by Sarah Ockler
“Sam’s girl! Sam’s girl! Sam’s girl!” the entire kitchen chants, and I realize in that moment how many people a raucous game of beer pong can attract. I take the ball out of the cup and chug it down, letting out a loud hiccup that I’d probably regret if I was sober, which for the record I’m not.
“Don’t worry, girls,” Eddie says, putting his arm around me. “The good thing about beer pong is, even when you lose, you win.”
Jake peels Eddie’s arm from my shoulders. “Anna,” he says, “where’s that boyfriend of yours, anyway?”
“He’s not my —”
“Here.” Sam sneaks up and wraps his arms around me from behind. My hair is up and he’s breathing on the back of my neck, moaning softly so no one else can hear. If I was content before, now I’m effervescent. I’m an empty-headed floating feather again, a feather who is also effervescent. Hiccup. Someone could douse me with beer and I wouldn’t even know it.
I turn and kiss him, eliciting another round of catcalls. “I see you’ve been losing at beer pong,” he says, smiling in front of the cups scattered all over the sticky table.
“Yeah,” I say. “But the thing about beer pong is that even when you win, you win. I mean, even when you win, you — oh, never mind. We totally lost.” I wriggle loose to grab another beer, which has somehow become suddenly not so disgusting.
Frankie and Jake grab the cups off the table and restack them for the next match.
“Anna, you’re up,” Frankie says.
“Sorry, guys.” Sam takes the beer from my hand and sets it on the table. “I’m kidnapping your MVP. She needs a time-out.”
I smile and wave to Frankie as she disappears into another match. Sam navigates us through the mob in the house, which has become even more tangled in the last hour. Lots of people are still dancing, while others are strewn across various couches and floor space, some laughing, others making out, a web of arms and legs and pedicured toes with tiny silver rings.
We make our way outside, past the pool, and across the lawn. The backyard is packed but not as noisy. Surprisingly, no one is on the steps that lead down to the beach, and no one seems to be on the beach, either.
We sit on the bottom step listening to the ocean, my legs outstretched and draped over Sam’s. In the dark, reflected only by the near-full moon overhead, the water is black and frothy like licorice soup. As we sit in silence, the party noise fades behind us and I start to regain some of the brain cells I sacrificed during beer pong.
“It’s weird,” Sam finally says, one hand rubbing my bare (and thankfully shaved) leg. “I’ve lived here my whole life, but I never stop being amazed at how different the water looks at night.”
I squint and try to see beyond the immediate shoreline, past where the waves crest and foam and crash against the sand. Everything is black. If I try to walk in the water beyond the moon’s sheen on the surface, I’ll drop right off the earth into outer space.
“I know what you mean,” I say. “I’ve only been here a couple weeks and already I can’t imagine not waking up to this.”
It’s the first time I’ve allowed myself to go beyond the happy bubble of our vacation, beyond our lazy days on the beach and secret nights at the Shack. Beyond the ocean and the sand and the Perinos being happy and, most importantly, Sam. I think briefly about my life back home. Anna, daughter of real estate deal-closer. Anna, sad yet supportive neighbor kid. Anna, haunted by secrets.
I rest my head against Sam’s chest and know as his heart pounds softly in my ear that Zanzibar is my time capsule. I want to seal myself in this place, locked in this moment with Sam on the rickety sea-washed stairs in front of the ocean, not to be opened, examined, or otherwise disturbed for a hundred million years.
“Can we go somewhere?” I ask. I don’t want to think ahead of this night and am suddenly overcome with the urgent need to cram as much as possible into it.
“Sure,” he says, shifting my legs so he can get up. “Want to walk out to the Vista?”
Artists’ Vista is a narrow curve of shoreline that juts out on the other side of the pier beyond Moonlight Boulevard. Frankie showed it to me our first day here when we were waiting for Red and Jayne to get ice cream, but we haven’t gone out there on our midnight missions. I imagine at this time of night, there’s only one reason to go out there.
