“Watch it,” I growled, “or I’ll feed you to the ghost crabs.”
“Hey, that’s what I can be for Halloween in my building this year,” Will said, snapping his wet fingers. “The kids’ll be terrified. Or really confused. I don’t think anyone in New York knows what a ghost crab is.”
I grimaced. Halloween? With its Indian corn and pumpkins and nip in the air? Now that was surreal. I could barely imagine it.
“At Halloween, it’ll have been two months,” I whispered.
I didn’t have to say two months we’ll have been apart. Will knew what I meant. He sank deeper into the water, resting his chin on its surface and looking up into my eyes.
“What’ll it be like, do you think?” he wondered. “Two months isn’t very long.”
“It’ll feel long,” I said. Now my voice was wobbly. “But maybe after that, it will feel less so.”
I wondered if that would be even worse.
Will pulled me into a sad, salty kiss.
“Forget the ocean,” he said. “What am I going to do when I don’t have you every day?”
I was going to cry. If I didn’t kiss Will right then, I was going to cry. So I did kiss him—with a heat and urgency that felt different from before.
We were heading into the end and we both knew it. It was time to weather the bitter and embrace the sweet and suck the marrow out of all the time we had left.
* * *
A couple of nights later, it was Will who had a plan.
“Guess what we’re doing tomorrow?” he said as we cleaned up at The Scoop. “I signed us up for something.”
I cocked my head.
“You signed us up …”
I paused and pondered what was going on on the island the next day. Then I gasped.
“You did not!” I said, slapping at Will with my bleachy rag.
“I did,” Will said. “We’re entered in that sand castle competition you told me about.”
“Will,” I sputtered. “People take that competition very seriously. They, like, train for it. My sister’s been practicing with her girlfriends for months. They’re making a re-creation of the Sydney Opera House.”
Will snorted.
“You’re kidding, right?” he said. “Anna, I don’t want to dis your sister, but she doesn’t seem like the Sydney Opera House type. Have you guys been to Australia?”
“Oh, please,” I said. “We haven’t even been to California. But the Sydney Opera House is a big favorite with the sand castle competition. Someone does one almost every year. That and Hogwarts.”
Will’s eyes went wide and he put a hand on top of his head.
“Oh, man,” he said with a laugh. “I didn’t know. You’d think for something this hard-core, they would have had an entrance fee or something to keep out the dilettantes. I just went to the chamber of commerce and put our names on a clipboard.”
“Oh, well,” I said, waving him off. “It’s all just for fun.”
Then I narrowed my eyes and added, “Grueling, cutthroat, punishing fun.”
“This is not good,” Will said. “But wouldn’t it be lame to be a no-show? Especially since we got slot number six in the line-up. I think that’s pretty close to the main action.”
I shook my head in confusion.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “When did you sign us up for this thing?”
“Um, I guess it was in July,” Will said. Suddenly, he looked a little sheepish. “July fifth, as a matter of fact.”
I put a finger to my chin.
“I get it now,” I said. “That’s why you showed up at my house in the rain. You need a partner for the sand castle competition. You just had to get that blue ribbon, didn’t you?”
“What can I say,” Will said, leaning rakishly on his broom. “I’m a sportsman above all else.”
I spritzed my bleachy water in his direction. But after wiping a few more tables, I stopped and turned to him.
“How did you know we’d even be together now?” I asked softly. “When you signed us up in July?”
Will shrugged.
“It just seemed impossible that we wouldn’t be,” he said.
He walked toward me, trailing the broom behind him.
“Call it a leap of faith,” he said, alighting before me and planting a soft kiss on my lips.
I wrapped my arms around his shoulders.
“So you had faith in me?” I asked, half flirting, half serious.
“I had faith in us,” Will said. “Still do.”
Will’s broom clattered to the floor as I kissed him. And that was all the talking we did for a long while.
“Will?” I asked the next morning, “have you built a sand castle? Like … ever?”
“Well …” Will pondered this question as he mucked about our little lot on the South Beach, piling sand, smoothing it, and piling it again.
“I remember one summer when I was a kid,” he said, “we went to Long Island and my mom taught us how to make drip castles. You know, where you fill your fist with super-wet sand and just drip-drip-drip it until you have these pointy towers.”
I gasped. I would have covered Will’s mouth if my hand hadn’t been breaded with sand.
“Whatever you do,” I said in a low voice, “don’t mention drip castles around these folks. It’s the sign of a complete amateur.”
“I am a complete amateur,” Will declared without a hint of embarrassment.
I sighed and glanced at the banner hanging directly over our heads. It read FOURTEENTH ANNUAL DUNE ISLAND SAND CASTLE COMPETITION!
I cast shifty looks at the castle builders stationed on either side of us. They, of course, were well into their architectural feats. It was only ten in the morning and I already saw some flying buttresses and six-foot-tall turrets.
If I’d been really brave, I would have walked the whole gauntlet of sandy construction sites to check out the competition. We were placed in a straight line that extended for about half a mile. The castle builders seemed to fit three different profiles.
