Where the Mountains Meet the Sea

by A. R. Breck

  But I’ve never had a dream like this before.

  So, I stay in my bed, crying silently with my patterned quilt drying my tears.

  Knock, knock.

  I whimper, a scream stuck in my throat.

  “Luna?” A whisper blows through my window like the wind, wrapping around my neck and trailing into my ears and belly. “It’s me, Roman.”

  My shaky hands pull the comforter off my body. I pad across my orange carpet and to my window. His figure is barely visible in the night, but I can still see him through my sheer curtains. He has a frown on his face as he stares at me, his dark outline filled with concern.

  I pull the curtain back, seeing him standing there in pajama pants, a t-shirt, and nothing else. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I could hear you crying all the way from my house. Where are your parents?”

  “Sleeping,” I grumble, wiping my eyes. My tears fight to break free, but I don’t want to cry in front of Roman.

  “They didn’t wake up? You sounded like you were hurt.” He steps forward, standing against the cracked open window. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  “I just had a bad dream.” I take a step back, suddenly feeling like a baby. Turning around, I walk back toward my bed. I already feel like a baby, mostly because yesterday I freaked out on him and told him he can’t like my sister.

  I see how he looked at her. That’s how everyone looks at her. Like she’s the most beautiful person on the planet, and I’m nothing but the leftover pieces in the cereal box. The stale ones. No one wants the leftovers.

  I don’t even know what came over me. I just know he needs to be my friend. It’s like nothing else matters in the world. From the first moment that I saw him, I knew that we were going to be best friends. My heart warmed and my belly ached. It sounds really weird, but I know this is where I’m supposed to be.

  He might be a dumb jerk sometimes, but I just want him to like me. It’s like we were supposed to meet or something.

  I was so angry at my dad for taking a job in Wisconsin to make cheese, or sell cheese, or whatever he does. Before here, we lived in Illinoi; and before Illinois, we lived in Kansas. We never stay anywhere for long. It’s like every time I start to settle in somewhere, make friends, and feel like I’m starting to be at home, my parents up and leave. They always say it’s because of a job, but I think it’s just the fact that my parents get bored easily.

  When we came to Wisconsin, it was right when my friends started being my best friends. Every move we make across the country gets harder. It gets harder for me to find friends, and now, living in Wisconsin, I see Roman in front of me and there isn’t anything more that I want than to be the best friend he’s ever had.

  Forever.

  I turn around when I hear a squeak coming from my window, watching as Roman pushes the window up, swinging his leg inside. He presses his bare foot against my carpet as he ducks and slips into my room. “What was your dream about?” he asks, taking a step closer to me. He stares at me quizzically, like he isn’t sure what to think of me.

  It’s hot in here, and my matching pajama set feels like wool as it scratches against my skin. We don’t have air conditioning in our new house and have been using fans to get us by during the day. In Wisconsin, the summer air is filled with a dewy moisture that sticks to your skin, and at night, that dewy moisture turns cool, but it never quite goes away. The bugs come out, smelling the sweet scent of sweat on your skin. The mosquitoes leave big welts on my arms and legs, finding their way through the cracks in the old screens on the windows and buzzing a tiny humming noise around the shells of my ears.

  I shrug at him, wiping the trail of sweat that drips down the back of my neck. “It was kind of weird.”

  His eyes brighten at this. “I like weird. Tell me.”

  I sit on the edge of my mattress, my toes pressing into my orange carpet as I scoot further onto the bed. Roman walks toward me, grabbing one of the two pink pillows from my bed. He drops it on the floor and plops down, lying on his back. His arms fold with his hands going beneath his head. With his eyes on mine, he crosses one ankle over the other and asks again, “Tell me.”

  I fold over onto my side, my heart suddenly beating quicker than it ever has before. I almost wonder if I’m sick or something. “I was on a tall hill, like a mountain. The ocean swirled below me like the water in the bath when it goes down the drain. It looked angry. It was super windy, too, like a tornado, but it was full of sand. It was in my hair and in my mouth and it hurt as it hit my skin. It pushed me over the edge.”