“Yes.” I answer immediately, standing to brush the sand from my shorts. “Let me go tell Frankie so she doesn’t freak out later.”
“Good idea,” he says. “And put your sweatshirt on. I’m going to grab a blanket, too.”
I’ve lost track of time, but it must be close to two in the morning. I’m not tired, and judging from the sound bouncing out of the house as I approach, neither are the beautiful party people.
Frankie’s where I left her in the kitchen, except that now she’s sitting on a barstool in front of the beer pong table with her arm around another girl, both in bikini tops and shorts, interviewing her companion for the camera about the loss of her clothing.
“Heyyyyyy,” she says when she sees me, stumbling from her perch in front of the door-slash-table. “Look who’s back!”
“Frankie, where’s your shirt?” I ask. “I lost it in strip beer pong.” She speaks slowly, making an exaggerated frown.
“Sounds like this game went downhill fast,” Sam says, coming in behind me.
“Hey, look who showed up!” Jake comes in from one of the mysterious corridors of the house with a bottle of Jägermeister. “Who wants to do a belly shot?”
“Off your hairy gut?” Sam asks. “No thanks.”
“No, silly!” Frankie hops off the stool and nearly drags down the other beer pong shirt-loser in the process. “Me and Lisa — I mean Leah — are the shot glasses.”
“Right,” Sam says. “Anyway, no thanks.”
“More for us!” Jake pulls Frankie back to her spot on the table next to Lisa / Leah, who still hasn’t said more than two words but releases a dopey giggle whenever Frankie speaks or moves and, for the record, looks like she’s about Katie’s age — not that it matters to Jake.
I don’t know how long it will take us to get to the Vista or how long we’ll hang out, so I tell Frankie not to wait up. After confirming that Jake is planning to stay the night with her, I hug her goodbye and ask her not to drink any more unless she wants to spend the whole next day throwing up.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” she says, leaning her whole body against mine from her position in front of the door-slash-table. “I won’t. And also, I love you, Anna. You are my best friend in the world. I’m not just saying that because I’m drunk, either. I mean, I am drunk, but I still love you even when I’m not.”
“I love you, too, Frankie,” I say. “Now please get off of me.”
She laughs and leans back on the stool, her long, tanned legs dangling over the edge next to laughing Leah, the pong-turned-Frankie fan club awaiting her next move.
I grab my backpack from an out-of-the way closet Eddie tucked it in earlier and dig out my sweatshirt, leaving my fake slumber party gear, journal, and toothbrush in the bag and dropping it next to Frankie’s on the closet floor.
I locate a bathroom along the hallway back to the kitchen and duck inside to put on my sweatshirt and do a quick hair and face check. As if by magic, I even find some lotion for my legs and a bowl of mints on the sink.
Butterflies are batting their wings against my rib cage as I take a final look in the mirror.
The next time I see you, Crazy Anna, you won’t recognize me.
twenty-three
It doesn’t take long to reach the Vista, and when we arrive I recognize the view immediately. All of California’s beach towns light up the coast like fireworks, just as I’d seen in Matt’s picture-perfect postcards a thousand times.
“We used to come here a lot for picnics when I was a kid,” Sam says, shaking out a blanket for us on the sand. “I haven’t been here in a while.”
I sit on the blanket next to him. “Tell m
e a story,” I say. “I just want to listen.”
“Sure. Come here.” He lies down and pulls me against his chest, stroking my hair. He tells me about growing up in California, and how it’s so hard to make friends because everyone you meet leaves at the end of the summer. His voice is low and soft, muffled through his chest against my ear.
“The most tragic thing about California is that nothing is permanent or real here,” he says. “It gets to you, you know?”
“No. I wish I could stay here forever.”
“But you can’t, Anna. That’s the point.” He lifts my chin and looks at my face. “You’re like this beautiful, crazy ghost, and when I wake up, you’ll be gone, and I’ll wonder if any of this really happened.”
“I know what you mean,” I say, wishing I didn’t.
