Chapter 20 #2
“We dig a drainage channel here,” Maddy was saying, carving a line, “so when the water comes up it splits around us instead of through us.”
“We should make it more of a moat. Oh, and we need a berm!” Noa pointed. “Right here. We build the berm first.”
“God, I missed you.” Maddy said fast and offhand, and Noa’s hands went still in the sand for half a second before she shoved Maddy’s shoulder and told her to keep digging.
Aspen got assigned the actual building. She packed wet sand into the bucket, tamped it down, turned out tower after tower, smoothing the walls with the flat of her palm until they held.
And Maisie was in charge of decoration, which meant Maisie disappeared down the beach for twenty minutes and came back with her shirt held out in front of her like a basket, full of treasure: a dozen shells, a ribbon of kelp, a single seagull feather, and three pieces of sea glass.
By the forty-minute mark, they had built a masterpiece.
Towers and a curtain wall and Noa’s beloved berm and a moat that was either a drainage channel or its own separate feature depending on who you asked, the whole thing crowned with shells and kelp and three triangles of sea glass catching the light.
The other teams were not faring as well.
The Dawgs were next to them and had been arguing for forty minutes—Jake wanted to build something BIG and Marion wanted to build something correct, and the two of them had clearly reached an impasse that neither was willing to surrender.
Their castle was half a giant lopsided mound and half a perfectly proportioned little villa, fused at the middle.
The Amazons’ castle was impeccable, but they’d built it eight feet too close to the water and Aspen watched the incoming wave coming up the slope and knew exactly what was about to happen.
“No!” All three Van der Bergs screamed at once as Ava and Zoe flung themselves down in front of it, lying full-length in the sand with their arms thrown wide like they could body-block the Pacific Ocean, and the wave went around them and through their castle and took the whole thing out to sea.
Grace tried not to laugh. Lena closed her eyes and inhaled slowly, her chest rising, as she visibly counted to some very high number.
Then she opened her eyes, looked at her daughters sprawled in the wet sand, and reached down to brush seaweed off Zoe’s shoulder.
The Peepin’ G’s had not gotten out of their chairs.
They had flagged down three children who were not in any way affiliated with the Cup and started directing the kids to build a castle by committee, except all three Gs were giving different instructions at the same time, and the children had stopped building and were just sitting there with blank stares on their faces.
The Tailgaters had packed sand around a pyramid of empty beer bottles, and every time they needed a taller turret, Jaden or Elijah simply chugged another beer and added the bottle to the stack.
And the Ghost Peppers, well they had built a perfectly respectable castle—solid, square, competent.
It just had nothing on it. No sea glass.
No shells. No feather. Hector stood over it with his hands on his hips, looking at the Sharks’ masterpiece, and called over, “Okay, who taught the eight-year-old to do that?”
Bunny made her rounds with a clipboard, narrating each castle to the crowd, and stopped at the Sharks’ for a long beat. She looked at the towers. She looked at the moat. She looked at the three little triangles of sea glass, and her hand went to her chest.
“This one,” she announced into the megaphone, “makes me feel something.”
The Sharks took the category. Maisie did a victory lap.
Noa called out their chant. Aspen looked over to high-five Maddy and found Maddy already looking at her grinning, sand on her cheek, eyes bright, and the high-five turned into Maddy catching her hand and squeezing it once, quick, before she let go.
Aspen would have built a thousand sandcastles for the ocean to swallow if that was the reward.
“To the watermelon eating contest!” Bunny called into the megaphone.
“Watermelon eating!” Jaden cracked his knuckles. “Say less. This is what I trained for.”
The watermelon-eating contest was Bunny’s idea of pacing: something messy and silly to run between the building event and the spikeball, so nobody had time to take themselves too seriously.
They lined everyone up at two long folding tables pushed together, twelve on one side, eleven on the other, a thick pink half-moon of watermelon in front of each of them, hands behind backs. No utensils. Face only.
“On my count!” Bunny called through the megaphone even though she was standing right next to them. “And no hands. Jaden, I am watching you specifically. EAT!”
The table descended into chaos. Aspen got her face into the rind and started working, and it was going fine, it was going great, right until she made the mistake of looking up.
