and braced itself against salt air for so long, but it stands strong to gatekeep the world’s wishes.

“I don’t know what we’re going to find in these letters, but they’re written by real people.

I’ve always wanted to see other people’s wishes, you know, since you never tell me yours.” Everett cracks a smile, then hands me a dark blue notebook.

He takes a green one and sits on a wooden bench to read.

I sit in the sand and fight the wind to keep the pages open.

The pages crinkle when I slide my fingers across them.

They, too, have to be strong for the words of the world.

I let the wind take me to random pages, then brace against it to read them:

What does someone wish for when they’ve come all this way?

I make a lot of wishes, but this is different.

My biggest wish is to see my mom again.

I never stopped to think about a simple moment being my last, but I’m glad I smiled at her from the kitchen window that day.

I can’t smile at her again but at least I can give her this.

Mom, I trekked all this way for you. Think of it as me smiling at your ghost.

We never even met, but I feel you next to me in the car,

on the parkway, taking every curve with a laugh,

and listening to songs I never learned were your favorite.

I’ve thought up the rest of you in my head,

The real-you and my-you ride two parallel lines.

What once existed on the same axis

now move perpendicularly.

So far from each other now,

one sits on a mountaintop

and one sleeps on the beach.

Last October, I ran a red light. I didn’t hit anything, but what if I had? I can’t shake the possibilities from my mind. I can’t stop dreaming in red and blue lights. Kindred Spirit, please free me from this guilt.

There are moments when you feel your happiness

as sure as you feel the wind.

Happiness is like breathing,

but right now I exhale it pointedly.

It hits me on the beach too warm for February.

I forced it to happen when I stepped into my shorts and sandals.

“It will be summer today,” I told the sky.

It listened.

It sent me weather that made me forget how it felt to be cold.

Give me a sign. Help me understand if you’re still with me. Make the waves wash up a starfish. You always loved saving the ones that were still breathing, even if it meant getting your jeans wet. Peek through the clouds and fix this overcast day. You always thought the day wasn’t real without the sun, but I’m not real without you. Send me a messy patch of wind. You always hated how the wind messed up your hair. You tied your bangs up and never cared how silly it made you look, but I never thought you looked silly. Please. Give me something. I need to know you see me. I need to know you’re proud of me. I miss you. I love you.

You are crispy leaves and rainy days, which is to say you’re sprawling with life even when you think you’re dead. Why don’t you feel the same way about me?

I close the notebook after nearly reading the whole thing. I look at the ocean. This notebook, this stretch of beach, this warm sand—all of it connects me with the people who wrote these letters. That and the pain, joy, love, and loss of life on planet Earth.

There’s no pattern to these strangers’ lives. Some are joyous, some are unexpected sunshine on a February morning, some explain the dark circles stained on the page—tears, dried but still crinkling to life.

We’re all just people, subjecting ourselves to the world and its woes.

We have family and friends and love and fear.

We fear that the universe will take what’s ours; we’re grateful the universe gave us ours to begin with. We breathe fear and gratitude in the same breath. In the same life.

You have to have the highs to have the lows.

We all have ups and downs, rollercoasters, but we shoulder on.

Everett closes his notebook, then looks at me.

“What do you think?”

“I think I’ve never felt less alone.”

Kindred Spirit is a sacred ground. The ghosts of visitors past cling to the dune grass. The breeze remembers those who have come and gone.

“Me too. I knew there’d be a lot of sad letters, but I didn’t expect so many of them to be so happy.”

An oxymoron—love letters living in the same notebook as hopeless letters to lost loved ones. A metaphor for life before and after love. Life because of love.

Everett pulls something out of his bookbag—a sheet of notebook paper folded and secured with the sticker from an orange.

“I’m going to write in the notebook too, but I wrote this for you.”

In his tall and thin handwriting, Everett wrote:

I’m not ashamed to say I love math more than the average person.

Some people might call me a nerd for that, even though they feel the same way about the stars, which is also math, but I’m not one to judge.

If you know where to look, almost everything is math.

The shape of a nautilus shell can be measured by the Fibonacci sequence.

Tree branches are fractals.

The circumference of every circle, from bird baths to buttons, can be calculated with pi.

Snowflakes crystallize in symmetrical patterns.

A friend of mine believes that the universe is transactional.

Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is what Galileo (not a friend of mine) once said: “Mathematics is the language of the universe.” Not to go against Galileo, but I know that the universe isn’t always so formulaic.

Even though math is the fabric of the universe, the universe is more than just fabric.

The universe has organic things like friendship, life, death, and love, which are beautifully random in their occurrences.

It makes life scary, but it also makes life fun.

