25. Summer
Summer
SUNDAY
Iget to the surf school just after ten.
The sun’s already pounding. So is the music—reggae, blending with the sound of the waves.
There are more people than I imagined. Which is stupid, because I’m the one who worked on the Instagram posts, the flyers we handed out at the lodge and the Market, the targeted storytelling for families on vacation around here. I know how many shares there were. I know the stats.
But stats are numbers on a screen. This is families, kids running barefoot, couples in flip-flops lined up at a stand.
It smells like sunscreen and hot food. The Walker Surf School flag snaps in the wind at the top of a wooden pole—a scrap of white bedsheet Yumi found for me, with the logo I drew in marker at three in the morning on Saturday, on the lodge deck, a cold coffee in my hand.
Jace doesn’t know.
That’s the deal. I made Maya, Kai, and Miles promise not to say anything. Maya protested, “Pero, why?” Because I don’t want Jace to know. Because I didn’t do it for him. They didn’t get it, but they went along with it.
I walk into the surf school yard, hands in the pockets of my denim shorts, hair loose in the wind. I’ve got my gold sandals on, my red tank top, and I didn’t bring a bag. Just my wallet, tucked in my back pocket. Playing it cool.
Playing it cool lasts six seconds.
“What?” I say when I catch Jace’s eye. “You going to keep me out? I’m here to spend my money.”
He’s ten feet away, deep in conversation with some guy holding a cooler. He shrugs.
“Long as you pay.”
He starts to turn back to his conversation, then adds:
“You see our new posters? Not bad, huh?”
I don’t bat an eye. Maya warned me: Jace knows full well neither she nor Kai has a laptop, and the school computer is too slow to open a file without crashing.
“Maya did a good job,” I say.
He raises an eyebrow but doesn’t push it. He watches me a moment, then turns back to the guy with the cooler. I keep walking.
You won’t get me, Walker.
The school’s yard has been transformed. The board racks have been pushed off to the side, the wetsuits stowed out of sight.
In their place, stands have been set up.
Strings of colorful pennants flutter between the posts.
Someone’s hung balloons on the sign—it’s lopsided, a little crooked, and it’s perfect.
Down on the beach, Maya and Kai are in the water with a group of beginners. A cardboard sign stuck in the sand reads:
Beginner surf lesson—$5
Maya’s waist-deep, her hands on the shoulders of a little girl wobbling on a foam board. Kai is in the water a little farther out, calm, arms crossed, watching two teenagers paddle on their stomachs. Maya looks up and spots me. She waves. I give a small wave back.
I head over to Evan’s stand.
Who can beat Officer Carter?—$5
Evan stands a few yards from a pyramid of tin cans—three on the bottom, two in the middle, one on top. He picks up the air rifle, settles it against his shoulder. Three shots, six cans down. The motion is slow, precise, almost boringly easy. He sets the rifle down and rebuilds the pyramid.
In front of him, a guy around nineteen—the one from the lodge gym, who laughed when Jace threw chalk in my face—shoulders the rifle with way too much confidence. Dylan, I think. He aims, fires, and misses. Fires again, misses. Fires a third time. The top can wobbles and falls.
“Not bad,” Evan says.
“Wait, wait, I’m not done!”
“Yeah, you are. That’s five bucks.”
Dylan digs through his pockets, muttering. Evan doesn’t smile, but the corners of his eyes crease.
Nobody’s beaten him. Nobody will.
Miles’s stand—Molkky—is the loudest. He’s set the pins up on a flattened strip of sand, and he calls every throw like it’s the Super Bowl.
“Twelve! Ladies and gentlemen, she’s going for twelve! It’s bold, it’s risky, it’s…”
The throwing stick lands a foot short of the pins.
“It’s a beautiful disaster. Next!”
People laugh. The kids all want a turn. Miles grabs the stick, resets the pins, takes the fives with a big grin, all in one continuous motion. He catches sight of me and shoots me a thumbs-up, still talking.
Farther down, Ruby and Hank are running a darts stand.
Ruby’s in a sleeveless Motorhead T-shirt and studded leather pants.
She’s got more earrings than I’d seen on her at book club.
She throws a dart without looking—and hits the bullseye.
Hank stands beside her, arms crossed, his leather vest stretched across a massive chest. He’s tall, bearded, a black bandana tied around his head.
He chews a toothpick and takes the dollars without a word.
Between them there’s a quiet ease that looks like forty years on the road together.