Because directly across the table, Maddy Sterling—who had stayed crisp and composed and fully in control for five straight weeks—had her whole face buried in a watermelon, juice running down her chin and off her jaw and onto her chest. There was a seed stuck to her cheek and clumps of watermelon in her hair.
And she was laughing, helplessly, around a mouthful of fruit.
God, Aspen was so gone for this woman.
Jaden won by a longshot. He stood up, threw both arms in the air, and roared at the sky then pounded his fists on his chest, watermelon dripping off his face. His entire family jumped to their feet for him. It was the first event their team had won. Or come anywhere close to it.
Maddy wiped her chin with the back of her wrist, still catching her breath, and looked at Aspen with the seed still stuck to her cheek.
“You have—” Aspen gestured at her own face. “There’s a—”
Maddy wiped the wrong cheek. “Did I get it?”
Aspen burst into laughter. “Yep.”
* * *
Spikeball was the last event of the day, and it was the one Aspen had been looking forward to all afternoon, because spikeball put her and Maddy side-by-side in a fast-paced game with limbs flying and lots of reasons to accidentally touch.
They were matched up against Jake and Chloe. Aspen rolled her shoulders. Maddy cracked her neck. And the match began.
They were perfectly synced within twenty seconds, reading each other’s bodies, playing off the other’s every move.
The ball pinged off the net low and fast. Aspen dug it up; Maddy set it without looking; Aspen spiked it down quicker than Jake could get to it.
“Point,” Maddy said, deadpan, and held up a flat hand, and Aspen high-fived it with a grin.
Across the net, Jake and Chloe were having a different kind of game.
They were good—Jake was a natural athlete and Chloe had quick reflexes—but they kept getting in their own way, because they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
Every time they scored a point Jake scooped Chloe off her feet and spun her in a full circle.
The first time he did it, Chloe shrieked and smacked his shoulder and told him to put her down, and did not look even slightly like she’d wanted him to listen.
By the third point she’d stopped pretending.
She was bumping him with her hip between serves, laughing way too hard at things that weren’t that funny, touching his arm to make a comment she could’ve made fine without the touch.
In the end, Maddy and Aspen took the win.
Round two was Noa and Maisie against Lena and Ava, and it was a bloodbath.
Noa was good and Maisie was eight, which meant Maisie’s job was mostly to serve and then provide morale, which she did at full volume, while Lena and her eldest dismantled them with calm viciousness and zero remorse.
Ava put the final ball away and pointed at her mother without a word.
Lena pointed back with a smile and said “That’s my girl,” and then pulled Ava into a hug.
By the time the sun started dropping toward the water, Bunny was up on her platform with her reading glasses, tallying the day.
“Alright, my gladiators!” The megaphone squealed. “After two full days of blood, sweat, and one extremely contested egg-and-spoon ruling we are NOT relitigating, Glenda—”
“It was a foul!” Glenda called from her chair.
“—the standings are as follows.” Bunny dragged it out. “At the top of the board, we have—a tie!—going into the semi-finals to battle it out for a coveted spot in the tug-of-war finals, we have: the SHARKS and the AMAZONS!”
Maisie screamed. Aspen got an arm thrown around her from one side by Maddy and from the other by Noa and a flying eight-year-old somewhere around her waist, all four of them in a bouncing group hug.
“Two points back, and I would not count them out, we have… the DAWGS!” Bunny rumbled.
Jake barked while rolling his fist in the air. Olly and Chloe followed suit. Marion gave a half-hearted first roll but did not do the bark.
“And rounding out our semi-finals, we have…The Ghost Peppers!” The Reyes’ burst into cheers.
“That means—” Bunny pressed a hand to her heart “—we say farewell to the OH G’s and the TAILGATERS, who fought the good fight.”
“We didn’t fight shit,” Hank said cheerfully, cracking another beer. “But we had a great time.”
The Peepin’ G’s accepted their elimination like deposed royalty, waving regally from their chairs, already informing anyone nearby that they’d thrown the whole thing on purpose to give the young people a chance.
And the Cup tipped over into evening.
By full dark, the games were packed away, the grills were down to embers, and the families had spread out across the sand in a loose patchwork of blankets and low chairs.
Bunny was bossing around the pyrotechnics who had arrived to put on the fireworks display as they loaded up the barge.
In just a few minutes they’d float out a couple hundred feet and set off the fireworks that she and Maddy had picked up together.