Chapter 2
Opinion: A person without skeletons in their closet is a person who can’t be trusted. Under any circumstance.
—Delilah Dune, opinion writer
T he world felt too bright the next morning, and a small headache thrummed at Lyla’s temples. Had she really gotten drunk with her high school’s former head cheerleader last night? What kind of alternate universe had she landed in?
In high school, Lyla hadn’t seemed to be on Allison’s radar. But for the most part, Lyla was grateful to be invisible to the popular kids at Echo Cove High. And yet, now that they were grown, Allison seemed so approachable. Either Lyla was still under the influence of those bottles of red Cabernet from The Sippy Cup, or she’d actually enjoyed Allison’s company.
Weird.
Lyla lifted her head off the pillow and glanced around her bedroom for a moment. The only packing left was still stuffed into this room. This was going to take forever. Not to mention, Lyla had a copyediting job to do as well as an opinion article deadline looming over her head. She should get started right away. But first, coffee.
As Lyla stood, the diary on her nightstand caught her eye. She’d forgotten about finding it. The iridescent fireflies on the cover were made from sequins and glitter. She picked the little journal up, recalling the tiny thrill she’d gotten every time she’d opened it all those years ago. The air had been thick with anticipation that summer. For years, she’d been dreaming of going off to college. One of her biggest fears was getting stuck in Echo Cove like her mother. Her mom had fallen in love with Lyla’s dad instead of chasing dreams and had anchored herself to this town. That was why their current trip around the globe was so important.
Lyla didn’t want that to happen to her too. For all four years of high school, she’d dreamt of nothing other than which university she’d attend. The farther, the better. Then, in her senior year of high school, when the time finally came to decide where she’d enroll, she was nervous. More than that, she was terrified.
Hugging the diary to her midsection, Lyla headed toward the kitchen, praying there’d be a coffeemaker. If she remembered correctly, the counters had been bare when she came in yesterday. She stepped into the kitchen and her hopes dissipated. The coffee machine was probably packed away in one of the dozens of boxes waiting to be picked up by the local thrift store. She couldn’t rip off the packing tape and search through them. Not without making a ton more work for herself. Coffee was a necessity, though. A day without coffee wasn’t a day at all.
Hmm, that might make a good opinion piece. Reaching for her phone, she tapped the idea into one of her digital notebooks. After a second, her shoulders rolled forward with a defeated sigh. While most folks were passionate about their morning coffees, they wouldn’t be passionate enough to write into “Delilah’s Delusions” to defend their stance on its level of priority. If Lyla wanted to save her job, she needed opinions that hooked readers and sparked debate at breakfast tables across the country. Bob’s threats were a lot of pressure heaped on top of a recent breakup and an empty house to sell for her parents.
Lyla set her phone on the counter where the diary with sequin fireflies sparkled up from where she’d laid it. Grabbing it, she plopped down on the kitchen floor, leaned against the cabinets, and opened the book to the first page.
June 9
Dear Diary,
Nothing has ever happened to me. I’ve never traveled anywhere, unless you count our class trip to D.C. last year. I’ve never won an award or starred in a school play—although I’d much rather write the script.
When I leave for college next month, I feel like my life will finally begin. But what if nothing happens? What if I don’t write a bestselling book or experience new and wonderful things? What if I don’t meet the love of my life? Or worse, what if I’ve already met him and he holds me back here in Echo Cove?
Lyla knew exactly what her teenage self was talking about. Travis Painter. The preacher’s son and world’s greatest prankster. The boy who’d made her question everything she wanted in life when she was eighteen.
Lyla was only two paragraphs in and she was already regretting her decision to read this diary.
Ms. Davis suggested we create a time capsule to commemorate who we are now for our future selves. In case we forget. Or something like that.
Ms. Davis had been Lyla’s twelfth-grade language arts teacher. She was always trying to inspire the students in some way or another, most of her ideas and suggestions falling on deaf ears. Except Lyla always listened.
“Time capsule,” she whispered, climbing to her feet. She turned toward the window and stared out at the old cypress tree in the backyard. She’d buried her time capsule right beside it. She couldn’t sell this house and leave that bottle and all its memories—her memories—buried there.
Now she had two reasons to delay packing up her room this morning. A trip to town was in order. She needed coffee. And a shovel.