  “And then what happened?” Roman asks, his voice enthralled. Like he’s listening to an action book or something,

  I look up at him, noticing I’ve been picking at some loose threads on my quilt. “I woke up.”

  He blinks at me, his eyes worried but also curious. He blinks again, his vision clearing, and a fierceness lights up his eyes, the dark brown glowing around the edges. “I wouldn’t let you fall.”

  I frown. “You weren’t even there.”

  “I’ll be there next time.”

  I want to burst out laughing. How could he be there? He can’t come into my dreams. It doesn’t make sense to me, but I don’t want to ruin the moment, so instead I smile at him and roll onto my back. “Okay, Roman.”

  I can hear him settle down, and I tilt my gaze to his. “What’re you doing?”

  His brows furrow. “Going to sleep?” He poses it as a question, like I’m being stupid for even asking.

  “On my floor?”

  He shrugs, his shoulder brushing his ear with his movements. “I need to be here next time you’re on the mountain. To keep you from falling off the cliff.”

  “Won’t your mom get mad if she wakes up and you aren’t there? My parents would call the police.” It’s true. My parents are pretty lax, but they’ve always been extra cautious about my safety, like one blink and I’ll disappear.

  “I’ll just go back into my room before she wakes up. She stayed up late waiting for my dad to call.”

  “Where’s your dad? At my old house, my friend’s dad was in the army. Is that where your dad is? Is he in the army?” Her mom was always waiting for his phone call, and I always saw her meet the postman at her mailbox so she could see right away if she got a letter from him. Sometimes he didn’t send letters when he said he would. That always made her sad, but my friend told me it’s because people in the war are busy all the time.

  He shakes his head, his hair noisy as it brushes against the pillow. “No. My dad’s a rock star.” He puffs up his chest at this. “I’m going to be a rock star someday. My dad teaches me how to play the guitar when he’s home from tour. He says I’ll play better than him when I grow up.”

  I tilt my head toward the ceiling, imagining Roman with an oversized guitar underneath his arm, propped on his thighs as he learns the different tunes.

  “I’m going to be a ballerina. I want to dance in front of thousands of people and have everyone come watch me.”

  Roman doesn’t say anything for many moments, and I wonder if he’s gone to sleep when he says, “You’ll be a ballerina, and I’ll be a rock star. And someday, we can go to where your dream was.”

  I imagine twirling in my ballet slippers on the cliff of the mountain, overlooking the angry waves as they crash against the cliff. Roman can play a soft acoustic tune on his guitar while I dance on the rocky, jagged ground. The sand won’t slap at my skin angrily as I dance. The sun will shine, and the waters will be calm, and the world will settle as we dance and play my nightmares away. “Where the mountains meet the sea.” I murmur.

  “What?” he asks, his voice growing raspy of tiredness.

  “Where the mountains meet the sea. We’ll go to where the mountains meet the sea.”

  “Where the mountains meet the sea,” he echoes. “I like that.”

  I roll over and give him my back, smiling as I burrow my face into my pink pillow. I can hear rustling across the room, and I im
agine him turning over and getting comfortable himself.

  I forget about my nightmare and how scared I was. I forget about needing my parents tonight. I don’t need them, not when I have Roman to protect me. I hope he can protect me forever. I hope we can be best friends for the rest of our lives.

  And secretly, I’m hoping that one day he’ll marry me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LUNA

  The sun tickles my skin, the rays embedding deep within me as I lay on the beach. I’ll burn, I know it. I’m not one to get tan. Having that golden shade that Roman seems to constantly have seems to be impossible. I go from pale, to burnt, and back to pale. My mom thinks it’s odd. She says her entire family tans well, and I’m the only one that can’t seem to catch the rays and gain some color from them.

  It’s like my body rejects the sun. It’d rather me be a pale, ghostly white. I don’t know why I look the way I do, with my weird gray eyes and my pale skin. My hair couldn’t get any darker even if I dipped it into a pool of black ink.