Sam asks me about New York, rubbing my back lightly as I talk. I tell him about our childhood, carefully skirting the tragedy that so defines me. But all my real childhood stories — the important ones — reach the same inevitable end.
Before — together.
After — apart.
Before — happy.
After — sad.
Being with Sam on this trip has been like a vacation from sorrow, but now I can’t talk about growing up without thinking about Matt. The effort of pushing him from my thoughts and words drains me. Finally, his memory wins out, creeping into my mind and making me go quiet against the sound of the ocean and Sam’s breathing.
Right after Matt died, I was afraid to do basically everything. I couldn’t even bite my nails or sniff my shirt to see if I needed deodorant without feeling like he was watching me. I willed and prayed and begged him to give me a sign that he was watching, that he was with me, so I would know.
But he never did. Time moved on. And I stopped being afraid. Until right now, vulnerable and insecure and a little bit drunk. Lying in the sand and falling in crazy love with someone I just met. Matt is watching me. Observing. Possibly judging. And the worst part of it is, I don’t want to wake up under his landslide of sad rocks anymore. I don’t want to taste the marzipan frosting and the clove cigarettes. I don’t want to think about the blue glass necklace or the books he read to me on his bed or the piles of college stuff or some random boy in the grocery store wearing his donated clothes.
I don’t want to be the dead boy’s best-friend-turned-something-else.
Or the really supportive neighbor friend.
Or the lifelong keeper of broken-hearted secrets.
I just want to be floating, suspended here in my California time capsule with neither yesterday’s dusk nor tomorrow’s dawn anywhere on the horizon.
Erased.
What’s your earliest memory? I asked Matt. We were washing his car while Frankie made sandwiches in the kitchen.
Most of them are in California. The ocean. I don’t really remember the first time I saw it, just how I felt.
How?
Impossibly small. Impossibly insignificant. And completely safe. Sounds crazy, right?
No.
What’s yours?
I wanted to tell him it was my fifteenth birthday party two weeks earlier, because everything that came before that night was a pale moon behind the sunshine of that kiss. Instead, I told him about sitting in the garden with my dad while Matt caught caterpillars and tried to feed them oak leaves from the tree in our backyard. I must have been about three.
I wanted to make a caterpillar farm. I can’t believe you remember that, Anna. Matt smiled, rinsing the car soap from his hands.
Not as cool as seeing the ocean for the first time, but it still makes me smile.
I promise I’ll take you there someday. I want to see it with you. I want to see everything with you.
Sam looks at me hard and serious, like he’s trying to read my mind. I can’t find the words for this conversation and even if I could, I’d probably just cry. So I do the next best thing and kiss him.
Erased.
He kisses me back, deeper and more intense, and moves on top of me, pulling off my sweatshirt, his hips pressing against mine, harder and closer than ever before. I feel things that I’ve never felt, in places I didn’t know existed, like a hundred hungry little flowers waking up and blooming in the sun after a long, harsh winter.
Somewhere beneath my newly tanned skin I know that I should wait, that it should be special, that it should be with someone I can wake up with in the morning, tomorrow and always.
What if he thinks I’m a tourist girl looking for some romantic long-distance love affair just so she can share his gushing, beach-stained postcards with her friends?
No — after this vacation, that’s it. Sam and I will no longer exist in the context of Sam and I. I will lose him, just like Matt. Whether by death or the impossible distance between New York and California, soon I will wake up, and Sam will be gone.
Sam, whose sea locks fall in soft waves on my cheeks as he kisses me.
Sam, whose wild green eyes are on me like his hands, searching and finding, hot and intense.
Sam, whose skin tastes like salt and summer.
Sam, whose last name is — a total mystery.
“Wait!” I pull away from him as he fumbles with the ties on my bikini top. “I just realized that we don’t know each other’s last names. Mine’s Reiley.” I look at him with a sense of urgency, as though this new piece of information will sway the forward momentum of this crazy night.
He laughs. “Macintosh.”
“Like the apple?” I ask.
