Chapter 2
JULIA HAD JUST NOTICED a bit of chocolate on her lip from their first-night s’mores and was leaning over the bureau, using the mirror to wipe it off with her thumb, when a paper airplane whizzed in through the open window and hit her on the shoulder.
It sent a small jolt down her arm, through her body, and she quickly wiped away the chocolate, grabbed her Lip Smacker from her pocket, and ran it across her lips, before picking up the airplane and seeing the message written inside.
Meet me on the beach?
Nate’s handwriting was so distinct, a little bit messy and oddly charming, just like he was.
Nate and his mom had lived next door to Grandma Vera on Ocean Boulevard since Nate was a baby.
He was a year older than Julia, and he’d hung out with the May sisters, building castles on the beach and threatening to teach them to surf, for as long as they had been coming out here to visit.
Holding the paper in her hand now, thinking about how close he was, made her heartbeat quicken. She pulled a purple pen from her small backpack purse that was hanging over the bedpost and wrote her reply, in her own neat and perfectly measured cursive:
I’ll be there in five minutes!
She refolded the airplane, threw it out her window, and watched it soar the short distance into his—an art she had perfected over the last five years, since thirteen-year-old Nate had realized their windows were close enough for paper airplane messages.
Even though it might sound silly, if she were to describe it to her friends back home in Chicago, the truth was, Julia looked forward to these paper airplanes almost more than she looked forward to their first-night s’mores.
She ran her Lip Smacker across her lips one more time for good measure and then ran downstairs.
“Where are you going?” Nora called from her place on the couch, tucked under a blanket and snuggled up with Grandma Vera, where they were watching Some Like It Hot.
“Honey, where’s the VCR remote?” Grandma Vera said to Nora. “Pause it.”
Nora shuffled to find the remote, hit pause, and then they both turned and stared at Julia, expectantly.
Fourteen-year-old Emily, who had become obsessed with both poetry and the subject of death that spring, sat alone on the love seat reading Emily Dickinson, and she didn’t even look up or register Julia’s presence.
“I’m just going to take a walk with Nate,” Julia said, trying to keep her voice even, nonchalant, like it was no big deal.
It was no big deal. She’d walked with Nate many times by this point in her life.
But something about this May already felt different.
Before now, she and Nate had been friends only the one week in May when she and her sisters came to visit Grandma Vera.
But this past year, Julia’s dad and Grandma Vera had both installed dial-up internet and had given each of the girls CompuServe email so that they could communicate with Grandma Vera all year long without racking up enormous long-distance phone bills.
Nate also had gotten email, and he and Julia had been emailing each other almost every day for the last six months.
The anticipation now to run down to the beach, to actually see him, welled up inside her, hot and heady, making her face flush.
Eleven-year-old Nora was already bored with the conversation and fiddled with the remote, while Grandma Vera smiled and nodded. “It’s a beautiful night for a walk,” she finally said, knowingly, a small smile escaping across her lips.
Julia took off her flip-flops, stood on the sand at the top of the beach, and listened to the roar of the Pacific Ocean.
It was high tide, and breezy enough that she could practically taste the salty water on her tongue.
This was her favorite moment of the whole year, that first time she found the beach again after an entire year away.
“Hey, Jules!” Nate’s gravelly voice.
No. This was her favorite moment of the whole year.
She turned, and he was jogging toward her from his house.
The yellow light from the streetlamp on Ocean Boulevard slanted across his face, and he was smiling so wide it engulfed his boyish cheeks.
The last thing he’d sent to her over email—which she had printed out, folded up, and locked inside her diary at home—was a poem that he’d written just for her:
Jules, light and order.
Like a star you walk
on water. No, please—
walk through water instead
with me.
She’d read it a thousand times, vacillating over whether it meant something. With me. Was he asking her out? Or did he just like writing poetry?
“Oh my God, Jules, you’re finally here!” He’d reached her on the beach, his arms around her, hugging her so quickly she could barely register what was happening as her cheek hit his chest and she inhaled the sudden sandalwood scent of him.
She clung to him for a few moments, and then forced herself to take a step back.
He put his hand on her cheek, traced her cheekbone with his thumb as if trying to memorize her face.
