He shrugged again and pushed sand around with his feet. “Video games and stuff. The beach sometimes. I don’t know.” He was quiet again, and a few minutes later he said, “It’s different than it was in Boston.”
“Night and day, I’d imagine.” Feeling the serious turn of the conversation, Bella sat up straighter. “I’d imagine it’s a different type of change for you than your dad sees in his life.”
“Dad’s life sucked before you came along.” A hint of a smile lifted his lips.
Wow. That was interesting. “I doubt it sucked. I mean, he obviously misses your grandparents and his friends, but he seems to be happy here.”
“Yeah, I guess. But he didn’t have a life. He had work and me, and then we moved, and now I’m the one without a life.”
Ouch. So the move was far more of an issue than either Caden or Evan were letting on—or maybe than Caden even realized.
“So you don’t like the kids you’ve met here?”
He shrugged again. “They’re okay. They’re just different from my old friends.” He threaded his fingers together and cracked his knuckles.
“I’m sorry you had to move.”
Evan was quiet for a long time. He moved sand around with his feet, watching a group of children running from the surf and a group of teenage girls gathering their towels and umbrella and walking down the beach.
“I guess I’m glad we moved, after what happened to George.” He shook his head. “I always knew my dad’s job was dangerous. I’m not stupid, or anything, but when you grow up seeing someone all the time and then they’re gone forever, it’s kind of unreal.” He swallowed hard and turned his face away from Bella.
If she weren’t afraid of embarrassing him, she’d pull him into her arms and hold him. She’d brush his hair from his face and tell him it was okay to feel sad and angry about George, and moving, and his friends. She’d let him yell and cry and kick sand if it made him feel better; then she’d hold him again until he got all that bottled-up frustration out of his system.
“I’m sorry.” She wasn’t sure what else to say. Talking too much would make him more emotional, which would probably lead to him clamming up out of embarrassment. Talking too little would say she didn’t care, and she did care. Desperately.
He rose to his feet and pulled his shirt over his head. “Wanna eat? I’m getting hungry.”
Deflection. She knew it well from her students. “Yeah, sure.” There were so many things she wanted to ask, like if he’d talked to his father about how he felt. She thought he must have, but teenagers were experts at camouflaging their emotions—even from themselves—with anger and attitude.
Bella pulled on her cover-up and grabbed her wallet from her tote.
“Crap.” Evan turned his back to the dunes.
“What’s wrong?” She shaded her eyes and looked up toward the path that led down the dunes from the parking lot. She didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
“Can we go?” Evan grabbed his towel and boogie board.
“Yeah. I was just getting my money.”
“No. I mean, like, leave.” He grabbed the second boogie board and picked up her tote. A deep V formed between his brows, and his narrow chest rose and fell with each heavy, agitated breath.
“Sure. Why are you in such a hurry?” She scanned the beach again. There were people lying out on the beach, kids filling buckets with sand, and lifeguards sitting high up in their chair. She wondered what had caused his reaction.
“Just hot.”
Bella grabbed the beach chair and blanket, and they crossed the hot sand. Evan walked at a quick pace with his eyes glued to the path that led up the steep dune. When he shifted the boogie boards in his arm to block his face from the right, Bella was sure something was up, and she quickly surveyed that part of the beach.
She was pretty sure that the two boys Evan had met at the flea market were walking along the base of the dunes, fully dressed in shorts and tank tops. For Evan to leave the beach in order to avoid them could only mean there was some sort of trouble brewing. Bella was so tempted to ask why he didn’t want them to see him that she had to bite the insides of her cheeks to keep the words from slipping out.
They packed their stuff in the car and drove away in silence. Evan clenched his jaw repeatedly as he stared out the window.
“Mac’s okay for lunch?” she asked, hoping to ease the tension.
“Sure. Whatever.”
Bella drove through the center of Wellfleet, along the main road that was home to art galleries and cozy restaurants.
“Have you and your dad been to the gallery walk?” The gallery walk was a popular tourist attraction on Saturday evenings, when the galleries offered free wine and cheese to patrons and local artists came out to meet the customers.
“No.” His voice was flat as he stared out the passenger window.
“It sounds boring, but it’s really pretty fun. We usually go to the juice bar or the pizza place and eat, and afterward we fill up on ice cream at the pier.”
He slid her a blasé look that either meant she sounded like a stupid adult who was trying too hard to make a kid feel better, or that she was speaking a foreign language. She was pretty sure she was guilty of the first. She pressed her lips together and silently chided herself for doing just that. Ugh. She was turning into an adult in ways that she swore she never would.
They parked at the Wellfleet Pier, and as they walked across the parking lot in a bubble of uncomfortable silence, Evan kept his eyes trained on the ground. Bella wished she understood what was going on, but she knew better than to push. She tried to ease the conversation into a safe subject as they neared Mac’s Seafood.
“What are you hungry for?” she asked.
Mac’s was built at the edge of the parking lot on the beach. Lines at least twenty people deep led to several walk-up windows. On the far side of the cedar-shingled building, where a covered deck met the beach, there was a handful of picnic tables packed end to end with customers.
“Whatever.” He eyed the menu, and Bella noticed that he was breathing a little easier than he’d been at the ocean. “Burger, I guess.”
Bella was in the strange position of feeling like she was young enough to relate to anything Evan might be willing to share with her, when in reality, she knew that the way she saw herself was very different from a teenager’s perspective. As a high school teacher, she was well aware of the dichotomy, but as Caden’s girlfriend, everything she knew about dealing with teenagers felt different with Evan.
She was beginning to see even more clearly how remarkable what Caden had done the other night really was. He’d done what he believed to be the right thing for Evan, regardless of how uncomfortable it was for him. And he hadn’t seemed the least bit hesitant. Let him snap.
What was even more remarkable was that it had worked. It had brought them closer together.