First there were the gray-haired curmudgeons who’d been doing this forever and worked alone (or perhaps with a couple of cowed grandkids as assistants). They grumbled and growled through their castle building, working as intently as scientists trying to cure cancer.
Then there were the teams, like my sister Sophie’s team of six fourteen-year-old girls. They gave themselves cute titles and usually functioned as both competitors and cheerleaders. Whenever things got too quiet along the assembly line, they’d start jumping around in their bikinis, hooting and shouting things like, “Team Patty Cake rocks!”
Finally, there was the pathetic minority—tourists who’d joined as a lark and had no idea what they were getting into.
Somehow—after a lifetime of looking down my nose at summer people—there I was in the last category. I was a dismal dabbler. No better than a shoobee.
But I loved Will, and he’d made this sweet gesture for me, so I was embracing the humiliation. I’d instructed myself to smile (and smile big) when Dune Island High kids strolled by and snickered. I’d agreed when Sophie had begged me to deny that I knew her, much less shared a bedroom and DNA with her.
And I wore sunglasses and a big floppy hat along with my shorts and bikini top.
When Caroline and Sam had stopped by our construction site a half hour earlier, Caroline had given my wardrobe selection a skeptical squint.
“What?” I said defensively as I adjusted my enormous hat. “It’s for UVA protection!”
“Uh-huh,” Caroline said. Then she gave my bare brown torso a pointed look. I had the sort of honey-colored complexion that never burned. By this time of the year, my whole body was always as brown as an almond. Between that and the thick layer of SPF 50 I was wearing today, I didn’t really have to worry about burning.
Caroline shook her head and gave me an indulgent smile. Then she gripped me by my upper arms and looked me straight in the sunglasses.
“Anna,” she said,
“I love you. I support you. But we can’t be seen hanging around with … this.”
She gestured at the crude beginnings of our castle.
“So we’ll see you after you’re done, okay?” she said gently.
I nodded somberly.
“I understand,” I said. “It’s too late for me. Go save yourself.”
Then we both laughed so hard that we fell to our knees in the sand, crushing a good portion of the moat around the castle.
“All right, all right,” Sam said, helping Caroline to her feet and pointing her toward the lighthouse at the southern end of the island. Every year the chamber of commerce set up a carnival in the lighthouse parking lot to coincide with the sand castle competition. I could already see the distant swing ride, roller coaster, and carousel flinging people about.
“We’re getting breakfast, then going to the carnival,” Sam said. “See you there?”
“If we make it out alive,” I called dramatically, whereupon Will pretended to give me a swat.
“You better curb the attitude, Allison,” he said with a grin.
I laughed and smiled at the little laser-printed sign that had been planted in front of our building site. It read STARDUST MEMORIES, BY LEONARD ZELIG AND ALLISON PORCHNIK.
About that, I had no objections whatsoever.
Once Caroline and Sam had left, though, and Will and I had gotten to work in earnest, I did have a few complaints. A lot of them, actually. I’d always known sand castle building was hard, but not this hard.
“Why couldn’t this be an ice cream competition?” I grumbled as I slapped sand around with little plan or purpose.
“Anna, don’t take this the wrong way,” Will said, “but I’m not the only amateur here.”
“I know.” I sighed. My experience making sand forts with my siblings had given me exactly no edge in this contest. So far all Will and I had done was dig our foundation and assembled a very tall mound of sand, ready for carving.
But since our castle was supposed to be a tall, skinny triangle, our curvy hill was of little use to us.
“Are you sure people are going to recognize this building?” I asked Will, peering at the already damp and runny photo printout he’d brought to the beach. “I mean, it’s cool, but I’ve never heard of the Flatiron.”
“It’s the third most famous building in New York,” Will said with a shrug. “I guess we could have done the Chrysler Building or the Empire State, but I figured those would be trickier.”
“Ya think?” I said sarcastically.
I began rifling through our box of tools, which mostly consisted of spatulas and spreaders, buckets and shovels, plastic cutlery and a large spray bottle of sea water. I pulled out a long, floppy cake-frosting knife and tried to shave a section of sand off our mound to make one of the long, flat walls of the Flatiron.
The wall promptly caved in on itself, shedding a big chunk of sand that plopped right onto my foot.
“Okay, it might be time to think about forfeiting,” I said, trying not to break out into funeral giggles, which is what Caroline and I call it whenever we laugh at completely inappropriate times. “Or at least taking a swim break.”
“No, we can do this!” Will ordered. I could hear a laugh in his voice too. If not for the super-serious builders to the right and left of us, I think we would have kicked our castle attempt down that very minute and gone off for a sno-cone.
But even Will knew that giving up on the sand castle competition would invoke mockery at best, righteous scorn at worst. So … we stayed. Will grabbed our spray bottle and started moistening the collapsed wall of the castle.
“We let it get too dry,” he said. “If we keep it wet enough, we can keep the shape together, then carve in all these details.”
Will pointed at the curvy windows, crown molding, and elaborately decorated bricks of the building in our photo.
“And then we’ll be done,” Will said, “and we can go do something else. Anything else.”
“That’s all the motivation I need,” I said, squelching the last of my giggles. “Let’s go.”
