Page 8 of All the Ways You Save Me
“But not all of them are tall, fit, dark-haired guys.”
I give her a smirk. “You think I’m fit?” I stretch my arms into an exaggerated muscle flex. “Chloe, all this time, I’ve been hoping you’d finally notice.”
“Please.” Her eyes nearly roll back in her head, and she tosses the rag at me. With a grin, I snag it out of the air right before it lands, cold and wet, on my face. Aside from Ian, Chloe is my closest friend on the island, but we’ve never been anything more than that. Objectively, I can see she’s attractive, but I’ve never thought of her that way. She’s a single mom to an eight-year-old daughter, Ellery, who thinks of me like an uncle, and I take that relationship pretty seriously. I take all my relationships here on the island pretty seriously. This eclectic group of people is my family.
“I’m just repeating what people are saying. Rumor has it that a”—she waves her hands in my direction—“surfer matching your description ran into the water, saved some kids, and took off before anyone could thank him. Pretty superhero-y.”
“How do you know it wasn’t Ian?” My best friend is also a surfer, and equally tall, dark-haired, and fit. ThoughI’d never say that last part to his face or his ego would inflate like a balloon.
“Because,” Chloe says, “Ian would have stuck around to shake hands, pose for photos, and give a quote for the local paper.”
I concede to that perfect description of my friend with a grin. “Okay, fair point.”
A couple of firefighters approach the bar, and Chloe saunters over to wait on them. I take another long drink of my beer. Ocean rescues aren’t that uncommon around here, it’s just that it’s usually the lifeguards pulling people out of the water. In contrast to Ian, though, I’ve never been someone who thrives on attention and accolades.
I’d rather the whole story died as quickly as possible.
FIVE
PRESENT DAY
Madeline
I stare at the phone in my shaking hands as the app presents the next video—a girl holding up a recent romantasy book and raving about how much she loved it. I swipe backward, looking for the video of the surfer, but it doesn’t appear.
“Can we watch that again?” I ask Brooklyn, holding out the phone. “The video of the guy rescuing the kids.”
“No. Sorry.” Brooklyn waves a hand at the phone. “I don’t think we can. That video was live. Didn’t you notice the flashing red button in the top corner there?”
No, I hadn’t noticed anything except the man in the video. The man who looks so much like Adam. “What do you mean—live?”
Brooklyn gives me an indulgent smile, and I feel every bit of my twenty-seven years. I’m not that old, but to my students I probably seem ancient. And social media isn’t really my thing. As a high school teacher, I have to be careful about what I put out there that students might see.
“Live means that someone was taking the video through theapp and playing it for people to see while it was happening. Once it’s over, it’s gone. It’s different than a video that someone shoots and then posts later. It’s meant to be kind of like an exclusive thing. If you don’t watch live—you’ve missed it.”
“So, it’s just—gone?” I choke out.
Brooklyn looks at me strangely. “Don’t worry, Ms. Sullivan. Those kids seemed like they’re okay. They were lucky that surfer was there to save them.”
“I know, it’s just…” I hesitate. In addition to avoiding social media, I tend to avoid telling my students too much about my personal life. They may have heard the stories about the local guy whose car went over the cliff on that cold, rainy February night, probably from their parents warning them about not ending up with a similar fate. But ten years was a lifetime ago, and I’m sure they never made the connection between that kid in the Ford Bronco and the one smiling in the photo on my desk.
But I want Brooklyn’s help, and I need to tell her something about why I’m so desperate to recover that video. “The guy who rescued the kids looks like someone I knew. An… old friend.”
Brooklyn’s eyebrows raise, but at eighteen, she’s mature enough not to ask for details, and I’m relieved. Because “an old friend” is obviously the biggest exaggeration of my life. How could I admit that the guy in the video looks exactly like the love of my life? Adam, who drove off the side of the road and plunged into the river? Adam, whose life was swept away in the cold current, taking my heart along with him.
It sounds completely unhinged.
Itiscompletely unhinged. And yet…
I take another glance at the phone in my hand. I should hand it over, change the subject, and get on with my day. I need to pack up my classroom, go find the perfect lounge chair by the pool, and open the book I’ve been so excited about. But while I feel my arm reaching out to press the phone back into Brooklyn’s hand, I hear my voice asking, “Is there any way to find out any more information about that video?”
Brooklyn takes the phone and clicks around in the social media app. “Here,” she says, holding it up. “This is the guy who streamed it.”
On the screen is a photo of a college-aged guy with a ball cap tugged over his sandy brown hair.
TylerBealAΔΦ/ 1.5k Followers / 565 Following
“He’s like… a frat guy on vacation,” Brooklyn says, scrolling through his posts. The cover photos for the first five or six videos show Tyler lying in the sand and drinking at an outdoor beach bar with a bunch of other early twenty-somethings. “He was probably just hanging out on the beach and happened to catch the rescue, but it doesn’t look like he posted anything else about the surfer.” She pushes play on a video, and I watch the group cheer and throw back shots. “It’s mostly a lot of partying. You could DM him and ask him, though.”
