Sixteenth Summer (27 page)

Had we been on the North Peninsula, I wouldn’t have thought twice about following Will into the water in my cutoffs and tank top. But we were a shell’s throw from the boardwalk, which was teeming with post-dinner people—both tourists I didn’t know and school friends that I did.

I bit my lip. Letting other people see me cavort in the waves with my boyfriend felt kind of like going out in public with my underwear on outside my clothes. On the other hand, skulking
around with Will felt even more wrong. If our breakup had taught me anything, it was to embrace the scary. You missed out on too much otherwise.

So with only one more furtive glance to see if we were surrounded (we weren’t, but we certainly weren’t alone either), I kicked off my flip-flops, carefully slipped my silver bangle inside one of Will’s sneakers, and splashed into the water.

As I waded toward Will, he ducked underneath the surface. When he came up, he flicked his hair off his forehead and whooped.

“Oh, that feels
good
!” he said. “What am I gonna do when I don’t have an ocean outside my door every day?”

“I can’t tell you,” I said as I swam toward him, skimming easily over the lazy nighttime waves. “I’ve never had that experience.”

“Man, I can’t imagine this being my everyday world,” Will said. He shifted onto his back and blinked up at the stars. “It doesn’t seem real.”

“Right back at ya,” I said. “New York is
my
idea of a vacation. A frantic, crazy, sensory-overloaded version of it, anyway. I mean, you ride in elevators and shoot through underground tunnels every day. Do you know how weird that is?”

Will went upright and looked over at me.

“Sometimes it feels like we’re from two different countries.” His voice wobbled a bit as he said it.

I swam closer still, until my hands were on his bare chest.

“At least we don’t speak two different languages,” I said softly.

“Oh, no,” Will said, one side of his mouth rising a bit, “
y’all
don’t think so?”

“Watch it,” I growled, “or I’ll feed you to the ghost crabs.”

“Hey, that’s what I can be for Halloween in my building this year,” Will said, snapping his wet fingers. “The kids’ll be
terrified
. Or really confused. I don’t think anyone in New York knows what a ghost crab is.”

I grimaced. Halloween? With its Indian corn and pumpkins and nip in the air? Now
that
was surreal. I could barely imagine it.

“At Halloween, it’ll have been two months,” I whispered.

I didn’t have to say
two months we’ll have been apart
. Will knew what I meant. He sank deeper into the water, resting his chin on its surface and looking up into my eyes.

“What’ll it be like, do you think?” he wondered. “Two months isn’t very long.”

“It’ll feel long,” I said. Now my voice was wobbly. “But maybe after that, it will feel less so.”

I wondered if
that
would be even worse.

Will pulled me into a sad, salty kiss.

“Forget the ocean,” he said. “What am I going to do when I don’t have
you
every day?”

I was going to cry. If I didn’t kiss Will right then, I was going to cry. So I did kiss him—with a heat and urgency that felt different from before.

We were heading into the end and we both knew it. It was time to weather the bitter and embrace the sweet and suck the marrow out of all the time we had left.

* * *

A
couple of nights later, it was Will who had a plan.

“Guess what we’re doing tomorrow?” he said as we cleaned up at The Scoop. “I signed us up for something.”

I cocked my head.

“You signed us up …”

I paused and pondered what was going on on the island the next day. Then I gasped.

“You did not!” I said, slapping at Will with my bleachy rag.

“I did,” Will said. “We’re entered in that sand castle competition you told me about.”

“Will,” I sputtered. “People take that competition very seriously. They, like,
train
for it. My sister’s been practicing with her girlfriends for months. They’re making a re-creation of the Sydney Opera House.”

Will snorted.

“You’re kidding, right?” he said. “Anna, I don’t want to dis your sister, but she doesn’t seem like the Sydney Opera House type. Have you guys been to Australia?”

“Oh, please,” I said. “We haven’t even been to California. But the Sydney Opera House is a big favorite with the sand castle competition. Someone does one almost every year. That and Hogwarts.”

Will’s eyes went wide and he put a hand on top of his head.