We got quiet as we heaped our wet sand into a passable Flatiron shape, then got busy with forks, knives, toothpicks, and our ever-present spray bottle. Before long, we’d started carving all the building’s beautiful details out of our giant, skinny triangle.
“I still can’t imagine,” I said as we worked, “growing up with a building like this right down the road. Hundreds of ’em.”
Will chuckled.
“‘Down the road,’” he said. “That’s something you don’t hear too many New Yorkers say.”
“Oh, God,” I groaned. “I’m a bumpkin.”
“Bumpkins don’t make ice cream flavors like Greek Holiday,” Will said, making me hide my face with my hat brim so I could blush proudly. “Anyway, I like it. ‘Down the road.’”
“Okay, enough of that,” I admonished, returning my focus to the tricky columns at the curved point of the building.
“You’re right, though,” Will said. “Living in New York is amazing. I take it for granted sometimes, but then something always happens to make me remember that there’s no other place like it.”
“I want to go back some day,” I said. “I always have.”
It went without saying that now I had even more reason to want to go back to New York. But I didn’t say it.
Just like we didn’t talk about whether Will and his family might come back to Dune Island the following summer.
We’d silently agreed not to make our last days together all about clinging to fantasies about the future. We didn’t propose spending school vacations together or applying to all the same colleges. Because those things might never materialize and we knew it.
It felt better just to be honest. Just to be.
Even if now we were being seriously bad sand castlers.
I did allow myself to ask Will one question as I started shaping window frames with a popsicle stick.
“Do you think you’ll go to college in New York like Owen?”
“I used to be sure I would,” Will said. “But after being away from the city this summer—I mean really away—and loving it so much, I wonder if I wouldn’t want to do the same thing for college. Maybe go somewhere that’s completely different.”
“That’s exactly what I want to do,” I said. “I’m definitely leaving Dune Island, probably the South, too.”
Usually when I talked about graduating from high school and leaving (and I’ve been known to talk about that a lot) I felt restless and itchy, defiant and even a tiny bit bitter. Those emotions were so familiar, they’d worn a groove into my life; a permanent sound track that I’d considered unalterable.
But as I told Will my plan, those familiar emotions weren’t there.
Which wasn’t to say I’d suddenly become a born-again Dune Islander. But now when I pictured myself leaving, I imagined myself as an adventurer, rather than a rebel.
Small towns, as everyone knows, don’t like to lose their young people, so I’d always thought of it as a triumph/scandal when someone graduated from Dune Island High, then seemed to disappear forever to the nebulous Up North.
I used to wonder if I’d be one of those disappearing acts, except for brief visits home for holidays and special occasions. But after this summer, I was starting to think that that wasn’t how it was going to go for me. Now I pictured my future self—the one who might or might not dart down subway steps with a chic handbag under her arm—coming home often. I saw my sweet, chaotic house as a haven in the world, instead of a shelter that was holding me back from it.
Maybe, like Will’s mom, I’d bring my own family back to Dune Island someday and spend a summer exploring all my old haunts.
I didn’t know if Will would be a part of that future, but I did know that he was partly responsible for my new vision of it. Just like Will, I’d taken my home for granted. And he’d been the something that had made me remember there was no other place like it. He’d m
ade me realize that having the ocean outside my door was a gift, not a given.
He’d made me want to leave Dune Island—but not flee it.
After four hours of packing and carving, our Flatiron Building wasn’t great. It wasn’t even good. But it was finished.
“All that work!” Will huffed as he gave our castle a final spritz of water to make sure everything set. “And it’s just going to be washed away by the tide tonight.”
“You do know that those other folks probably put twice as much time into their castles, don’t you?” I said. I’d just used a trowel to smooth Fifth Avenue out in front of our building.
“Yeah, but it only looks like they put in thrice as much time,” Will scoffed. It took me a moment to process what he’d just said and then I laughed—wearily, but still.
I tossed my floppy hat and sunglasses into the toolbox along with all our other makeshift tools. Then we stashed the box behind our castle and I took a deep breath.
“Well,” I said to Will with a wry smile, “let’s go congratulate the winners.”
“Now where’s the optimistic Anna that I know and love?” Will asked, wrapping his arm around my sweaty, sandy waist and giving me a squeeze.
I turned to him with wide eyes.
“Do you even know me?” I blurted.
“Um, Anna,” Will said, “I was being sarcastic.”
“Oh,” I said. We stumbled down the beach gaping at one unspeakably brilliant sand castle after another, including Sophie’s opera house, which was huge and elegant.
I shook my head to clear it.
“I think all the manual labor—not to mention our impending disgrace—has left me a little impaired,” I said.
“I’ve got something for that,” Will said, pointing to the carnival.
“Oh yeah, the carnival,” I said sleepily. “I’d almost forgotten.”
“I think you forgot something else,” Will said. “It’s not us who are going to come in last place in the competition. It’s Allison Porchnik and Zelig!”
I had forgotten that. I grinned at Will.
“Our poor bicycles,” I said. “They must be horrified that we roped them into this crazy scheme.”
Sixteenth Summer Page 21
