Page 70 of The Sun
“One day, I will.”
He dragged the toe of his shoe over the pavement. “It’s not Elias Black, is it?”
My heart thumped a little harder. There was a twinge of disdain to Brandon’s voice when he said Elias’ name, like out of all the people in the universe that was the last person he wanted it to be.
Just like everyone else. . .
“Sunny?” He kind-of-sort-of scowled, and I kind-of-sort-of panicked when I climbed behind the wheel without responding. “Please tell me it’s not him,” he said, grabbing ahold of the doorjamb.
“Nope. Definitely not Elias Black.” I went to close the door, but he was still holding it. “What? It’s not. Now go spend time with your man so I can spend time with mine.”
I did that a lot—told Brandon I was going to seethat boywhose name I refused to share. Why? Because had I divulged that every time I dropped him off at Travis’ house, I went and sat at the beach alone, he never would have stayed. And I wanted one of us not to fall victim to Shakespeare’s curse. I needed to believe that some star-crossed lovers could work out. Or maybe I just wanted to feel like a martyr.
“You’re stubborn, you know it?” he said.
“So my mother has told me.”
Brandon hugged me before jogging down the drive and disappearing behind a jungle of palm trees.
Ten minuteslater I was the only car in the public beach parking lot, and I had two hours to kill.
Sighing, I grabbed Brandon’s CD case from the floorboard and flipped through until I came to a Matchbox 20 CD. I put it in and skipped to the last song, losing myself in the acoustic guitar and Rob Thomas’ voice. I played it twice, made myself a little sadder, and I still had an hour and fifty minutes to spare.
When I opened the door, the little buzzer that let me know the keys were still in the ignition sounded. I reached back in, snatching them and slipping them inside my pocket on my way to the boardwalk. The familiar crash of the waves swirled around me. The wind rustled the sea oats that dotted the ever-growing dunes that towered over the railing of the boardwalk. That was the tallest I’d seen them since the last hurricane had swept through.
I didn’t bother to take my sneakers off when I reached the sand. I just shoved my hands in the pockets of Brandon’s varsity jacket and hunched my shoulders against the wind as I started down the deserted coastline.
The thing a lot of people didn’t know about the beach was that it can be the loneliest place on earth. Most people came here when the days were blazing hot, and no matter what you did, you couldn’t escape the scent of tanning oil or the sound of children splashing in the surf. Those nights are filled with families carrying flashlights, searching for crabs. Summer loves trying to find somewhere to seclude themselves.
But in October, when there’s a bite to the air and summer was long gone, the only people that came out here had something on their mind. It was dark and empty. The endless sea and sky could make you feel so small if you let them.
I kicked at the white sand, and it caught in the moonlight like dull glitter.
Plopping down on one of the empty lounges, I placed my hands behind my head and stared up at the stars, wishing I’d paid more attention in science the semester we went over the constellations.
Freshman year I didn’t think the pattern of the stars mattered, but too often we don’t realize the significance of things. To me, it was just a bunch of broken planets and dying suns that didn’t seem to make up a fish or a big dipper. I definitely never saw a dog. . . But now, lying on the warped, wooden chair, I realized that in a really poetic way, the heavens connected me to existence.
The same sky bearing down on me at that very moment was the same one overlooking Shakespeare when he had pennedRomeo and Juliet. The same sky Cleopatra and Marc Antony had made promises under—the same sky Elias and I had made promises under.
Like ancient eyes, the stars had seen everything. And we all need something to connect us.
I glanced at my watch, then at the rings on my finger. I almost threw both away after Elias taped his to my locker, but the idea of tossing them out hurt more than the thought of keeping them. And some masochist part of me liked having the sun and moon together on my finger. When I looked down at those rings, it made me happy and unbearably sad at the same time.
But that was how mine and Elias’ story had always gone. A little happy, and a lot of sad. So much to hope for because life was too long to let go of each other so soon.
By the timeI started back to the parking lot, my fingers were numb from the cold, and my heart just a little more broken.
My shoe hit the first plank of the sand-covered boardwalk when I heard a girl shout Elias’ name. I froze and gripped the worn, wooden rail before I glanced over my shoulder, watching two figures walk toward each other. I wondered if they would kiss or if he would make pretty promises to her, but it didn’t matter.
I was the sun, and he was the moon, and while we may share the same sky during the early hours of dawn, we would never be close enough to matter.
20
Elias
We won our homecoming game against the rich-kid school from Daphne, the Kingstown Knights, and that was reason enough for Ben to throw a party at his house the next day. Which was reason enough for me to want to stay home, but a pipe at the house had just busted which jacked my water bill through the roof. And I needed some cash.
By the time my brothers and I pulled into the drive, the front yard was full of trucks, SUVs, and a few rundown clunkers.
