32. Summer
Summer
TUESDAY
Yesterday shook me: the waves, the bracelet, Jace’s hand… My stomach’s still in knots.
I won’t fall back asleep.
I push the sheet back, plant my feet on the warm floorboards. Better to go for a run than lie here counting the fan blades turning. I pull on leggings, a sports bra, a T-shirt, my sneakers. The motion is automatic—years of training.
The bungalow door closes without a sound behind me.
The lodge is still asleep. The air is cool, heavy with moisture. Mist wraps the bougainvillea and blurs the outlines of the nearby bungalows. Not a sound, not a voice. Even the cats have vanished.
I head down the gravel path, phone in hand. Dad texted me at four in the morning—noon in Oxford.
Sorry, sweetheart—conferences all day. All good? Call me tomorrow.
I type “All good” and slip my phone into my leggings pocket.
On the step of one of the cabins, I notice a still figure. Boxers, no shirt, a mug in one hand, a cigarette in the other. The orange ember is the only color in all that gray.
Noah.
I stop in front of him. He looks up at me, bored.
“Hey,” I say, surprised.
He drags on his cigarette, exhales, nods at me. The smoke blends into the mist.
He lives here. In one of the long-term cabins. The full ashtray on the step and the chipped mug in his hand are enough to say so.
“Run with me?” I ask.
He stares at me like I just suggested a marathon. Then he takes a sip of coffee before answering.
“I’m busy.”
“Busy doing what? Moping in your boxers?”
The corner of his mouth pulls down. He grunts, looks at his cigarette, then the gray sky, then me.
“No, Summer.”
“Come on, like old times,” I press.
“Old times…” he sighs.
Just as I’m about to give up, he sets down his mug, stands, and disappears inside. I hear a drawer open, a muffled curse, the sound of someone wrestling into clothes.
He comes back in shorts, sneakers, and a black NASA T-shirt that’s way too tight. The one from the Lighthouse Diner, the one he wore that day under his apron. Back then, he swam in it.
He’s still got the cigarette in his mouth.
Without a word, I take it from his lips. I crush it under my sneaker, on the wood slats, next to the full ashtray.
Noah looks down at the butt, opens his mouth, closes it. Then he falls into step beside me.
We start to run.
Well—I run. Noah survives.
We run along Crescent Beach on the boardwalk.
The air is thick, clinging to my skin. The skatepark slides past on our left, ramps and rails ghostly in the gray morning.
Farther on, to our right, the pier and its pilings, disappearing into the mist. The sea is almost invisible, but you can hear it—a low, steady rumble.
I adjust my pace. I could go at least twice as fast, but Noah’s already struggling. His breathing’s gone wheezy, his strides heavy.
Past the pier, the path leaves the sand and turns toward the cliff. The climb starts almost right away, steep, rocky—a trail that punishes knees and lungs. The ground is uneven, roots break the surface, stones roll under our feet. The mist thickens between the pines and the cypress trees.
Out of breath, Noah slows. When I was a teenager, we used to run this route together. Often just the two of us, sometimes with Jace. Noah could keep up. He’d talk while he ran, laugh when I passed him on the climbs.
A few years without exercise and too many cigarettes leave their mark.
In the last hundred yards, the trail gets even steeper. Noah’s swearing picks up. I wait for him at the top, barely winded. He arrives thirty seconds later, red-faced and drenched in sweat. He doubles over, hands on his knees, mouth open.
“You okay?” I ask.
He flips me off.
Star Park is ahead of us, in the mist.
The chain-link fence appears first. The metal’s eaten away by sea spray, rust flaking off in orange patches. Behind it, the rides’ silhouettes take shape—the still Ferris wheel, the skeleton of the carousel, the caved-in roof of the haunted house. The fog swallows the structures farthest off.
The park is dead. The wind sets a metal frame creaking. Moisture has swollen the wood of the booths, cracked the paint. Moss climbs the posts. Sand has taken over the walkways.
A scrap of yellow-and-black police tape hangs from the fence to my right, faded by sun and rain, snagged between two links. I walk past without stopping.
A little farther on, I spot a big hole in the fence, the edges bent inward.
“Want to go in?” I say.
“We’re not… allowed in here,” Noah pants. “Evan’ll… haul us in.”
“Five minutes. I’m not getting on the rides, I’ll be fine.”
He shakes his head. But when I slip through the hole, he follows, grumbling, forced to twist himself sideways to fit.
The silence inside is thicker. The sound of the sea reaches us muffled, filtered through the structures and the fog. Our footsteps crunch over the debris.
We walk between the booths. Their paint peels off in long ribbons—red, yellow, blue, the colors of a place that used to be happy.
We skirt an overturned popcorn cart. The bumper cars are buried under sand and weeds, seats split open, steering wheels bent. Vegetation has reclaimed every open space—the cracks, the seams, the steps.
It smells of damp, iron, and salt.
I look up at the Ferris wheel.
It’s enormous—bigger than I remember, or maybe the mist makes it look more imposing. The cars hang motionless, except one that sways. It creaks in the wind.
The number painted on its side: 17.
The wind, the height, the lights below… It all comes back.
