said.
Josie said, “I thought Pete was your whole social life.”
I said, “I branched out this year. I actually had a lot of sleepovers with my friends, and then I was too tired to go to practice because we’d stay up all night. And… I had a lot of studying to do.” I didn’t want to tell her that I’d been asked to leave the track team. Well, okay, so more told than asked, but she didn’t need to know that. “I guess you had a good season?”
“Really good. I’m sorry to hear you gave it up. You loved it.”
I shrugged. “It was time for other stuff. It’s fine.”
Kevin’s Fun House was there, same as always, except it didn’t look the same. It looked a little tired. The paint on the slide was fading in the middle, and the v in Kevin’s name had come loose and hung to the side, like <.
“Ready to give it a checkout?” Josie asked
“Let’s do it,” I said.
Josie gave me one of the VIP wristbands that Dad’d bought for us so we could skip the line. I noticed that we were the tallest of the kids waiting. We headed in, stopped at the hall of mirrors, many of which were cloudy and cracked, and looked at ourselves. I’d seen these reflections a hundred times before, so it wasn’t that funny to me anymore. Then we wiggled through the foam pillars; most had chunks missing, and their previously bright colors had dulled. Lastly, we scaled the rope bridge, which I could now get over with one step. Unfortunately, I tripped on that one step because my sandal got caught.
Josie arrived at the barrel first.
“I win,” she crowed.
“It wasn’t a race.”
“It’s always a race,” Josie said. “Every single time we come here, we’ve raced to this exact barrel.”
I didn’t respond. She was right, of course, but I didn’t feel like racing, and I didn’t want to argue about it. Instead, I looked around. “All clear.”
Josie stomped and popped up the chunk of loose floorboards. “What will we do if Kevin ever decides to fix this?” Josie asked, and before I could answer, she disappeared through the hole.
I jumped next, pulling our trapdoor shut behind us.
Four Stella
Under the Boardwalk
June 18 (Continued)
We dropped about five feet to the sand below, plopping onto our butts. Sand wiggled up inside my shorts into places where I would’ve preferred not to have sand.
We studied our hideaway. I was always struck by its stuffiness. When stuffy and beach mix, it smells like dead fish. Yuck. It was shady, except for where sunlight snuck through the cracks between the boards above. In some of those sandy patches, tufts of beach grass grew. Overhead we could hear all sorts of boardwalk activity: people laughing, biking, and skateboarding, even though they’re not supposed to.
I had great memories of being down here. One time there was a huge storm, and we curled up and told each other scary stories and watched lightning bolts spike at the ocean, until we heard Dad frantically calling our names from the beach. He was so relieved when he found us that he forgot he was mad at us.
“It looks different,” Josie said.
There used to be a latticed fence on the ocean side that went from the boardwalk to the sand, hiding us from beachgoers. We could see through the crisscrosses. The fence had been replaced with a sliding door that hung from rails, the kind you’d see on a barn.
“What’s with that?” Josie pointed to a deep groove in the sand. It started at the new sliding door and crossed the sand alley under the boardwalk between Kevin’s Fun House and what was now the Smoothie Factory. The groove went toward the opening to Thirty-Fourth Street.
I said, “It looks like a bigger version of the kind of groove that kids dig in the sand as a river.” Those never really work, because the water soaks into the sand before it reaches its intended place—probably a castle moat. But there were no castles down here.
Josie said, “And check out all the footies.” Josie meant footprints. “People have been hanging out down here. And I don’t see our marker.”
I brushed the sand around in the spot where I remembered the rock being, then dug with my hands. “No rocks. No box,” I said. “It’s gone.”
“Gone? Gone!” Josie cried. “First Water Ice World, now this?” She frantically dug deeper. When she didn’t find anything, she sat in the sand. “Those memories are just gone!”