“Like the computer.”
“Same thing, right?”
“Um, Anna?”
“Yeah?”
“No more talking.” He smiles.
“Okay,” I whisper, running my fingers along his lower lip. My mind is racing faster than my heart, but I’m not sure how to stop it. I don’t want to stop it. I want to devour everything about him. I want to taste his mouth and smell his shampoo and then die with this memory, immediate and swift, before anything can take it away.
He moves close to kiss me again, but I push my hand against his chest. “Sam, I mean, it’s okay. Do you have something?” I wait for the glimmer of recognition to rise on his face.
“Yeah,” he says, nodding and reaching for his sweatshirt beside me. I hear the crinkling of paper as he tears open the condom.
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“Yes.”
Sam kisses me hard, breathing through his nose as he unzips, unties, unbuttons, and pulls our clothes down, kissing my stomach as he goes. His mouth moves slowly back to my lips, murmuring softly as I wrap my legs around him and pull him inside.
It doesn’t hurt exactly — it’s just kind of — strange. At first I hold my breath, my shorts and bikini bottoms clinging limply around one of my ankles like they didn’t run off in time and now have to sit through the whole act without making any noise, lest they be discovered.
Sam tangles his hands up in my hair, pushing back and forth against my body like the waves in front of us. I sense his rhythm and relax as my shoulders and hips dig trenches in the sand beneath our blanket. Through the silk of his hair, I watch the low, orange moon, tasting the salt of his skin on my mouth, breathing hard, waiting for the stars to fall down around us.
But they don’t fall.
They just fade, looking on in silence, lingering over the rushing waves until Sam disentangles from my body and I sit up, pulling my clothes back on.
The sparkle of the night sky pales with the receding tide, evaporating in the pink dawn along with the albatross I’ve at long last abandoned.
Somehow, I don’t feel any different than I felt in front of the mirror back at the party. I’m not older. I’m not smarter. Nothing in the murky waters of my life has been suddenly clarified or demystified now that I’m a member of the secret club.
Sam lies with his eyes closed, arms crossed over his chest. “Stay with me, Anna Reiley,” he whispers sleepily, smiling. I reach down and touch his stomach with ligh
t fingers.
“I’m just going to rinse my feet off. I’ll be right back.” I hook my flip-flops through one finger and walk barefoot to the edge of the water, my unbuttoned jean shorts slung loose over my bikini bottoms. Clumped with sand, the fringe clings to my thighs like wet spiderwebs.
I let the water lick my feet and wait for a sign that I’ll be okay, that what I did is okay, that everything is okay. I look out over the licorice-soup ocean and wait.
The waves whisper against the shore as they have all night, knowing and ancient and unchanged.
The sand and the vanishing moon and the hotel beach umbrellas closed like flowers at dusk sit still, unaltered, unaffected.
The sea surges forward over my toes, only to recede, her opalescent slick on the sand evaporating instantly. I took the magic pill, and now it’s done.
I rinse my hands in the water and turn back toward Sam. It must be after five. He’s sitting up now, watching me with his hazy green eyes, shivering and smiling.
“What?” I ask, digging in the sand with my toe, hiding my own smile.
“Don’t move, Anna Reiley,” he says. “Right now, everything is perfect.”
twenty-four
We walk along the shore at dawn, arms locked, heads down, scanning the damp sand as it passes below our feet. My pockets grow heavier with each piece of sea glass I collect — greens, blues, whites, ambers. After three weeks on the beach, I’m still amazed that pieces of things that were once whole, once part of something else, can break and fall into the ocean, traveling thousands of miles and years only to end up here, passengers in the pockets of my white sweatshirt.
The rest of the beach comes to life, preparing for the morning tourists. Hotel staff scuttle along the strip like tiny ants in khaki shorts and pastel polo shirts, cleaning, straightening, anticipating. As the umbrellas yawn and stretch and open their white-and-yellow petals against the sun, Sam smiles at me.
“You okay, Anna?” he asks.