The summer I’m seventeen. Star Park is swarming with people, music blares from the speakers, neon flickers and lights up faces in pink and blue. The group’s somewhere below, between the bumper cars and the shooting gallery, out of sight now.
Car 17 stops at the top.
Jace is next to me. We kissed yesterday morning on the beach and haven’t talked about it since. We haven’t told anyone. Tonight, we managed to get on the Ferris wheel alone without it looking planned—or maybe it did look planned.
The wind is warm. Jace has draped his arm along the edge of the car, just behind me—not around my shoulders. All of Coral Bay is below us—the lights of the pier, the white line of foam, the rooftops of Main Street.
Jace turns to me… and he kisses me.
It’s different from the beach. He kisses me slower, surer. His fingers settle at the nape of my neck, my breath tangles with his, the car barely sways.
When he pulls back, he’s not smiling. He looks serious, almost worried.
“Be my girlfriend, Summer.”
I shake my head. He can’t be serious.
“Jace… I leave for New York in five days.”
“Don’t see what that’s got to do with it.”
“I—”
“You don’t have to answer right now,” he cuts in. “We’ve got five nights left. We can head back to the others.”
He looks down at the lights of the park, then back up at me.
“Or… we could disappear for a while.”
“My place?”
He searches my eyes.
“Only if you want to.”
I slide my hand into his. Car 17 sinks back toward the lights.
A hand lands on my shoulder. I jump.
Noah’s right behind me, his face shiny with sweat. Car 17 creaks in the wind.
“Summer?”
I blink. The fog. The rust. The creaking metal.
“Let’s get out of here,” I say. “This place gives me the creeps.”
Noah doesn’t argue. We go back through the hole in the fence, one after the other, not a word.
I lead him to the edge of the cliff. We sit facing the sea, on a flat rock. The sun is coming up. A pink line widens above the horizon, the fog lifts in sheets, the ocean appears—dark, then gray, then blue.
Still red and soaked, Noah catches his breath. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, spits into the grass beside the rock. Charming.
I haven’t even broken a sweat. The cool air prickles my arms.
We sit side by side, still, watching the waves smash against the rocks below.
Jace showed me this spot, The Last Ride.
The pros come here when conditions are good.
For everyone else, it takes a lot of experience, a lot of ego, or a questionable survival instinct.
“The Last Ride,” he’d said, smiling. “You catch the wave… and sometimes you don’t come back. ”
Surfers have a sense of humor.
Once his breathing’s back to normal, Noah glances at me, then looks away.
“You okay?” he asks.
A laugh slips out of me.
“I should be the one asking you that.”
“I mean back at the park. In front of the Ferris wheel… you looked like you’d seen a ghost.”
“Something like that.”
I sigh before I go on.
“I kissed Jace on that Ferris wheel.”
“Yeah. I saw you two,” Noah says.
A gull cries above us, short, hoarse calls. Noah jams his hands into his pockets.
“You know… I had a crush on you when I was a teenager.”
My eyes go wide.
“Had it bad, actually.”
I stare at him.
“Shit… I had no idea.”
Noah manages a half-smile, still not looking at me.
“I know. You only had eyes for Jace. But deep down, I couldn’t help hoping that…”
He exhales, shakes his head. A gull dives toward the cliffs and disappears.
“That you’d choose me,” he finally says.
“Maybe I should have,” I murmur.
“Why do you say that?” Noah asks, surprised.
I stare at my dust-covered sneakers. If I look at him, I won’t have the nerve to go through with it.
“Because I’m sure you’d never have bet a hundred bucks that you could sleep with me.”
“What?”
“Don’t act surprised,” I say, annoyed.
“What are you talking about?”
“Stop it, Noah.”
Six years swallowing those words, and he looks at me like I just made it up.
“You’re the one who brought it up, at the diner. To Luke and Ryan. I heard you, Noah!”
He opens his mouth, closes it. Then he drags a hand down his face.
Of course he’s embarrassed.
I look out at the horizon. It’s sharp now, a straight line between water and sky.
Noah shakes his head.
“Fuck… Summer…”
But I’m already on my feet.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore. It’s humiliating enough as it is.”
“No, Summer, you don’t underst—”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it. Any. More.”
A wall. The same one I built at seventeen in my father’s car, between the Now leaving Coral Bay sign and the San Francisco airport.
Noah stares at me. I hold out my hand to help him up.
He takes it, gets to his feet, then opens his mouth again.
“Race you?” I cut in.
I don’t wait for an answer. I take off down the trail, toward the beach.
My strides stretch out. The wind slaps my face, my feet pound the ground, and I hold the pace.
Behind me, I hear Noah—his ragged breath, his heavy strides, a curse when he trips on a root.
I speed up, just enough.
The slope eases, the sand comes back, the pier takes shape in the morning light. Noah coughs behind me, then stops. I don’t look back.
I run all the way to the lodge, along the boardwalk, between the palm trees and the sleeping cabins. The door of Bungalow 17 closes behind me. I lean back against it and close my eyes.
My breathing is calm. There’s a slight pull in my right foot. My hands aren’t shaking.
Six years. Six years I haven’t told a soul.