“Oh, man,” he said with a laugh. “I didn’t know. You’d think for something this hard-core, they would have had an entrance fee or something to keep out the dilettantes. I just went to the chamber of commerce and put our names on a clipboard.”

“Oh, well,” I said, waving him off. “It’s all just for fun.”

Then I narrowed my eyes and added, “Grueling, cutthroat,
punishing
fun.”

“This is
not
good,” Will said. “But wouldn’t it be lame to be a no-show? Especially since we got slot number six in the line-up. I think that’s pretty close to the main action.”

I shook my head in confusion.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “When did you sign us up for this thing?”

“Um, I guess it was in July,” Will said. Suddenly, he looked a little sheepish. “July fifth, as a matter of fact.”

I put a finger to my chin.

“I get it now,” I said. “That’s why you showed up at my house in the rain. You need a partner for the sand castle competition. You just
had
to get that blue ribbon, didn’t you?”

“What can I say,” Will said, leaning rakishly on his broom. “I’m a sportsman above all else.”

I spritzed my bleachy water in his direction. But after wiping a few more tables, I stopped and turned to him.

“How did you know we’d even be together now?” I asked softly. “When you signed us up in July?”

Will shrugged.

“It just seemed impossible that we wouldn’t be,” he said.

He walked toward me, trailing the broom behind him.

“Call it a leap of faith,” he said, alighting before me and planting a soft kiss on my lips.

I wrapped my arms around his shoulders.

“So you had faith in me?” I asked, half flirting, half serious.

“I had faith in
us
,” Will said. “Still do.”

Will’s broom clattered to the floor as I kissed him. And that was all the talking we did for a long while.

“
W
ill?” I asked the next morning, “have you built a sand castle? Like … ever?”

“Well …” Will pondered this question as he mucked about our little lot on the South Beach, piling sand, smoothing it, and piling it again.

“I remember one summer when I was a kid,” he said, “we went to Long Island and my mom taught us how to make drip castles. You know, where you fill your fist with super-wet sand and just drip-drip-drip it until you have these pointy towers.”

I gasped. I would have covered Will’s mouth if my hand hadn’t been breaded with sand.

“Whatever you do,” I said in a low voice, “don’t mention drip castles around these folks. It’s the sign of a complete amateur.”

“I
am
a complete amateur,” Will declared without a hint of embarrassment.

I sighed and glanced at the banner hanging directly over our heads. It read
FOURTEENTH ANNUAL DUNE ISLAND SAND CASTLE COMPETITION
!

I cast shifty looks at the castle builders stationed on either side of us. They, of course, were well into their architectural feats. It was only ten in the morning and I already saw some flying buttresses and six-foot-tall turrets.

If I’d been really brave, I would have walked the whole gauntlet
of sandy construction sites to check out the competition. We were placed in a straight line that extended for about half a mile. The castle builders seemed to fit three different profiles.

First there were the gray-haired curmudgeons who’d been doing this forever and worked alone (or perhaps with a couple of cowed grandkids as assistants). They grumbled and growled through their castle building, working as intently as scientists trying to cure cancer.

Then there were the teams, like my sister Sophie’s team of six fourteen-year-old girls. They gave themselves cute titles and usually functioned as both competitors and cheerleaders. Whenever things got too quiet along the assembly line, they’d start jumping around in their bikinis, hooting and shouting things like, “Team Patty Cake
rocks
!”

Finally, there was the pathetic minority—tourists who’d joined as a lark and had
no
idea what they were getting into.

Somehow—after a lifetime of looking down my nose at summer people—there I was in the last category. I was a dismal dabbler. No better than a shoobee.

But I loved Will, and he’d made this sweet gesture for me, so I was embracing the humiliation. I’d instructed myself to smile (and smile
big
) when Dune Island High kids strolled by and snickered. I’d agreed when Sophie had begged me to deny that I knew her, much less shared a bedroom and DNA with her.

And I wore sunglasses and a big floppy hat along with my shorts and bikini top.

When Caroline and Sam had stopped by our construction
site a half hour earlier, Caroline had given my wardrobe selection a skeptical squint.