Fifteen minutes later, Lyla pulled into the parking lot for Bean Time Coffee, the only coffee shop in town. She paused before entering because she was sure to run into half a dozen people from her past. The only other options were gas station coffee or caffeine withdrawal, though. No thanks.
Opinion: The truest risk-takers are those who ingest anything purchased from a gas station.
Stepping inside the coffee shop, she looked around. Each wall was a different color and showed off eye-catching abstract designs. The lighting was dim, but bright enough for the customers to read their books or newspapers.
Lyla inhaled deeply, already energized just by the store’s rich coffee bean aroma.
“Ly-la-lalalaaa? Is that you?” a loud voice asked as soon as Lyla reached the short line in front of the counter.
What were the odds? She’d just been reading about Ms. Davis in her diary and now the much older version of the language arts teacher was standing right in front of her. Ly-la-lalalaaa. Ms. Davis was the sum of all things creative.
She wrote poems, painted, and sang opera as a hobby, and Lyla was the only student in class whose name Ms. Davis belted out in full operatic voice whenever she called on her.
Lyla stared back at her former teacher. “Hi, Ms. Davis. Yes, it’s me.”
The Betty White look-alike shook her head, her white curls bouncing at her ears. “Oh, I’m not Ms. Davis anymore. I’m divorced, and good riddance. Call me Louise. We’re both adults, after all.”
Lyla guessed the woman in front of her was around seventy years old these days. Time had wrinkled her skin and shrunk her height by a couple inches. “Yes, I guess we are.”
The woman beamed. “Thank goodness for that. Hopefully, you’ve matured as well.” She lifted a pale-colored brow. “I always thought you’d make something of yourself if you could just separate yourself from that boyfriend of yours.” Before Lyla could contradict her, Louise fluttered a hand. “Oh, I know you two weren’t going steady, but a boy and a girl are never just friends. It’s not natural. And I admit I worried that boy would hold you back.”
The consensus around Echo Cove was that Travis was a bad influence. Because he was the preacher’s son, expectations on him were higher. All he’d really ever done was pull a few pranks that no one would have talked about had Pastor Painter not made an example of his son every Sunday morning.
Louise reached up and patted Lyla’s shoulder. “You know where I live, right?”
“I think so.” Lyla used to ride her bike past Louise’s house with Ms. Hadley’s Yorkie chasing her wheels. Sonny was small, but he had the energy to chase her all the way from her house to the town square.
“Drop in to visit while you’re here. I love to see my old students. Some of them. Allison Wilkerson comes by often.”
Lyla found that interesting. Allison was not the person Lyla had assumed she was. “I’ll try. It was great seeing you, Ms. Davis . . . Louise.”
“You too, dear. Take care.”
The customer in front of Lyla moved and it was Lyla’s turn to order. When Lyla met eyes with the person behind the counter, her heart fell into her stomach.
“Lyla Dune.” Bernadette Myer didn’t look as happy to see her as Louise had been.
Lyla took the lead in the conversation. “Bernie. Hi. You work here?”
Bernie’s eyelids subtly dropped, giving them a bored, hooded appearance. “I’m the owner.” She lifted her chin and folded her arms over her chest. The Bernie standing in front of Lyla had matured and grown into her lips and nose, which had both been a little big for her face when they were younger. Bernie looked good. Great, actually.
“You own your own coffee shop? Wow. That’s so amazing.” Lyla glanced around the shop with a new appreciation.
“What do you want?” Bernie asked, all business.
Bernie didn’t like Lyla, and for good reason. What happened to Bernie was an accident, though. Travis was the prankster, not Lyla. And Travis’s pranks were always harmless. Plastic spiders. Rubber snakes. Fake dog poo in odd places. But after the Sloppy Joe incident, Lyla had been guilty by association.
Sloppy joes were the only choice on the cafeteria’s menu that fateful day, and sloppy joes had always made Lyla gag. She’d missed breakfast, though, and her stomach had been roaring embarrassingly in algebra class. So she’d closed her eyes and had tried to imagine she was biting into a hamburger. Even her oversized imagination couldn’t make that sloppy joe go down, though.
The texture. The tangy taste. The smell. She couldn’t handle it. Feeling like she might vomit, Lyla suppressed a gag and spat the bite of food into the seat next to hers. She didn’t have time to think. One more second in her mouth and it would have been like a scene from The Exorcist .
