Another emotion, a brief flash of embarrassment. “I didn’t mean for you to hear about that.”
“Maybe next time you should pay more attention to who’s pouring your ice water. Did you really think Nic wouldn’t pass that one on? He may be your teammate, but he’s my cousin.
Blood trumps chlorine.”
Alex has picked up on my raised voice and peeks over, takes in the situation, turns away, clearly distancing himself from any potential “scene.” He hated scenes, probably why he broke up with me by text.
“I think the word you were going for is mascot. You should work on your vocab, or your SATs are going to tank.”
I walk away to the sound of Spence’s startled laughter.
When Vivie and Nic drop me outside our house, I hold my hand up in farewell, climb two steps, and plunk down wearily on the porch. The back of one of my shoes is jabbing into my heel like a blade saw.
The sky is hazy summer-night beautiful, with the moon cutting sharp into the dark, but the stars are nothing but pin-pricks. The night breeze is shifting, stirring through the woods, over the water, bringing in the silty, sandy smell of low-tide.
I look down the High Road. The quartz embedded in the tar glitters in the moonlight. Seashell has no streetlamps. This late at night, barely any windows are still lit in the long line of houses along the road. The Field House is five down from ours.
I wonder if Cass stayed late at the party. I didn’t see him as we packed up the van to leave. Partly because I tried really hard 104
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not to look. Will he spend the night in town in his sailing-ship house, or here on Seashell? I rub my hands up and down my arms, abruptly chilly in the night breeze, and wonder why I’m suddenly thinking about Cass Somers so much. Gah. Part of the whole point of this summer was to forget him.
I let myself in through the rattly porch door with the bro-ken latch—the one Nic keeps saying he’ll fix—and the house is quiet, peaceful, so different from all the sound and drama in the tent.
Mom’s dozed off on the couch, her brow crinkled, still clutching a brightly colored paperback. Leaning over, I pull it out, dog-ear the page she’s on (which I can’t help but notice begins with “Begorrah, ye she-witch, I’ve half a mind to put ye over my knee”), then pull the quilt off the bottom and cover her up. I should wake her, coax her to sleep in her own bed, rather than in the dubious comfort of Myrtle’s exhausted orange plaid arms. But tonight, I want a room with only me and my thoughts.
I can hear the soft rumble of Grandpa Ben’s snores coming from the room he shares with Nic and Emory. I wish I could peel away the whole evening—last night too—like I do my sticky clothes, erase it in the outdoor shower the way I scrub off the smell of smoke and shrimp.
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Chapter Eleven
“I was hoping it would just be us,” Viv mutters, after Grandpa Ben has squeezed between the front seats for a second time to adjust the radio to FBAC, “Your Station for the Best in Nostalgia.”
Grandpa’s drumming his fingers on the window, singing loudly to “The Way You Look Tonight,” with Emory gamely echoing him, “The way your smile just BEAMS . . . The way you haunt my DREAMS.” Both of them are beaming themselves, identical big-toothed grins. I try to shake off guilty resentment that they’re tagging along.
Yesterday was the longest day in history. I need girl-time with Viv. So I baked brownies early this morning with that sole purpose. My plan was to ply her with sweets at Abenaki Beach and get to the bottom of the ring thing. Viv will spill—I just need to get her alone.
But just as she was about to gun her mom’s car, Grandpa bounded down the steps with Emory, a large cooler (which I knew from bitter experience would hold a variety of highly idiosyncratic Grandpa Ben items), and a new(ish) metal detector slung jauntily over his shoulder.
“I feel lucky!” he announces now as we rocket down the hill to Abenaki, seemingly unperturbed by Vivien’s violent swerve 106
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to avoid an abandoned Razor scooter lying in the middle of the road, as though it had been tossed there by the tide. “Today, we make our fortune.” He brandishes the detector out the window.
Vivie and I sit on the short, silvery wooden pier, looking out at the ocean. It’s scattered with sailboats, spinnakers billowing.
Grandpa Ben hunts for treasure on the wide sandy beach. Em sits cross-legged, totally preoccupied with a bucket of water and a shovel. I love this about him—that when he concentrates on one thing, the rest of the world fades away.
He’s wearing, as always, a Coast Guard–approved life jacket.
Despite that, I keep clutching at the back of his T-shirt, or the elastic of his shorts when he bends over too far or tries to peer over the rim of the pier. I’ve had so many nightmares involving the top of his head disappearing beneath the whirling waves.
Particularly ominous today, the sky is gun-metal gray and the water correspondingly dark. Not the best for sunbathing, which is why we’re on the warm wood of the pier rather than the chilly sand. The occasional sun shooting out around the clouds is heated, but there’s a breeze whipping straight off the water and right into us.
Emory upends his shovel full of icy water onto my leg, making me gasp. “Em, no!”
He smiles at me, scoops, pours out another chilly trickle.
Viv stretches drowsily, her skin already lightly golden against the graying wood of the pier, her small spattering of freckles looking as though someone flicked a paintbrush over her nose.
Nic calls it her “constellation” and is always pretending to dis-cover new shapes in it, tracing them with a finger.
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“Nic was so tense after catering. I had to drive him out to the bird sanctuary to . . . calm him down.” She points her toes, stretching further, then scoops her fingers around her instep, lengthening the stretch with a balletic grace.
“Uh-huh. My cousin, the ornithologist. I’m sure the binoc-ulars got a lot of use.”
“Well . . . it is secluded there.” Her slightly wicked private smile overtakes the sweet and innocent one she uses in public.
“Just Nic, me, and that crime-scene tape they use to keep us from disturbing the piping plovers’ mating season.”
“You, Nic, and the plovers doing the dance as old as time.” I start giggling. She lets go of her foot and gives my hip a gentle shove.
“It’s not like we can snuggle up in the bedroom Nic shares with Grandpa Ben and Emory.” She looks down at the tossing gray-green water, worrying her bottom lip, waxy with cherry ChapStick. The only thing Nic ever complains about with Viv is her addiction to that and sticky, flavored lip gloss. “I was prob-ably more stressed than Nic, anyway.”
“Any reason why?” Without looking at her, I dip my finger in Em’s bucket, trace a circular shape on a wood slat, press my thumb down in a diamond shape, a subliminal suggestion.
She takes a deep breath, opens her mouth as though she’s going to say something, then closes it again. “Nothing big,”
she says finally. “Just . . . you know . . . Al . . . being all up in my face about forgetting to make sure everybody’s water glasses were full and so on.”
That makes me think of Spence’s dickish “team tradition”
comment. “Did Nic tell you—”
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