Page 36 of The Summers of Us

A laugh escaped me while I rolled the window up. I threw my head back onto the headrest with a smile, watching the houses blur by.

“You like him,” Blair said with a laugh from the driver’s seat.

“I do not,” I said. I watched my face turn red in the rearview mirror.

Age 14, June 22

“Slow down!” Everett shouted from behind me.I barely heard him over thewhooshingwind.

When I agreed to grab Sunset Scoop with Everett, I didn’t think it would transform into a bike race to the beach, but winners couldn’t complain. The wind was salty from the nearby ocean, humid from the summer evening, brisk from my growing speed on the bike. My muscles burned through every push, but I leaned forward and gripped the handlebars so tightly my knuckles lost color.

“In your dreams!” I shouted, but he was so far behind me that the wind stole the words before he could hear them.

I reached the top of a small hill. On the way down, I stopped pedaling and let the decline take me with it. The trees became an emerald blur. The sunlight blinked on and off through the leaves, leaving shadows like Queen Anne’s lace on the path ahead. The wind put its fingers around my lungs and squeezed. I put one hand out to catch the wind. I bet this was what it felt like to drop down a rollercoaster.

“Why’d you stop?” Everett screamed as he came up beside me. He pedaled with the downward momentum until I was the one chasing after his words like catching fireflies for a mason jar. He disappeared when he turned onto a road off the trail.

I kicked back into high gear, my legs ringing in protest. I almost won, but he passed the green Ocean Drive sign seconds before me.

“I win.” He skidded his Converses against the concrete.

“Barely.” I stuck my tongue out at him and hit the brakes. In the still air, sweat beaded down my back. I hoped I didn’t lose my mascara and lip gloss in the wind. “New challenge. Whoever gets to the bike rack slowest wins.”

“Did Itireyou out?” Everett laughed at his own dumb line.

I rolled my eyes. “If that’s what you want to believe, then yes.”

“It’s fine by me. Ocean Drive demands slow biking.”

He was right; Ocean Drive boasted million-dollar houses with billion-dollar views, and palm trees were more abundant than mailboxes. Locals rented out these houses to ocean-starved tourists who wanted to wake up with the ocean outside their bedroom window. I understood; I was tourist adjacent, after all.

We biked so slowly it couldn’t really be called biking. I pedaled just hard enough to keep from wobbling.

He pointed to a house the blue color of Mason’s eyes. Three stories, a blinding white balcony off every door, grass as green as a street sign. “I bet a woman named Matilda Ainsworth lives here. Her husband is on a ‘business trip’ in Italy. While she waits for him to come back, she eats imported lobsters, fresh crab cakes, and oysters. It’s where she gets the pearls for her necklaces.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” I said, but I felt like I could crack my chest open and find a pearl where my heart should be.

“Come on, try it. Tell me who lives here.” He pointed to a house the color of dried pink roses. A row of pampas grass sprouted along the driveway paved with individual gray tiles.

“You’re such a dork.” I nudged his bike tire with mine but decided to play along. “Let’s see. His name is William. He made billions playing tennis. He spends his days drinking thousand-year-old wine and eating goat cheese and cucumber slices on his dad’s sailboat.”

That exact picture was on a billboard on the way to Piper Island. If there ever were a misleading advertisement, it was that one. Piper Island had a lavish side, but it was mostly an island for drinking homemade lemonade on pastel Adirondacks, wearing bikinis for bras or swim trunks for shorts, and spitting watermelon seeds into the grass in hopes that you could grow your own.

“There you go!” He pointed to a navy house. “That’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s house.”

“No way.” I pointed to the house next to it, a coral one with windows that reflected the blue sky back to us. “That’shis house. He would never own a navy house; it’s too much like the water the Titanic sank in.”

“I think you’re right. And obviouslyalsoa dork. And obviously can’t separate actors from their characters.”

“It’s what I do.” I shrugged and let Everett bike ahead of me until he ended up first at the bike rack. “I win.”

Everett didn’t protest. We steadied our bikes in the bike rack and headed for the shore.

I followed him down the stairs and to the sand. The ocean and the summer breeze roared in unison. My hair joined the rush, but I gave up taming it. Everett hobbled over the mounds to keep his balance. He was so focused that his eyebrows scrunched up. His hair blew in the wind, moving in and out of perfection until he settled on imperfection. The wind was a sculptor, turning his hair into disheveled-on-purpose art. I wished I were a sculptor, too, but I shoved my hands in my pockets.Thatfeeling I could tame.

“Hey, Q, look.” Everett pointed to a pile of jagged gray oyster shells. “It’s Mrs. Ainsworth’s dinner. Her butler just threw them out.”

I put my hand over my mouth. “I heard she found a pearl.”

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