Pulled Under (Sixteenth Summer) (14 page)

“Trust me when I say that I have no idea what’s going on in your mind.”

“Okay, that’s a fair point,” I answer. “But all I know about Beth is that she was beautiful and wonderful and everyone thought you two were a perfect couple.”

“And after I told you that, you ignored me for two weeks,” he says. “In fact, just a few blocks up from this very spot you told me that you couldn’t be the girl I talked to about other girls.”

“Things are different now,” I reply. “And to be honest, since the only things I know about Beth are how wonderful she is, a little part of me could stand to hear how it ended.”

I really don’t know what it is about me that takes perfect moments and twists them into psychodramas, but I can’t help it. I am who I am.

There’s just enough moonlight on his face for me to tell that he’s biting the left side of his lower lip. He’s in deep thought mode, so I stop talking. Finally, after what seems like forever, he responds.

“It was my idea. We were out by the lake. She was talking about the prom and how important it was and how it would be this signature moment in our relationship. I mean, I know it’s a big deal, but it is just a dance. She was obsessed with what table we were going to sit at, where we were going to go for photographs, and I just couldn’t get excited about it. Maybe it’s because I was in a pissy mood about my parents, but I just couldn’t. Then, somewhere in the middle of it all, I just knew it was over.”

He stops for a moment and takes a deep breath.

“Some of my friends said that I should’ve just hung on until it was time for me to come to Florida, but I couldn’t do that to her. She didn’t deserve to be strung along. So I told her that I was really sorry but I couldn’t go to the prom with her and that we couldn’t see each other anymore.”

“You dumped her right before the prom?” I say, almost feeling sorry for her.

He nods. “I know. I’m a terrible person.”

“You’re not a terrible person,” I say. “The timing was unfortunate, but if that’s how you felt, you did the right thing.”

“Just for the record, Beth did not agree with your take on it. She made sure everyone knew how much it was not the right thing. I can’t blame her, I guess. Somehow she did manage to bounce back and find a guy who was more than happy to sit at the right table and smile his way through God knows how many pictures. He’s a good guy, actually. I hope it works for them.”

There’s a pause. Which means of course that I have to keep pressing the issue.

“How did you know it was over?” I ask. “You said that in the middle of it all you just knew.”

He turns his head to the side and shakes it in disbelief. “You really want me to tell you this stuff?”

I nod. “I know. I can’t help it.”

“Somewhere in the middle of all the discussion it dawned on me that it really was more than a dance for her. She sounded like my sister did when she was planning her wedding. And that’s when I realized that Beth was actually in love with me. We weren’t just dating. It wasn’t just some high school thing. She loved me.”

“And you weren’t in love with her?”

“No,” he says. “I might have been in love with the idea of her. I might have loved the attention. But I didn’t love her, and it seemed incredibly unfair for me to let someone love me when I didn’t feel the same way in return.”

Now here’s a problem.

I have no doubt that I am completely in love with Ben. Not the idea of him. Not the concept of him. Him. I’ve even wondered if I should tell him. But now I think the smart thing to do is to keep that secret to myself. Instead, I lie to him for the first and hopefully only time.

“Lucky for us we don’t have to worry about that,” I say, trying to sound convincing. “We both know that this is just for the summer.”

He doesn’t really answer. Instead he just kind of nods, and I lay my head on his shoulder again. It takes a moment, but he puts his arm around me.

It’s quiet for a while and we just sit there. I can’t help but think I’m doing everything wrong in this relationship. I don’t know why I asked about Beth, but the truth is I really felt like I needed to know that stuff. I put my hand over to rest it on his chest, but he pulls back, and I worry that he’s about to tell me that I’m just not worth the headache. But instead, he says something completely unexpected.

“Is that a body?”

“What?”

“Over there,” he says, pointing down the beach about a hundred feet. “I just saw that dark shadow move. I think it might be a body.”

I look, and when I see it, I know instantly what it is.

“Ooh, ooh, ooh, it’s not a body,” I say, trying to contain my excitement. “Follow me.”