  I dig my toes into the hot sand, burrowing beneath the dry grains until my toes curl around the cold ones deep into the earth. I dig until the sand is wet, keeping my toes there, letting them cool from the hot day. My hair lays in a mess of strands around my head, probably dirty and grainy from the beach. Strands stick to my forehead, and I pick them away, only for them to stick back to my skin.

  I’m alone today, and if I were to be honest, a little crabby.

  I start school next week. The summer has been fun. Playing with Nora. Playing with Roman. Playing in the water and going to the park. Nights spent with Roman sneaking in my window to sleep on my floor. I’ve forgotten about school altogether until this last week when my mom told me that I’ve grown out of most of my clothes from last year and we needed to go get a few things from the store before school starts.

  Then it hit me, I’m going to an entirely new school. Again.

  The worst part is that Roman is a year older than me. He will be going into second grade, and I’m only going into first. At least I’ll have Nora with me. She’s become my best friend faster than any of my friends in Illinois and Kansas put together.

  But there’s something about Roman. He’s more than a best friend. It’s like he’s a part of me. The lace on my ballet slipper. The chord on his guitar. A piece that’s needed to make the other whole, and that’s what Roman is for me.

  I think I’m the same for him, too.

  Except, now his friends are back from their summer vacations. The past month Roman has been playing with his friends more and more. He doesn’t ask if I want to play with him. I don’t know why, because I like to catch frogs and tadpoles, or do anything else that Roman likes to do. But he doesn’t want to play with me when they’re around. So, I’ve ended up spending a lot of these last few weeks with Nora. She’s excited to start school, telling me that she hopes we’re in the same class.

  I brush my arms out against the sand, creating a sand angel. The grains are warm against my skin, the insides of my eyelids yellow and glowing from the bright sun above.

  Roman’s mom brought him and Nora to pick up Roman’s friends. That means another day of me all alone. I might as well spend it in the sun, since my mom tells me the nice days are limited. She says the winters here will be worse than any other one we’ve ever had, being this north in the country. Roman was there when she said that, stuffing his face with a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie. The chocolate was still gooey and stretched from his fingers to his lips as he mumbled, “But we can go ice skating on the lake. That’s really fun.”

  I’ve never ice skated before, but maybe it’ll be fun.

  One of the things I am looking forward to is dance. I started doing a general dance class back in Illinois. Jazz, pop, contemporary, ballet—I’ve done it all. But my mom says I was the best at ballet, and that was my favorite too. So next week, once we start school, I’ll also be starting strictly ballet classes at the only studio in town.

  I don’t open my eyes when I hear voices from up the hill. Multiple voices, and one of them is distinctively Roman’s. He has a northerner accent that I didn’t know existed, stretching his O’s with most of his words.

  “Luna! I’m back!” Nora’s voice jumps, her feet pounding down the hill, bouncing her words.

  I tilt my head up at this, my hair burrowing in the sand as I watch her run toward me. Her curly hair bounces with her steps, creating a messy wave trailing behind her body. Still up at the house is Roman and his three friends. I’ve seen them only one other time. Otherwise, Roman usually goes to their houses, or they meet up at the park to play.

  I roll over and get up, brushing the sand from my dress and patting it from my hair. I’m suddenly embarrassed, and I’m not quite sure why. “Luna!” Nora says, digging her heels into the ground when she reaches me. She’s out of breath, and I see she has something clutched in her hand.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “My mom stopped at the store and got me a jump rope. I’ve always wanted one! You want to go try it in the front yard?”

  Her hand grips the wooden handles, the rough, pale rope between them heavy and thick. I glance up at the boys who stand by the back door of the house, shaded underneath the wooden deck above them. Roman and a blond friend look over their shoulder at me, quickly turning back around when they notice me staring.

  I frown.

  “Yeah, let’s go,” I say, walking toward my property line. I don’t want to go anywhere near these boys today. Not if they’re going to whisper about me.

