“Okay, you can come out now.”
He opens the door, letting out a cloud of steam. He actu-ally showered. And changed his clothes. His eyes flick to mine and he drops the towel he’s rubbing through his hair to the ground.
“Hey,” he says.
“Um,” I answer, as if that is an answer.
He looks me over, my hair, my black halter top dress, my bare feet. I curl my toes, raise my chin, act like this is all easy for me.
But he knows, Cass knows me.
“Well,” he says. “Wow, Gwen.”
“I think we need to get this over with,” I blurt out.
He starts to laugh. “Just what every guy wants to hear. We all want to be the Band-Aid you rip off fast.”
“You’re not. I want this. I mean . . . I . . . I . . . I brought candles,” I say.
“And a Dockside Delight,” he adds. He walks over slowly, sets his hands on either side of where I’m standing by the kitchen counter. I lean back against it. He just looks. “You planned this.”
“Yes. I did. I . . . did.”
He raises his hand, cups my face. Bends to tip my forehead to mine. Says the words I know he’ll say. “Thank you.”
“It’s not about a jumbo box of condoms,” I say.
“Never was,” Cass says simply.
He slants his hand against my jaw, tips his mouth to mine.
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EPILOGUE
Set up on the wide square green between Low Road and Beach Road, where Seashell weddings are always held, is a castle.
Well, the high-peaked tent looks like one, festive as something from my namesake’s Camelot, with blue and white streamers—Stony Bay High colors—flapping in the wind from the tops of the canvas turrets, twinkling white lights wrapped in the rafters and looped around the poles, and blue and white flowers everywhere.
The “Congratulations!” banner droops crooked on one side, and Al Almeida is gesturing impatiently at someone to fix it.
Not me, though. Not tonight. Or Hoop or Pam or Nic or Viv.
Tonight we’re guests, no clamshell T-shirts or rented tuxes.
It’s an informal Stony Bay High tradition for seniors to leave graduation and drive to the lake near town, and dive in fully clothed. We all did it, Hoop, Nic, Spence, Viv, Cass, and me, piling into the Porsche and the Bronco, Hoop’s truck, Cass’s battered BMW, joining the lineup of our classmates for the plunge, screaming as we each hurtled ourselves over the water, and then driving across the causeway to Seashell for our own celebration—jumping off the pier at Abenaki in those same soggy clothes.
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Hoop yelped that the water was freezing. Cass, already far toward the breakwater, called him a wimp. Spence paddled lazily, far from the fierce strokes that, combined with Nic’s backstroke and Cass’s flawless butterfly, made the SBH team state champions for the first time ever.
And now we have a party—not a tradition but something that will only happen once, celebrating all we are leaving behind, public and private, in school and at home. Spence’s dad wanted to throw a big one at the B&T, but in the end, only Seashell seemed right.
“How’d that happen?” I asked Viv when she told me.
“I used my superior managerial skills,” she said.
“You threatened to cry, didn’t you? Spence can’t handle that.”
“No, I don’t do that. When it’s real love, no manipulation necessary.”
“I still think you should get that job at Hallmark.”
She shakes her head, “It would interfere with my college career.”
Stony Bay Vocational has culinary courses, and Viv plans to take them this fall, picking up credits that, a year ago, she thought weren’t important. If things go well, she can trans-fer to Johnson & Wales in Rhode Island in the spring. Spence will be at Harvard. Whether they can survive the distance is a page they haven’t turned yet. They’ve already survived the school year, survived awkward family occasions at the B&T, where Viv was the girlfriend instead of the waitstaff, survived comments of Spence’s like, “Wow. I’ve never been faithful this long. Or at all.”
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My high heels, another female torture device, like eyelash curlers and endless articles about how to “get a beach body,”
were killing me, so now I’m standing in the grass outside the tent, heels kicked off, absently rubbing one foot. Through the folded back tent flap, I can see Mom doing the same. She’s spent the last few weeks opening houses on Seashell, shaking the sheets off the furniture, sweeping away the cobwebs.