That’s when Bernie pulled out the chair next to Lyla. Bernie usually sat with her boyfriend, TJ. Bernie had been crazy about that boy. Until TJ, Lyla had never seen Bernie smile—the real kind that radiated from within. The kind of smile that never left a person’s face completely while they were in the throes of first love.
Bernie hadn’t chosen to sit with TJ that day. Instead, she’d stomped over with her lunch tray, yanked out the chair next to Lyla’s, and plopped down with a miserable sigh. Lyla was too frozen to speak. She and Bernie had never been real friends, but Lyla had always wanted to be. They shared a love of writing, and Bernie was good at it. Lyla equally admired and was jealous of Bernie.
“What are you staring at?” Bernie had asked, using both hands to pick up her own sloppy joe and hold it in front of her face as she glared at Lyla. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and there was evidence that Bernie had been crying. If not for Lyla’s nausea, she would have asked Bernie what was wrong. Instead, she had suppressed another gag, quickly got up, and ran to the bathroom, not realizing that she’d turned an already traumatic day for Bernie into something far worse.
“Are you going to order or not?” Bernie asked now, pulling Lyla back to the present moment.
“Yes. I am.” Lyla looked at the menu on the wall, pushing down the memories and regrets of the past. “I’ll have a blonde coffee. With two raw sugars. Please.”
Bernie disappeared to prepare the drink. When she returned, Lyla slid her debit card across the counter. “It’s good to see you, Bernie.”
“I go by Bernadette now,” Bernie said, her hooded eyes narrowing as she looked up. “We aren’t in high school anymore.”
“Right. Sorry. I still go by Lyla, even though we’re no longer in high school.” Lyla didn’t intend it to sound sarcastic, but it apparently had. “Listen, maybe we can grab lunch and catch up sometime.” Lyla suddenly felt vulnerable like her teenaged self. She didn’t want Bernie to think she’d intended for her to sit on sloppy joe vomit and return to class with brown stains on her backside, just in time for oral presentations that afternoon.
Lyla remembered how proud Bernie was of her presentation. When it was Bernie’s turn, she walked to the front of the class, holding her head up high, even though TJ had shattered her heart not even an hour before. That former smile had dulled, but it wasn’t wiped out completely, because she was still holding onto a paper that meant something to her.
The snickers from other classmates began before Bernie even began to speak, rolling from a quiet rumble to an all-out roar, as kids covered their faces and put their heads down on the desks in failed attempts to hide their laughter.
Bernie pretended not to notice as she read her report, but her eyes gradually took on a thick sheen of tears that splashed on her paper as she tried to blink them away. Lyla imagined Bernie thought the hysteria had to do with TJ, who was seated in the back row and already spreading his own narrative about their breakup. It wasn’t until later that Bernie discovered what everyone was laughing about. She’d sat in Lyla’s spat-up sloppy joe mess. TJ and his crew used the incident to their advantage, of course, giving Bernie the cruel nickname of “Brownie.” It was no wonder Bernie went by Bernadette these days.
And no wonder she hated Lyla still.
“I have customers waiting behind you,” Bernadette said, ignoring Lyla’s suggestion that they catch up.
“Right.” Lyla returned her debit card to her purse and grabbed her beverage. “Thanks for this.” She started to turn away, but didn’t want to leave on a bad note. “Hey, I know we weren’t the best of friends in school, but . . . I always admired you.”
Bernie’s mouth tightened as if she was holding back a slew of not-so-nice things. “It was a long time ago, but I remember how it felt to be Bernie. It was miserable. Maybe that incident was an accident, like you claimed, but even you signed my senior yearbook to Brownie.”
Had Lyla done that? She couldn’t recall, but she knew she’d joined in the laughter when other kids whispered and gossiped about Bernie. Lyla could have stood up in class that day and admitted that it was sloppy joe, and it was all her fault. In high school, though, things that should have been trivial had seemed monumental.
High school was one big mission of trying to fit in while desperately wanting to also stand out for your good qualities, like being the prettiest, the smartest, the best writer. Maybe some part of Lyla had been secretly glad when classmates stopped talking about how great Bernie was at writing and instead spoke more about the brown stains on the back of her pants that one time.
“I wasn’t fooled by you then,” Bernie said. “Everyone thought you were so nice, but nice people don’t do what you did.”
Lyla wanted to defend herself, but she couldn’t. “I—I’m sorry if I ever hurt you, Bernie.”
