Julian for the first time. We’d said hello in school a few times before that, of course. You couldn’t avoid it, on an island this small.
But we’d never really talked until the night someone called the cops while I was inside their house, and I’d sprinted away, looking for somewhere to hide. I found it when I stumbled into Julian’s yard, and he let me climb through his bedroom window.
Julian was the reason I eventually stopped my juvenile crime spree. He was the reason I returned everything I’d taken, too. When you got right down to it, Julian was the reason I’d even made it out of senior year alive.
But I hadn’t known any of that the first time I climbed into his bedroom and stood face to face with the beautiful, quiet boy who’d haunted the edges of my awareness for years.
I pushed the thought away as I approached the beach. I didn’t want to think about Julian. Not now.
The thing was, I thought I’d prepared myself for what I’d see at McIntyre Beach. The shoreline strewn with trash, the stream clogged. I even thought I’d prepared for the pervasive scent of sewage and rot that Deacon had, annoyingly, been right about. I thought I’d prepared myself to see a place I’d once loved being destroyed.
But I hadn’t prepared myself to see a place I’d once loved, full stop.
And when I turned off the road into the patch of gravel that had always served as the beach’s unofficial parking lot, my breath caught. I was standing in the middle of a glorified field of rocks and I couldn’t even move. It was so long since I’d been here, and it felt like just yesterday.
I know that’s a cliche but that was how it felt—like I could reach out and catch the past between my fingertips. Change it maybe. Like I could find my younger self somewhere through those trees and tell him—what, exactly?
That it got easier with time?
Standing there in that weed-choked, dusty rectangle, I wasn’t sure it did. Things I’d studiously refused to let myself feel for years were suddenly just under the surface of my skin. If I stood still any longer, they might claw their way out and run loose into the night.
I forced myself to keep walking—further into the park, and not back out onto the road as my brain begged me to. A low border of trees beckoned from the far side of the lot and I ducked under them.
The path was more overgrown than I remembered, but all the brush in the world couldn’t have hidden it from me. I pushed branches out of the way as I wove through the scrubby coastal forest. The moon was bright above me, halfway to being full, but I could have walked this path blindfolded.
The ocean was never far away on Summersea. Even when you couldn’t hear it, it pulsed in the back of your mind like half-remembered truth. But as I approached the dunes, the pound of surf on sand grew louder. Even on a calm night, the ocean was restless, calling out to you.
At the inside edge of the dunes, the smell of salt finally overtook the fetid odor that had pervaded the woods. The winds had scoured the sand clean of anything but starlight and saline. I walked over the dunes on the rickety remains of steps that looked more like a pile of matchsticks than any functional structure.
When had the town stopped maintaining those? And how many people had crossed directly over the sand since then, their feet destabilizing the delicate architecture of the dunes?
Then my foot left the last wooden step, and the ocean stretched out before me. There were tears in my eyes, and they had nothing to do with the wind.
I came to McIntyre Beach the night I left Summersea, to think. To decide whether to stay or to go. That was the last time I’d touched this sand, but that night felt as much a part of my present as it did my past.
My legs gave way beneath me, but I didn’t notice I was on the ground until my fingers dug into the sand. Roxie padded over and licked my face, confused about why I was suddenly on her level. I threw an arm around her, hugging her close. Used her solidity to tie me to the here-and-now, and not that memory.