Page 63 of The Summers of Us

“Of course. I know it doesn’t seem like it sometimes, but I think about that night all the time.” Talking about it is teleportation. Here, under the pier at eighteen, I’m seventeen again, consumed by karaoke chords, cotton candy cheeks, fumbling nerves inside Ferris wheel lights. All the best parts of seventeen, without the other feelings that usually arise when I think about that night.

“Me too,” he says.

We’re still holding pinkies, like time elapsing will make the promise stronger. This vulnerability makes it easier to keep my eyes on his, easier to say things I don’t really know how to put into words. “I’ve been feeling guilty about my own happiness,” I whisper.

I hear how it sounds coming out, and this is why I’ve kept it in for so long. Deep down, I know there’s no correlation. It’s not rational. It’s not right. I shake my head, knead my other hand over my face.

“I understand.” Everett turns to me, kills the sand mound between us with his knee to wipe the tears from my eyes.

Together, we’re a closed circuit. We’re linked by more than just our pinkies. Our souls are connected, spindly beings. One of us could get struck by lightning and it’d kill us both.

“You think the universe is transactional.” He makes an internal transaction with the information.

Everett’s found the words for my sleepless nights, given a face to my night demons. Over the goosebumps on my thighs, I make circles with my thumb like I’m a psychic making sense of a crystal ball. It whispers to me that,yes,yes, the universeistransactional. The universe has to balance its checkbooks. If you’ve gone too long without a tragedy, you must be overdue for another.

I nod. “How do I stop my thoughts? How do I stop drowning?”

“I don’t know. The world is unfair, but that also means there’s no rhyme or reason to what happens.”

“I’m trying to believe that. I want to believe that.”

“I know. Listen, I don’t want you to do anything that doesn’t feel right. I shouldn’t have left you this morning.”

“No, it’s okay. I wasn’t saying the right things. I do want this.” I smile and hand him the Almond Joy. “I’m going to make it up to you.”

He rips it open and holds it out to me first. He doesn’t have to ask; I bite the almonds off to make a milk chocolate Mounds out of it for him. The chocolate makes the almonds even better.

“For what it’s worth, I do,” he says between bites. “Like you, I mean. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“You probably should just run for the dunes. Take off down the sand right now and you’ll make it to Sapphire Beach for sunrise.”

“Eh, I’ve heard the sunrise isn’t as good there. And I’d miss everyone too much.” He gestures to me with the deformed Almond Joy. “You know, the twins and Jorge and Mason.”

I throw my head back with laughter that’s a little too loud, intruding on the moment. I can’t help how it escapes me. “Obviously.”

Everett notices something, then taps the teardrop earrings I slipped on before I left his house. “You got your earrings back?”

His touch zaps through me. “I went to your house to find you first. I think I interrupted something.”

“Oh, God. They’ve started making me leave the house on Friday nights. I think they’re a little too excited to be empty nesters.”

He chuckles and finishes his Almond Joy as I pull out the postcard. If he already has this one in his room, he doesn’t say so. Back at Beachy Keen, I scrawled on it with a dying ballpoint pen at the register:

Everett, You are my rollercoaster, and somehow also my moon. Two things that are constant but never stay the same. Two things that glow even when it’s dark. One day I’ll be a rollercoaster and its moon, too. Quinn.

He reads it in the string lights, then smiles at me.

The mood rings glisten in my palms, waiting for him to finish reading. I have to wear mine on my thumb because they’re so big, but he slides his on his ring finger. I start to tell the story of when we studied these at the aquarium, and of course he remembers, filling in the ending—that they always end up the same blue color. We’ve always shared that theory. They’re a sham, but it was never about that.

And maybe it’s a trick of the light—or lack thereof—but I think my mood ring finally boasts a new color.

Violet, like my cheeks under the moonlight.

July 17

Day falls into night during its balancing act with fate.

Saray Rivera-Sanchez’s fiftieth birthday party started hours after the streetlights cut on, the front yard bursting with cars. Their backyard glows from the string lights hanging from a mammoth white tent. Rows of white tables wear plastic tablecloths. Family and friends multiply before my eyes, filling the chairs and talking amongst themselves. There are more people than there is space to move. The music is loud enough for the mainland to hear. The table beside the DJ is covered with tin foil trays of what used to be steaming corn, tamales, and pulled pork.

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