At the food stand, Yumi’s busy with cardboard containers of poke bowls—rice, raw salmon, avocado, sesame seeds, soy sauce. Next to her, Luke’s loading up open-faced focaccia: mortadella, mozzarella, arugula. He lifts a knife my way in greeting.
Noah’s behind the stand too, an apron tied over a too-tight gray T-shirt.
An unlit cigarette behind his ear, he slices bread, passes containers, tidies whatever Yumi sets on the makeshift counter.
He doesn’t smile, doesn’t talk to the customers.
But he’s here, and he’s helping. Yumi says something to him. He nods without looking up.
I buy a focaccia from Luke and bite into it as I keep walking. The mortadella melts on my tongue, salty, perfect.
Ahead of me, a group of kids runs by, shrieking with laughter. Flip gallops alongside them, a piece of driftwood in his mouth. One kid tries to grab it—Flip speeds up, jukes, doubles back the other way. A chase across the sand. The dog’s in heaven.
The raffle’s at the end of the row of stands, just before the beach.
Sierra’s sitting behind a little table with an open ticket book and a glass jar already half full of folded tickets. She looks like she’s done this her whole life.
“Hey, Summer! It’s crazy—three times as many people as last year,” she says, flipping her braids over one shoulder.
I shouldn’t give a damn. It’s their school, their day, their community. But the line at every stand, the noise, the music, the laughter—I did this in two days. And I’m proud, which is a problem.
“Good, I...”
The words catch in my throat.
A yellow board rests on a wooden stand, set back slightly from the table, a red ribbon tied around it. A warm yellow, golden, a little faded at the edges.
“It’s the same color as your hair.”
Jace used to say that every summer, setting it on the sand in front of me or rinsing it off after a session.
My board. The one he used to lend me.
My eyes travel down the rail and stop on the right side, near the tail. The letters are pale. The black marker’s been eaten away by the salt and the years. The ink is washed out, half gone. But the writing’s still there:
J + S
Jace’s handwriting, not mine. The S a shade bigger than the J. He’d done it one morning, crouched in the sand, while I ran to grab towels. When I came back, he’d flipped the board over and acted like nothing happened. I let him believe I hadn’t noticed.
I look up. Jace is about thirty feet away, near the shed. Arms crossed, motionless, watching me. His face gives nothing away.
He chose that board.
Out of all the boards in the shed, all the longboards and shortboards, he picked that one, waxed it, tied a red ribbon around it, and now anyone can win it with a five-dollar ticket.
To be cruel? To get rid of a memory? Or to see if I still remember?
My eyes go back to the yellow board.
Early one morning, the summer I was seventeen.
The sound of a pebble tapping against my bedroom window.
I wake up. The sky is gray, the room still dark. A second pebble hits the glass. I know who it is before I look.
Jace is down in the yard, barefoot, his wetsuit pulled up to his waist. The yellow board under one arm, my wetsuit in the other hand. He isn’t smiling. He’s waiting.
I throw on a swimsuit and go down barefoot. The grass is wet; the air smells of brine. I pull on the wetsuit he holds out.
Without a word, he takes my hand, pulls me toward the beach, and sets the board in the water.
“Like when we were kids,” he says.
Two of us on one board. Me in front, him behind. His hands on my waist for balance. The board wobbles under our combined weight, too small for the two of us now.
We catch a small wave. We stay up for three seconds, then the board flips. We fall. I laugh, spitting out water. He laughs too, his too-long hair stuck to his forehead.
We climb back on, one behind the other, feet in the water. The sun starts to break through the mist.
His lips brush my neck—a touch so light I think I imagined it. My hand closes around the rail of the board.
I turn. He’s there, so close, water on his lashes. He tilts his head… and I kiss him. Three summers I’ve dreamed about this.
His lips taste like salt. His fingers slide over the nape of my neck. The board rocks under us.
The kiss deepens, and I never want it to stop.
Two days before the end of everything.
“Summer? You okay?”
I blink. Sierra’s watching me, forehead creased.
“Yeah. Yeah, sorry,” I say, my voice rough.
“You want a ticket? Five dollars.”
I hand Sierra a bill. She tears a ticket from the book, hands me half, and drops the other in the jar.
“Good luck!”
I crumple the ticket in my palm and slip it into the back pocket of my shorts. It’s not like I’m going to win. There are at least two hundred tickets in that jar, and only one prize that matters.
I walk away from the table without looking at the board.
Without looking at Jace.