Castle’s opened last week, Dad grumbling over the tour-ist buses, everyone wanting their breakfast sandwiches made a certain way. Frustrated that no one wants smoked bluefish breakfast burritos. Now he’s here, in a plaid sport coat I have never seen before, talking shop with Cass’s dad, jabbing his finger toward the distant ocean, where a Herreshoff, one of Dad’s dream boats, sails by, slow and majestic in the water as a king on procession.
Nic tilts against a table, sipping a Coke, but not morose. He got into the Coast Guard Academy, will go there in the fall. He watches Viv for a minute, then his eyes drift out over the ocean in the distance, out to his own horizon.
“You are not dancing, why?” Grandpa Ben demands, sud-denly beside me with Emory in tow. He’s actually in a tux, with Emory dressed in a scarily identical miniature, both of them complete with jaunty black bow ties. Grandpa found them in some classified listing in the Stony Bay Bugle a few weeks ago, and brought them both home as if they were that treasure he’s been searching for with his metal detector. He insisted they both try them on immediately. “Fred Astaire, pah,” he’d said.
“Look at us, coehlo. He should eat his heart out.”
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“Scratchy” was Em’s response. “Want swimsuit. Now.” All winter, Grandpa—and sometimes Dad, freer once Castle’s closed down—took him to swim at the Y in White Bay. Em can dive now, clean and clear into the water, coming up with a smile. And Hideout smells like chorine.
I edge out farther along the grass, looking back at the tent, the swath of lawn, the gray-shingled mansions and the low ranch houses. Seashell.
All the things that stay the same . . . and everything that’s changed.
It was an uneasy truce for a while, all of us adjusting, our shifting alliances. But, in its way, it’s all happened before, and it’ll all happen again. Summer turning to fall, crisp breezes replacing warm salty ones. Corridors and classrooms and indoor pools replacing sandy paths to the ocean, replacing the boathouse, fried clams at Castle’s, the wide open sea. My grandfather, a young man, flexing his muscles as he mows the lawns, whipping up his special lobster sauce. My grandmother, the daring young woman who drove too fast into town, the distance between summer people and island people shorter than the causeway, only as long as it takes to step across the invisible line that only exists if you insist on it.
“Hey,” Cass says, coming up next to me, jacket already off, sleeves already unbuttoned and rolled up. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
The B&T hired the jazz band (thank God not the barbershop quartet) and they’re smoothly playing the lush old-fashioned songs I know so well from Grandpa Ben, the mellow music 406
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drifting softly into the night, out over low tide.
Cass is a better dancer than I am—not hard—but we know how, we know now, how to move together, so he dips and twirls me to the music, dance steps I never knew before.
“You’re leading,” he breathes against my cheek.
And I am. “Sorry,” I whisper.
“S’okay,” he says. And it is.
By chance, and maybe a little bit by design, we’re going to the same university, State College. He to study cartography, me, thanks to a Daughters of Portuguese Fishermen scholarship (granddaughter, really, but Grandpa Ben talked his way around the logistics), to study English lit.
I love you, I told him, that night at the Field House. Sort of fiercely, in this aggressive tone I immediately wished I could take back—a challenge more than an admission.
But Cass gets it. He gets me.
“I know,” he said simply. And I knew he did. That that was true.
The old-fashioned music fades away, starts into something jangly and current. Cass pulls my hand and we head farther out into the grass, to the top of Beach Road where we can see everything—ocean, land, even a hint of the causeway far, far off. And I can glimpse it all, trace the path we’ve come along, like the lines on a map. Four kids lying on the sand, fireworks as bright as shooting stars. Two friends on the dock, looking out at the unknown. A little boy leaping for his life, an older one doing the same. A firefly glowing in the night, caught by a boy who shows it to a girl. This girl bending to that boy’s kiss. An old woman who hasn’t forgotten what it was like to 407
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