“What?” I said defensively as I adjusted my enormous hat. “It’s for UVA protection!”

“Uh-huh,” Caroline said. Then she gave my bare brown torso a pointed look. I had the sort of honey-colored complexion that never burned. By this time of the year, my whole body was always as brown as an almond. Between that and the thick layer of SPF 50 I was wearing today, I didn’t
really
have to worry about burning.

Caroline shook her head and gave me an indulgent smile. Then she gripped me by my upper arms and looked me straight in the sunglasses.

“Anna,” she said, “I love you. I support you. But we can’t be seen hanging around with … this.”

She gestured at the crude beginnings of our castle.

“So we’ll see you after you’re done, okay?” she said gently.

I nodded somberly.

“I understand,” I said. “It’s too late for me. Go save yourself.”

Then we both laughed so hard that we fell to our knees in the sand, crushing a good portion of the moat around the castle.

“All right, all right,” Sam said, helping Caroline to her feet and pointing her toward the lighthouse at the southern end of the island. Every year the chamber of commerce set up a carnival in the lighthouse parking lot to coincide with the sand castle competition. I could already see the distant swing ride, roller coaster, and carousel flinging people about.

“We’re getting breakfast, then going to the carnival,” Sam said. “See you there?”

“If we make it out alive,” I called dramatically, whereupon Will pretended to give me a swat.

“You better curb the attitude,
Allison
,” he said with a grin.

I laughed and smiled at the little laser-printed sign that had been planted in front of our building site. It read
STARDUST MEMORIES, BY LEONARD ZELIG AND ALLISON PORCHNIK
.

About
that
, I had no objections whatsoever.

Once Caroline and Sam had left, though, and Will and I had gotten to work in earnest, I did have a few complaints. A lot of them, actually. I’d always known sand castle building was hard, but not
this
hard.

“Why couldn’t this be an ice cream competition?” I grumbled as I slapped sand around with little plan or purpose.

“Anna, don’t take this the wrong way,” Will said, “but I’m not the only amateur here.”

“I know.” I sighed. My experience making sand forts with my siblings had given me exactly
no
edge in this contest. So far all Will and I had done was dig our foundation and assembled a very tall mound of sand, ready for carving.

But since our castle was supposed to be a tall, skinny triangle, our curvy hill was of little use to us.

“Are you
sure
people are going to recognize this building?” I asked Will, peering at the already damp and runny photo printout he’d brought to the beach. “I mean, it’s cool, but
I’ve
never heard of the Flatiron.”

“It’s the third most famous building in New York,” Will said
with a shrug. “I guess we could have done the Chrysler Building or the Empire State, but I figured those would be trickier.”

“Ya
think
?” I said sarcastically.

I began rifling through our box of tools, which mostly consisted of spatulas and spreaders, buckets and shovels, plastic cutlery and a large spray bottle of sea water. I pulled out a long, floppy cake-frosting knife and tried to shave a section of sand off our mound to make one of the long, flat walls of the Flatiron.

The wall promptly caved in on itself, shedding a big chunk of sand that plopped right onto my foot.

“Okay, it might be time to think about forfeiting,” I said, trying not to break out into funeral giggles, which is what Caroline and I call it whenever we laugh at completely inappropriate times. “Or at least taking a swim break.”

“No, we can do this!” Will ordered. I could hear a laugh in his voice too. If not for the super-serious builders to the right and left of us, I think we would have kicked our castle attempt down that very minute and gone off for a sno-cone.

But even Will knew that giving up on the sand castle competition would invoke mockery at best, righteous scorn at worst. So … we stayed. Will grabbed our spray bottle and started moistening the collapsed wall of the castle.

“We let it get too dry,” he said. “If we keep it wet enough, we can keep the shape together, then carve in all these details.”

Will pointed at the curvy windows, crown molding, and elaborately decorated bricks of the building in our photo.

“And then we’ll be done,” Will said, “and we can go do something else.
Anything
else.”

“That’s all the motivation I need,” I said, squelching the last of my giggles. “Let’s go.”