Chapter 26
THE SECOND SUMMER, FOURTEEN YEARS AGO
Didion and Austin were inseparable for the rest of that summer. Didion would ride her bike through the sticky hot air all the way into the marshes to meet him at the tennis club. Sometimes he wouldn’t be out of his match yet, so she’d watch him, or drink a Shirley Temple at the bar.
Didion had also started working mornings at Brew Lagoon, so she always smelled like coffee and wore sticky black work shoes that were constantly getting hosed down and dried out on the back porch.
But best of all, she had money. Not a lot.
But enough to get what she needed. She was saving up for a car.
It was her thinking that once she had a car—she was nearly sixteen, not far from getting her license—then she would never need to ask anyone for anything again.
She could get out of her father’s ever-silent house, go to the beach, work a job on the weekends or after school, and have more money.
Plus, she liked working. Liked being good at something. People in town said she made the best drinks, and her manager even let her run a special last week—an iced vanilla latte with real vanilla bean syrup and frozen espresso ice cubes.
Austin would come out of his tennis lessons, pick her up in a big sweaty hug and spin her around. They kissed constantly, almost never taking their hands off each other unless they had to.
They’d go back to Birdsong, where he’d use the outdoor shower and she’d sit outside, keeping him company—this was something she and Sammie and her mother had always done.
Sometimes, they’d go dive straight into the ocean, where he’d lift her onto his hips and they’d be moved backward and forward by the waves.
Often, they’d hang out with Sammie and Matt, playing Ping-Pong on the back patio at Dusty’s, or go to the movies on particularly hot afternoons, emerging just as a lavender dusk descended.
As in love as they were, they argued often.
She was impatient and he was stubborn. He took things literally and she sometimes seemed to speak in riddles, then became disproportionately heartbroken when he didn’t understand.
She was terribly jealous, and he was an awful flirt.
She knew, deep down, that the flirting was just how he moved through the world.
He talked the same way to Babe as he did to Matt as he did to his tennis coach as he did to some random girl at a party.
But it made Didion feel like she was being stabbed in the heart when she saw him with another girl.
She tried to hide it, knew it was irrational and annoying, and she trusted him, but too often she’d find herself getting upset without even fully understanding why.
It didn’t faze him. He had the ability to heal the hurt feelings with the perfect joke, kiss, or apology, never letting either of them take anything too seriously for long.
They were the picture of teenage love. Him with his messy hair and tanned skin—paler around the wrists where he wore his sweatbands at practice—and her with her pink cheeks and bright eyes, all limbs in a sundress.
It was a Friday night toward the end of the summer, and they’d just had one of their particularly heated fights.
One where she yelled until she was hoarse and he acted like he didn’t understand why she was mad, all because of some stupid thing they’d both forgotten by round two.
They’d spent a day “broken up” before he showed up at Birdsong and threw actual pebbles at her actual window until she came over and opened it.
“What?” she hissed.
He cocked his head. “Wanna go for a drive?”
She glowered at him and he smiled. She turned away to hide the fact that she was losing her ire.
She shut the window behind her, and then—as they both knew she would—crept down the steps, missing the creaking ones, and slipped out the front door, making sure to catch the broken screen door before it slammed shut.
And then, in her white nightdress and bare feet, she climbed into his truck.
He put it in reverse and said, “Where to?”
“I don’t know,” she said, skin pulsing in the heat, and craving something like a religious cleansing after the melodrama of their fight, “but let’s just go until we hit water.”