In life, you learn that bad things do not follow a pattern.

One cannot predict the events of the next day, even if the events of the day before were suspiciously good.

Quinn, your life is not transactional, and that makes it a beautiful thing in itself.

Universally, Dr. Bishop

Freshly fallen tears pool on the letter.

The world is a blur beyond my eyes, but these tears are air compared to the ones I’ve poured out these past few days.

I catch the remaining tears on my cheeks before they make a mess of Everett’s words.

The rest I absorb with my thumb to keep from smudging the black ink.

I smile at him, an oxymoron on my face. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. You don’t even have to believe me.”

“I believe you.”

The universe is not a nautilus shell.

Not a tree branch.

Not a bird bath or a button.

Not even a snowflake.

The universe doesn’t know math.

I am not in debt to something that doesn’t even know me by name. The universe is more than fabric, and my life is not transactional. It transcends the beautiful, inarguable equivalence of math.

I look into the fabric of his eyes. “Thank you.”

Everett smiles warmly in response, then we dig in to the sandwiches and grapes he packed in his bookbag.

While I pluck grapes from their vine, Everett writes his own letter in the green notebook, glancing up at the waves in blips of thought.

I write the beginning of my own letter, then get trapped in my own trance. I watch the waves in hopes that they’ll write my story for me.

Everett finishes and puts his notebook in the mailbox.

He tells me he’s going to cool off in the water.

I watch him walk the long stretch to the ocean.

Finally, the rest of my inspiration strikes. It’s impossible for it not to, given the way Everett waves at me from the ocean, smiling at the sun, smiling at me, smiling at us.

Quinn and Everett.

My words will live forever in the blue notebook in the Kindred Spirit mailbox:

Eight summers ago, I came here chasing the welcoming nature of the beach.

When my father left me for a new life, I felt invisible, but just like my father, I made my own new life.

Thanks to Piper Island, I got to be a kid again, form lifelong friendships, and fall in love.

I’ve never really told anyone that, but you’re special, Kindred Spirit.

You hold a universe of secrets, wishes, hopes, dreams, and loves.

The secret is that I am in love with the boy who brought me here.

He’s jumping the waves right now.

Every couple waves, he looks back at me. I don’t think he knows I’m watching, but there’s nothing I’d rather watch than him.

Kindred Spirit, I’m not proud to admit it, but I’m scared of a lot of things.

This fear has barred me from a lot of joy, but I’m not sure it’s kept me from danger.

I’m not sure the world is as dangerous as I always thought.

I’m not even sure what I’m scared of.

I guess it’s like swimming in murky water. There’s a fear there that you can’t quite shake, even when you don’t know what you’re scared of. The unknown, I suppose, but who knows if there’s even a sea monster? How often is there actually a sea monster? The unknown might have a perfect sand dollar or something else equally as incredible.

Another truth is that the ocean has given and taken things from me.

That’s how waves work.

It’s given me Haven, Holden, Mason, and Jorge.

It’s taken away my loneliness.

It’s given me a lifetime of memories.

It’s taken away Hadley.

It’s given me my moon, my rollercoaster, my Everett.

I’m still waiting for it to take away my fear.

It owes me that, but I suppose the ocean is not transactional.

The ocean and the universe are similar that way.

I put the pen down, open and close my fist to stretch out the ache from writing on autopilot. I don’t know the strangers who will read this letter one day, but I hope it helps them with their own grief, their own tug-of-war with giving and taking. I close the notebook and place it in the mailbox, then comb for shells closer to the waves.

While I’m searching, I see a shell emerge from the falling waves. When I get closer, I spot five flower petals etched on the top. There’s no way. Five oval-shaped holes emerge from all but the top petal. A bigger oval lives just below the etching. It’s more circular than clam shaped. The circumference could almost be calculated by pi. It can’t be.

Off-white. As big as my palm. Smooth.

An intact sand dollar.

My heart leaps in tune with my ear-splitting gasp. I jump out of my skin to cradle it into my shaking palms. I even let out some expletives, which prompts Everett to run over. I make him pinky promise he didn’t plant it here. It’s not bleached enough to be store-bought anyway.

How many years have I dreamt of this moment? How many years was I sure I wanted to carry it all the way to my sunny windowsill? How many years would I have needed to convince myself that when I finally found it, I wouldn’t keep it? The ocean has given, but I don’t plan on taking.

Someone else might, but if they do, it’s because they’ve searched their whole life for it. It’s because they need it as much as I don’t. Not anymore.

Instead, I pen an inky message onto the gritty underbelly, then place it inside Kindred Spirit.

Hadley, you deserved a rollercoaster, and so do I.