“If?” Bernadette rolled her eyes. “If you have to question whether you were wrong, then you are the same girl. You haven’t changed a bit. Besides, it’s kind of late for an apology, don’t you think?”
Opinion: It’s never too late for an apology if the apology is sincere.
Lyla clutched her cup of coffee shakily. “I’ll see you later, Bernadette.” Or not. Turning, she headed out of the shop, walking quickly and hoping she didn’t burst into tears or get stopped by any other ghosts from her past. When she got into her car, she exhaled.
Next Opinion: Gas station coffee goes down easier than humble pie.
After purchasing a shovel from the hardware store, Lyla returned to her parents’ home as thunder rumbled outside. She just needed the next summer storm to hold off long enough for her to finish treasure hunting. Grabbing the shovel, she made her way to the backyard.
Please don’t rain. Not yet.
She couldn’t even remember what she’d put inside that time capsule. The old cypress tree towered over her as she approached, making her feel small, like a child again. Smoothing her hands over the tree’s bark, she searched for the markings where she had used a pocketknife to carve a hand-sized X. There. Her fingers traced the shallow groove. Then she turned and took ten steps toward the gate of the fence that separated her and Ms. Hadley’s yards. “One. Two. Three.” She counted all the way to ten and stared at the unassuming patch of grass.
Woof!
Lyla looked up to see the little dog from yesterday, watching her intently. “How did you get inside the fence?” No doubt he had dug a hole the way Sonny used to, which had always infuriated Lyla’s father. “I won’t tell on you, but the next owners might install that electric fence my father always threatened you with.”
The dog barked and then a flash of light lit up just above his head. A firefly? In the daytime? It twinkled again, confirming exactly what she’d thought she’d seen. Either she was imagining things or Bernie had poisoned her coffee.
Note to self: Never drink a beverage prepared by a person scorned.
Thunder drove Lyla back to the task at hand. She pushed the shovel’s blade into the dirt, pressing her full weight into it. Then she pulled the shovel’s blade up and tried again. She made slow progress, discarding the unearthed dirt into a pile off to the side and continuing for what felt like half an hour, as the sky rumbled softly and the little dog observed.
She wiped the sweat that ran down her forehead away with the back of her hand, putting more effort behind the blade. The clouds were growing darker at an alarming rate, leaving no doubt that it was about to downpour, which—ugh. That would leave this hole a muddy mess. Not ideal for a home that was scheduled to be shown to potential buyers in the coming week.
From the corner of Lyla’s eye, she saw the spark of a firefly’s light again. What is this little guy doing out here? And why was Ms. Hadley’s dog out here? Shouldn’t she be calling him back in?
With one more determined jab into the ground, the shovel’s blade hit something solid. Bingo!
Dropping to her knees, she used her fingers to pry the pale green 7-Up bottle from the ground just as the first raindrop splashed the back of her hand. As Lyla pulled it free, thunder cracked loudly overhead. Where there was thunder, there was lightning. She’d learned that lesson once already. Actually, she’d learned it when she had buried this time capsule.
It’d been storming that day too and—even if no one believed her—she’d been struck by lightning. She’d just finished covering the hole and was turning to run inside as God rolled his giant bowling bowl in the sky. Travis’s allusion, not hers. Then boom! The ground shook and a pulse of electricity shot through her from her head to her toes.
Next thing she knew, she awoke on her parents’ couch, watching her mom and dad debate whether to call the paramedics or a family friend who was a retired EMT. Once Lyla opened her eyes, they’d decided to do neither. They were nineties parents, after all, and if you were walking and talking, you were probably fine.
“If you’d been struck, the soles of your feet would be burned to a crisp, Ly-lac,” her father had told her.
That was possibly true, but Lyla didn’t want history to repeat itself today. Pulling the bottle free, she let out a happy whoop and hugged it against her body as the sky broke open and a flood of water poured down. Thunder clapped, this time shortly after an unmistakable flash of lightning. Maybe it was her overactive imagination, but it seemed to be aiming straight for her. With the bottle in her arms, she jumped to her feet and raced toward the back of the house.
Suddenly, the little dog from next door dashed under her feet. Lyla stumbled, feeling like she’d been tossed around in a wave, not knowing which way was up. Then, in that scenario, it felt like she’d fallen into a nest of jellyfish, all stinging her from the inside out. In reality, she was pretty sure she’d just been struck by lightning—for a second time in her life.