I quickly climb down the lifeguard stand, and he’s right behind me.

“I just saw it move again,” he says as he tries to keep up. “What is it?”

I stop and turn to him. “A turtle!”

I grab him by the hand and we race down the beach together until we get close. We slow down and stop when we’re about fifteen feet away from where a massive sea turtle is slowly dragging herself across the sand. She’s three feet long and weighs nearly two hundred pounds.

We keep our distance, and I put my finger over my lips and say, “Only whisper, and don’t cross her path.”

He nods and replies, “She’s huge.”

“She’s a loggerhead coming ashore to lay her eggs.”

A bank of clouds drifts by and reveals the moon, its light dancing across the turtle’s red and brown shell.

“She’s going to lay them over there,” I say, pointing toward the sand dunes. “Don’t disturb her and don’t let her see any lights, like your phone; it can confuse her.”

“Okay.”

We spend the next thirty minutes watching her. It’s a lumbering crawl up onto the edge of the dunes, and you can’t help but marvel at her determination. When she starts to scrape away an area with her front flippers, I tug on Ben’s hand and we quietly loop around to get a closer look. She uses her hind flippers to dig a nest and then fills it with dozens of ping-pong-ball-sized eggs.

“Oh my God!” Ben whispers, being careful not to disturb her. “It’s amazing.”

I nod in agreement.

Once she’s done laying eggs, she uses her flippers to cover the nest back up, and then she begins the laborious task of dragging herself back to the ocean. We keep watching, but we move far enough away so that we can talk at regular volume.

“She was born here in Pearl Beach,” I say.

Ben gives me a skeptical look. “How could you possibly know that?”

“Because sea turtles always come back to the same beach where they were born. It’s in their DNA.”

He thinks about this for a moment and then says, “Like me.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I came back to the beach where I was born too.”

I laugh. “That’s true. You did.”

“What will happen with the eggs?”

“In about six weeks they’ll hatch, and the little turtles will poke out of the sand and look for the moon. That’s the key.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s how they find their way,” I explain. “During hatching season all the houses on the beach keep their lights off. That way the babies can find the reflection of the moon on the water and know where to go. Then they’ll scramble back toward the ocean and disappear.”

“That sounds amazing,” he says. “We’ve got to come and watch.”

“Will you still be here then?” I ask.

I didn’t mean it as anything more than a basic question. But, given the conversations of tonight, it carries some emotional baggage.

“Yes,” he says quietly. “That should be my last week.”

I’ve already been enough of a drama queen for one night, so I decide it’s time for me to put on the brave face. I take his hand in mine and our fingers intertwine.

“Perfect,” I say. “We’ll come out and watch them together. You’re going to love it.”

I
’m a total moron,” I say as I slip on a blue cami and look at it in the fitting room mirror.

“You’re being too hard on yourself,” Nicole calls out from the next stall. “I’m sure you’re exaggerating.”

“I don’t think so,” I reply. “I cried. I grilled him about breaking up with his girlfriend. Twice. It was basically a horror movie.”

“And then you were saved by a sea turtle,” she says. “Now there’s a twist on the normal environmental dynamic.”

“No kidding. Who knows how much damage I could have done if she hadn’t rescued me?”

“Let me see the outfit,” she says.

I step out and she looks it over. I’m wearing a lace shirt over the cami and a pair of white jeans.

“It’s nice,” she says. “But I like it more with the skirt than the jeans.”

“That’s a relief. I was worried the jeans would look better and then I’d have to make it through a whole meal without spilling anything on them.”

“But it’s okay to spill something on the skirt?” she asks with a raised eyebrow.

“No, but the white denim is just asking for it. That looks amazing on you, by the way.”

Nic’s trying on a floral baby doll dress with black leggings that really take advantage of her height.

“You sure? They’re not too tight?”

I shake my head. “You know what Sophie says.”

“There’s no such thing as too tight,” we both answer in unison.

