Page 102 of The Summers of Us

Blair cracks a smile, then looks between all my friends. “Thank you guys so much, for everything. Hadley would have loved this.”

The words are full, whole, dancing with the evening breeze.

Hadley’s name hits for the first time without sparking remorse, instead filling me with a sense of bittersweet acceptance. I’ll feel it every time I see something coral, every time I look to my horoscope for a sense of pseudo direction, every time I find myself too afraid to do something she would have dove head first into. I’ll feel it every time I see a shooting star and think it’s her in the sky, granting me the life she wants me to live out for her.

I know I will never stop thinking about her.

I know I never want to.

I exhale for the first time in what feels like years, staring in the face of rollercoaster tracks on their way up.

August 17

I wake up in a pink house.

Slip on a pink tank top.

Brush my teeth in a pink mood.

I bounce on pink heels around my almost packed up room, down the hallway, and out the door faster than a pink sunrise can break and spill into blue.

My steps leave emerald footprints in the dew on Haven and Holden’s front yard. If grass could talk, it would speak of the summer days spent roaming here. Of secrets told overtres leches, water hose battles on the trampoline, the backyard where I got the dreaded phone call.

The front door creaks. Holden’s eyes are barely open, his hair freshly peeled from his pillow, but he stomps down the stairs and pulls me into a hug. I’m back in the same embrace I burrowed myself into last summer when I learned the sky lost its stars. The hug feels different today, scabbed over and dwindling. I no longer feel the need to peel the dried maroon off and watch it bleed.

Scars don’t hurt when they’re healed, but you can’t outrun them.

“You’re up too early for someone on their last day of summer vacation,” I say.

“The sunrise is worth it.”

I cross my arms with a smirk. “Sunrise? You only wake up before noon for fish.”

He pokes my forehead. “And Quinn Kesslers.”

Haven steps down the stairs, a beach bag weighing down her shoulder, pink sunglasses on her nose despite the sky still dark enough for streetlights.

In the prologue to the rising sun, everything is pink. It’s impossible not to be, even with the thought of driving away tomorrow.

Today marks a new beginning.

That’s why we’re awake this early in the first place.

Last night, Everett and I were on the back porch with the cicadas, katydids, and locusts, eating a fresh batch of Liezel’s yam cookies when the idea struck. Even as far inland as Blair’s house is, the smell of salt hung heavily in the air. A beckoning call. A request for forgiveness. An olive branch.

“I’m tired of hating the ocean,” I said from the rocking chair.

Everett looked at me like he couldn’t believe the words just left my mouth, but he smiled and promised we’d go to the beach in the morning. There’s no better version of the shore than the one that spits out the sun into morning, at least that’s what I think.

Our plan to meet up to watch the sunrise turned into an early breakfast on the beach.

The twins and I file out of my car with our things, racing barefoot from the parking lot onto the beach. I stay behind to walk slowly, my ankle still wrecked, and spend more time with the seagrass whispering from the dunes. The sky is so pink I could jump with my mouth open and land with sticky sugar on my tongue.IfI could jump.Ifclouds really were cotton candy.

Everett, Mason, and Jorge wrestle the wind to lay a blanket on the sand. We sit on the blanket to keep it from flying away. A picnic breakfast awaits: orange juice, cinnamon donuts, blueberry bagels, grapes, and sliced strawberries.

In the distance, a shrimp boat comes in from a scandalous night out with the sea. Small black figures meander toward the horizon: beachcombers, joggers, dogs off their leashes. Surfers won’t catch much this morning, but they’re front row to the pod of dolphins that swim by for their own breakfast. Patches of sea foam lose the war with the wind and zip like tumbleweeds down the beach. The water waves good morning millions of miles out, a glassy opal sheen the pelicans probably skate on.

We wait for the sun to join us, like watching paint dry on a canvas, but once the first orange slice burns across the sky, the rest rises the way an avalanche falls. The canvas is dry now, its colors a byproduct of light bestowing itself upon the world.

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