way to claim something. I’d shown up out of habit but immediately regretted it. Everyone was celebrating—graduation, a new life—and for the first time, I had started to wonder what I was doing here. What had brought me here and now what was keeping me here. Beyond the boundaries of this town, there was a directionless, limitless wild, but anywhere might as well have been nowhere to someone like me.
My dad had grown up in Littleport—after attending a local college, he’d come back with his teaching degree, as he’d always known he would. My mother had found herself here by accident. She’d driven through on her way up the coast, the backseat of her secondhand car stuffed full of luggage and supplies, everything she owned in the world.
She said there was something about this place that had stopped her. That she was drawn in by something she couldn’t let go, something she was chasing. Something I later saw in draft after draft in her studio, hidden away in stacks. I could see it in her face as she was working, shifting her angle, her perspective, and looking again. Like there was some intangible element she couldn’t quite grasp.
The beauty of her finished pieces was that you could see not only the image but her intention. This feeling that something was missing, and it pulled you closer, thinking you might be the one to uncover it.
But that was the trick of the place—it lured you in under false pretenses, and then it took everything from you.
Sadie wrinkled her nose at the scene around the bonfire. “It’s going to rain, you know?”
I could feel it in the air, the humidity. But the weather had held, and that was half the fun. Like we were daring nature to do something. “Maybe,” I said.
“No, it is.” And as if she had control over the weather, too, I felt the first drop on my cheek, heavy and chilled. “Want to come back? We can make it if we run.”
I looked at the group of kids I’d gone to school with. Everyone casting glances my way. Connor sitting on a nearby log, doing his best to pretend I didn’t exist. I wanted to scream—my world shrinking as I watched. And this feeling I couldn’t shake recently, that all along I had just been passing through.
“You know, there’s a shortcut.” I pointed to the steps cut into the rocks, though from where we stood, you couldn’t make them out.
She raised an eyebrow, and I never figured out whether she’d known about the steps from the start or I’d opened up something new for her that night. But when I walked over to the steps, she followed, her hands gripping the rock holds after me. The rain started falling when we were on top of the bluffs, and I could see the commotion below in the glow of the bonfire—the shadows of people picking up coolers, running for the cars.
Sadie had a hand at my elbow as she took a step back. “Don’t hurt yourself,” she said.
“What?”
In the moonlight, I could only see her eyes clearly—large and unblinking. “We’re close to the edge,” she said. She peered to the side, and I followed her gaze, though it was only darkness below.
We weren’t that close—not close enough where a misstep could be fatal—but I stepped back anyway. She gripped my wrist as we ran for the shelter of her backyard, laughing. We collapsed onto the couch just under the overhang of the patio, the pool lit up before us, the ocean beyond. The windows were dark behind us, and she slipped inside briefly, returning with a bottle of some expensive-looking liquor. I didn’t even know what kind.
The perimeter of their yard was lit up in an amber glow, hidden lights around the black pool gate, so we could see the rain falling in a curtain, like it was separating here from there. “Welcome to the Breakers,” she said, placing her sandy feet up on the woven table in front of us. As if she had forgotten that I’d been working a party here just the week earlier.
I stared at the side of her face, so I could see the corner of her lip curled up in a knowing smile. “What?” she said, facing me. “Isn’t that what you call this place?”
I blinked slowly. I thought maybe this was the key to success: eternal optimism. Taking an insult and repurposing it for your own benefit. Taking everything, even this, and