The one drawback of life on Pearl Beach is that the nearest mall is almost an hour away. The two of us have made the trip because we’ve found ourselves in an unexpected situation. Namely, for the first time in our lives we have boyfriends. As a result we’re both looking for a little wardrobe pick-me-up. Of course we don’t have much money to spend, so we’re only looking on the sale racks.

“It was a lot easier when I stuck to dark colors and solids,” Nicole says. “You know, in order to blend in while I stalked him.”

“Good times,” I say as we head back into our stalls. “Speaking of which, how are things now that you and Cody actually talk?”

“Way more fun,” she says. “Although we’re taking it kind of slow. We only go out once, maybe twice a week.”

“Are you okay with that?”

“Absolutely,” she says. “The slow helps because it’s all so new to me. I feel like I need relationship training wheels.”

“That makes two of us. I don’t think I can count on that turtle rescuing me every time I start to spiral out of control.”

“Yeah, not so much.”

We step back out and now she is wearing a graphic tank top and a high-low skirt that looked like nothing special on the rack but incredible on her.

“I should never shop for clothes with you,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because of the whole six-foot-supermodel thing. I feel like Stumpy McGee.”

“Who’s Stumpy McGee?” she says with a laugh.

“I don’t know. I just made her up. But he cannot pull off any of the looks that you’ve been rocking.”

“Well, you’re not Stumpy McGee because everything you’ve tried on looks adorable. Besides, I could never get away with wearing those,” she says, pointing at the pair of boyfriend jeans I’m trying on.

“Sure you could,” I say. “Except on you’d they’d be capris.”

We both laugh and I realize that this is the beauty of having a lifelong best friend. You can give each other garbage, boost each other’s confidence, and look out for each other all in consecutive sentences.

I
remember learning how to ride a bike, and I’m still learning how to drive. (I’ve got my permit, but I do not feel a rush to get my license.) But I don’t remember learning how to surf. It was too long ago, and that’s a shame because if I did remember, it might help me teach Ben. Today is his first lesson on his new board, and he wants to make it memorable.

“It’s time we go out where the grown-ups surf,” he says.

Up until now, he’s been using my dad’s board and I’ve done the same lessons with him that I do with the summer campers. We’ve stayed in shallow water, and he’s only caught waves after they’ve broken. It’s a great way to learn, but now he’s ready to go out beyond the white water. At least, he thinks he’s ready. Just in case he’s not, I’m right alongside him reminding him of each step along the way.

First we wade out into the water until it’s waist deep, and then we lie out on our boards and start paddling. The part that surprises people the most is how hard it is to paddle. It looks like it should be easy, but it’s not. You have to get used to balancing, and you have to work hard to go against the tide.

“Don’t forget to duck dive,” I tell him.

Duck diving is what you do when you paddle into a wave that’s coming right at you. The way you’re supposed to do it is to speed up right until you’re about two feet away and then push the board down under the water and let the wave pass over you. If you forget, the wave slams your board into you.

Apparently he didn’t hear me, because he forgets.

“My bad,” he says. “I was supposed to do something there, wasn’t I?”

“Duck dive!” I say, louder this time as another wave approaches. Now he picks up speed, and although it’s not particularly graceful, he manages to get under the wave and pop out on the other side.

“Like that?” he asks.

I ignore the lack of grace and focus on the positive. “Yes. But next time try holding the rails tighter and push down with your whole body.”

“Got it,” he says.

We dive under a couple more waves before we get out beyond the break to where the water is calm. The look on his face is priceless. He is loving it.

“Now you need to straddle your board like this,” I say, demonstrating.

“Do I look at the ocean or at the beach?” he asks.

“Did you not listen to any of the lessons I gave you?”

“I tried,” he says. “But it’s hard to pay attention because you’re so pretty.”

This makes me laugh. “You look out at the ocean until you see the wave you want. Then you turn and start paddling.”

“Got it,” he says.

I look over at him and see that he’s struggling to find the right balance. His butt keeps sliding from one side of the board to the other and he overcorrects to keep from falling off.

“Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it.”

He squirms a little more and then finally settles into position. Kind of.

“This is . . . what’s the word you use . . . ‘radical’?”