I tread carefully.
“I don’t know. School sucks. That’s not different. But, you know – while I really want it to be over, I’m also worried about everything that’s going to come after. Not that I have it planned out. I don’t. I know you think that I have all of these plans – but if you actually look at the things I’ve done to prepare myself for life after high school, all you’ll see is a huge blank. I’m just as unprepared as anyone else.”
Shut up, shut up, shut up, I’m telling myself. Why are you bringing this up?
But maybe I have a reason. Maybe I’m bringing it up to see what he’ll do. He tests me all the time, but I’m not exactly innocent in that department, either.
“What do you think?” I ask him.
And he says, “Honestly, I’m just trying to live day to day.”
I know. But I appreciate it more when it’s said like this, in a voice that acknowledges we’re on the same side. I wait for him to say more, to edge back into last night’s fight. But he lets it go. I am grateful.
It’s been over a year, and there’ve been at least a hundred times when I’ve told myself that this was it – this was the new start. Sometimes I was right. But not as much as I wanted to be.
I will not let myself think that things are suddenly better. I will not let myself think that we’ve somehow escaped the us we always end up being. But at the same time, I will not deny what’s happening. I will not deny this happiness. Because if happiness feels real, it almost doesn’t matter if it’s real or not.
Instead of plugging the destination into his phone, he’s asking me to keep giving him directions. I screw up and tell him to get off the highway one exit too soon, but when I realize this, he doesn’t freak out at all – he just gets back on the highway and goes one more exit. Now I’m no longer wondering if he’s on drugs – I’m wondering if he’s on medication. If so, it’s kicking in pretty quickly.
I do not say a word. I don’t want to jinx it.
“I should be in English class,” I say as we make the last turn before the beach.
“I should be in bio,” Justin says back.
But this is more important. I can make up my homework, but I can’t make up my life.
“Let’s just enjoy ourselves,” he says.
“Okay,” I tell him. “I like that. I spend so much time thinking about running away – it’s nice to actually do it. For a day. It’s good to be on the other side of the window. I don’t do this enough.”
Maybe this is what we’ve needed all along. Distance from everything else, and closeness to each other.
Something is working here – I can feel it working.
Memory. This is the beach my family would come to, on days when the house was too hot or my parents were sick of staying in the same place. When we came here, we’d be surrounded by other families. I liked to imagine that each of our blankets was a house, and that a certain number of blankets made a town. I’m sure there were a few kids I saw all the time, whose parents took them here, too, but I can’t remember any of them now. I can only remember my own family – my mother always under an umbrella, either not wanting to burn or not wanting to be seen; my sister taking out a book and staying inside it the whole time; my father talking to the other fathers about sports or stocks. When it got too hot, he would race me down into the water and ask me what kind of fish I wanted to be. I knew that the right answer was flying fish, because if I told him that, he would gather me in his arms and throw me into the air.
I don’t know why I’ve never brought Justin here before. Last summer, we stayed indoors, waiting for his parents to leave for work so we could have sex in every room of the house, including some of the closets. Then, when it was done, we’d watch TV or play video games. Sometimes we’d call around to see what everyone else was doing, and by the time his parents came home, we’d be off at someone’s house, drinking or watching TV or playing video games or some mix of the three. It was great, because it wasn’t school, and we were with each other. But it didn’t really get us anywhere.
I leave my shoes in the car, just like I did when I was a kid. There’s the awkward couple of steps when I’m still in the parking lot and the pavement hurts, but then there’s the sand and everything’s fine. The beach is completely empty today, and even though I didn’t expect there to be a lot of people here, it’s still surprising, like we’ve caught the beach napping.
I can’t help myself. I run right down into it, spin around. Mine, I think. The beach is mine. The time is mine. Justin is mine. Nobody – nothing – is going to interfere with that. I call out his name, and it’s like I’m still singing along to a song.
He looks at me for a moment, and I think, oh no, this is the part where he tells me I look like an idiot. But then he’s running down to me, grabbing hold of me, swinging me around. He’s heard the song, and now we’re dancing. We’re laughing and racing each other to the water. When we get there, we splash-war, feeling the tide against our legs. I reach down for some shells and Justin joins me, looking for colors that won’t be the same when they’re dry, looking for sea glass and spirals. The water feels so good, and standing still feels so good, because there’s a whole ocean pulling at me and I have the strength to stay where I am.
Justin’s face is completely unguarded. His body is entirely relaxed. I never see him like this. We are playing, but it’s not the kind of playing that boyfriends and girlfriends do, where there’s strategy and scorekeeping and secret moves. No, we have scissored ourselves away from all that.
I ask him to build a sand castle with me. I tell him how Lisa always had to have her own, next to mine. She would build a huge mountain with a deep moat around it, while I would make a small, detailed house with a front door and a garage. Basically, I was building the dollhouse I was never able to have, while Liza was creating the fortress she felt she needed. She would never touch my castle – she wasn’t the kind of older sister who needed to destroy the competition. But she wouldn’t let me touch hers, either. We’d leave them when we were done, for the tide to take away. Sometimes our parents would come over. To me, they’d say, How pretty! To Liza, it would be, How tall!
I want Justin to work on a sand castle with me. I want us to experience what it’s like to build something together. We don’t have any shovels or buckets. Everything has to be done with our hands. He takes the phrase sand castle literally – starting with the square foundation, creating a drawbridge with his finger. I work on the turrets and the towers – balconies are precarious, but spires are possible. At random moments, he compliments me – little words like nice and neat and sweet – and I feel like the beach is somehow unlocking this vocabulary from the dungeon where he’s kept it all these months. I always felt – maybe hoped – that the words were in there somewhere. And now I know they are.
It isn’t very warm out, but I can feel the sun on my cheeks and my neck. We could gather more shells and begin to decorate, but I am starting to tire of the building, and putting our focus there. When the last tower is complete, I suggest we wander for a little while.
“Are you pleased with our creation?” he asks.
And I say, “Very.”
We head to the water to wash off our hands. Justin