  Nora follows behind me, telling me all about how we can walk to school together on the first day of school. Our elementary school is right next to Tip Town, so we’ll have to walk every day. Nora’s mom says there are only a few busses around, and they only go to the edges of town. Because we live in the center, our mornings and afternoons will be spent walking to and from school.

  We reach the front yard, walking down the driveway and ending in the street. No one drives down this road besides the locals. I step aside and let Nora jump first. She looks nervous as she grips the handles, but there’s an excitement building in her eyes. The thick rope drags and slaps against the black pavement as she swings it a few times. Then she jumps, her pink, flower-patterned overalls swaying as she hops into the air. She gets over it once, twice, and then trips. Frowning, she tries again, only getting it around her body twice before she fumbles again.

  “Let me try,” I say, holding my hands out to take the rope. She hands it to me, stepping aside so I can take my turn. The wooden handles are hot from Nora gripping them, a little damp, too. My green dress is not right for jump roping, but I give it a try anyway. I swing it against the ground a few times before I jump.

  And jump.

  And jump.

  My toes press into the ground, and I hop effortlessly and weightlessly over the rope as it slaps against the pavement. I smile at Nora, and she watches enthralled. “How do you do that? I want to do that!” she whines.

  “It’s easy, you just jump!” My black hair swishes against my back, all the way to my waist. I get into a rhythm, a silent beat in my head with the slap of the rope alternated from my toes hitting the ground.

  Suddenly, a loud buzzing noise zips past me. All four guys on their bikes whizz by, way too close, soda cans smashed on their back tires, creating a grating buzz as their tires rub against the metal. The gust of wind from their momentum coupled with the loud noise throws me off my feet. The rope wraps around my ankle and I stumble off the road. I fall to my butt, rolling down the small hill and into the corn field. A tall husk wraps around me and encases my body in its tough exterior. It’s suddenly dark, the sun shrouded and keeping me in the shadows.

  A hand shoots out, yanking me from the thickness of the corn field and pulling me back into the road.

  Roman.

  He looks angry and worried.

  “Are you okay?” He looks me over, from the top of my black hair to the bottom of my dirty
bare toes.

  I nod at him.

  He turns around, walking to his three friends that stand beside their bikes. He stomps up to the blond, giving him the biggest shove he possibly can. I’ve never seen Roman angry before, but boy is he angry right now.

  “What did you do, Lonnie?!” Roman shouts.

  Lonnie scowls at Roman. “You wanted to scare them just as much as we did.”

  “You went too close to her. She could’ve gotten hurt!”

  A dark-haired boy wrinkles up his nose. “Look at her. She’s not hurt. Why are you so angry? Do you like her?” he asks, the taunting words coming off his tongue sounding as if I’m a dried-up toad that got hit by a car last week.

  Roman glances over at me, his eyes wide in shock. “No! I don’t like her, Flynn. Gross.”

  Gross.

  It suddenly feels like my nightmare when I swallowed sand. It’s difficult to swallow, my tongue feeling swollen and my eyes growing wet. Everyone around me grows blurry.

  “Here,” I garble, passing the jump rope back to Nora.

  Gross.

  “Wait, Luna,” Nora’s voice is panicked.

  I shake my head, walking around her and running home. The wind brushes my face and trails my tears along my temples.

  “Luna!” Roman shouts at me.

  I don’t answer him. I don’t turn around. I only stare at my small brown house as Roman’s five letter word plays like a skipping record in my head.

  Gross, gross, gross, gross.

  “I’m telling Mom!” Nora shouts at Roman. That’s the last thing I hear before I shut my front door. I leave everyone outside, but somehow, Roman’s voice grating out the word gross has already curled around my heart.

  My knees dig into my rough carpet as I kneel by my window, staring out at the lake. It’s a little breezy this evening, the water crashing against the shore louder than normal. My sheer curtains billow in the wind around me. If I were to look over my shoulder, I bet they would look like a cape on my back. Like I’m flying in the sky.