puffs of sand. His sensible, professional-looking messenger bag bopped against his hip. The guy was like an advertisement for some spine-chilling combination of a Boy Scout and a church choir boy. “Ooh, look at this!” He was standing in front of a sign right outside the lighthouse that described its history. Pinky hadn’t realized that people under the age of sixty read those signs. “Wow. Ellingsworth Point Lighthouse was built in 1857 in a different spot. Apparently they had to move it back almost a thousand feet from the ocean in the nineties because of rising sea levels.”
Walking past bushes of beach grass that made a grab for her bare legs, Pinky pulled her wayward hair into a multicolored bun and walked up to join him, little prickles of curiosity getting through her stoic exterior. “Really? Weird. Wonder how you move a lighthouse.”
Samir glanced at her, his cheeks flushed from the heat. If she didn’t get him inside soon, he might just expire of heat exhaustion. And her parents would find a way to blame his demise on her. “I thought you’d been here before.”
Pinky gave him a look. “Many times. I just never read the sign.”
They stared at each other for a long moment, the silence punctuated only by the sound of ocean waves and a flock of seagulls arguing with each other in the distance. “But… but you have to walk right by the sign to get to the entrance.” Samir gestured to the entrance in front of them as if she couldn’t see it.
“I know that,” Pinky said slowly, feeling her short fuse getting shorter. “So what? Not everyone wants to stand around reading signs, Samir. Some of us want to actually get to the good stuff.”
“The sign is part of the good stuff!” Samir said, throwing his hands up in the air.
Pinky scowled. “Do you want to see the stupid lighthouse or not?” Before he could respond, she turned and headed past the lighthouse keeper’s neat green cottage to the entrance of the lighthouse proper.
Samir
Man, she was… flammable. It was like all her emotions were gasoline, and he just happened to have a match. Although, to be completely honest, she was making Samir grumpy too. There was just something about her scowly, flippant, irreverent way of being that got to him. Who didn’t read the signs outside historical monuments?
Huffing a frustrated breath, he clomped after Pinky into the lighthouse. But his annoyance dissipated the moment he was inside.
It was cooler in here; they were sheltered from the sun by thick, protective, ancient brick. Directly in front of them was a narrow, winding wrought-iron staircase painted a dark brown. “Look at the detailing,” Samir whispered, running his hand along the scrollwork. “That’s gorgeous.”
Pinky, who was already four stairs up, glanced down at him. “Um, yup. Super cool. But the view is the best part.” And then she kept going.
Sighing and shaking his head, Samir followed her, his footsteps clanging on the metal.
The near-vertical climb almost fifty feet up was kind of tough, and he and Pinky were both winded by the time they got to the top. The upside was, they didn’t speak much the entire time they were climbing, and less speaking meant less fighting.
“Ta… da!” Pinky flung her arm out at the view before them, panting slightly.
“Whoa.” Samir stepped forward, toward the big, curving windows of the observation deck. There wasn’t much room to move around—he and Pinky could stand side by side, but adding even two or three more people would’ve been a squeeze. None of that mattered, though, because the view… the view was incredible.
Samir could see for miles and miles; the ocean lay bright and blue as a piece of silk ribbon in the distance, dotted with a couple of fishing boats. He could see the trail he and Pinky had walked up, and swaths of marsh and grass and low, clumpy trees. It looked like a postcard for Cape Cod, almost too perfect to be real.
“Pretty incredible, right?” Pinky stood beside him, her hands on her hips, her face awash in sunlight. “I love that one quote by Thoreau; he actually said it about another Cape Cod lighthouse, but it applies here, too: ‘A man may stand there and put all America behind him.’ You’re looking out toward Nova Scotia right now.”
Samir darted a surprised look at her and she cocked her head, brown eyes flashing. “What?” she asked. “You don’t think someone like me could quote Thoreau?”
“I didn’t say that,”