Or recognize it again after all this time apart.
And then Julia, always wanting to know exactly what was what, blurted out the stupidest thing possible: “Are we dating now?”
He laughed but didn’t move his thumb from her cheek. And maybe that was a yes?
Then he leaned down, and his lips were on hers, softly, gently. It was exactly the way Julia had always imagined a kiss should feel. Nate’s lips were perfect and warm and intoxicating. She suddenly felt light, untethered, like she could just float away. This was definitely a yes?
“You taste like cotton candy,” Nate murmured.
“Lip gloss,” she said.
“I like it.” He kissed her again quickly, and then he said, “For the record, I thought we’ve been dating for three months. Didn’t we email in February about how much we missed each other and wanted to be together?”
“But can two people really date on email?” Julia asked.
“Why not?” Nate said.
And she realized that was exactly what she liked about him. If Julia saw the world as straight lines and ordered shapes, Nate saw it in blurs of bright and exciting colors.
He reached for her hand, held on to it. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
The last few years, it had become a tradition for Julia and Nate to walk the sidewalk on Ocean Boulevard all the way down to the Hotel del Coronado and back.
In the one mile, amidst the sweet smell of fresh-bloomed honeysuckle, the soothing sound of the ocean just next to them, they usually had all the time they needed to catch each other up on everything that had happened the year before.
But this time, thanks to email, they were already all caught up, and now they just walked, side by side, holding hands, not feeling like they had to say anything at all.
The next morning, Nora woke Julia by jumping on the end of her bed. “Let’s gooo to the beee-ach!” she exclaimed, arms in the air, bouncing up and down on the mattress.
“Okay, Oprah Winfrey,” Emily said, wandering in from across the hall, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Julia laughed. Nora recorded The Oprah Winfrey Show each day and diligently watched it every night after dinner. Julia and Emily usually sat with her, doing their homework while it was on.
“Come on,” Nora said, jumping down from Julia’s bed. “For real. The sun’s out!”
May was often cloudy when they visited—something Grandma Vera told them was called the May Gray, and, she said, the only thing worse was the June Gloom. The rare days when the sun was actually shining on their visits were always beach days.
And so, the three of them put on bathing suits and shorts and wandered down the beach to the edge of the water, before even eating breakfast. On days like this, Grandma Vera would bring them waffles and bacon midmorning, and they’d have a beach picnic brunch.
They all stood with their feet in the chilly surf, watching as Nate was just walking out of the water, surfboard under his arm.
He waved with his free hand, then put his board down on the sand and unzipped his wet suit before walking over toward them.
He caught Julia’s eye and smiled. She stared at his lips for a moment, remembering what they’d felt like on hers last night.
But suddenly Nora let out a bloodcurdling scream, interrupting her thoughts.
“Nora, what’s wrong?” Julia looked away from Nate toward her youngest sister, who was hopping on one foot.
Then, Emily let out a bloodcurdling scream of her own.
And before Julia could ask her what was wrong, suddenly something brushed against her foot and a sharp, stinging pain shot through her toes, up her leg, and she let out a scream.
“Jesus,” Nate said. “Did all three of you manage to get stung by the same stingray?”
“Come on, let’s go up to Vera’s house,” Nate continued. “You need to soak your feet in warm water.”
Julia started to hobble up the beach, but then she heard Nora scream again. “I can’t walk! It hurts too much!”
She stopped hobbling and turned, but Nate had already reached Nora and was scooping her up off the sand, lifting her in a fireman’s carry. “Em, Jules, you okay to walk?” he called out. Emily nodded and so did Julia, and they hobbled alongside him, back up the beach.
“My goodness, what’s with all the screaming?” Grandma Vera stood on her porch in her long floral nightgown, her gray hair still in pink rollers.
“The Trouble Trio over here all got stung by a stingray,” Nate told her, as he gently placed Nora down on the porch steps.
“I’m dying!” Nora exclaimed through sobs.
“Trouble Trio sounds about right.” Grandma Vera laughed at Nate’s nickname for them. “And no one is dying on my watch, my tiny songbird, I promise you. A stingray hurts like the dickens but it isn’t going to kill you.”