We left the record player and our shoes and our phones well away from the water and then, one by one, we climbed the ladder to the shelter Mikaela had made. The five of us crowded together and tried to be as light as possible, and though it swayed a little bit as we settled on it, the tower held. The platform was only ten or so feet high, but it felt significant—the breeze was stronger and the salt air was more noticeable and the music floated through the air and swirled around our heads, blending with the breeze.
I thought about what Mikaela had said and wondered whether the permanence of an object affected its worth.
“Lottie, it’s your turn,” Em said, shoving something into my hand. A small, sharp pocketknife.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“We’re carving the wood. Anything you want to write. Something important or something you want to leave behind,” Mikaela said. “I wrote destruction.”
“I wrote Led Zeppelin,” Abe said. Then, when Em gave him a look: “What? They’re very important.”
“What did you write?” I asked Sam.
He pointed to a piece of wood, and I leaned closer to read what he’d carved there.
Time.
“It’s important, but it’s not everything,” he said quietly.
I picked my own piece of wood and started carving. It was harder than I thought it would be. My letters came out crooked and hesitant, but each one was better than the last. When I was done, I leaned back and looked at what I’d written.
“Listen,” Sam read.
“It’s what she wanted me to do,” I explained. “But it’s hard.”
Abe and Em had sucked Mikaela into their John Bonham discussion. I listened as she laid out a very detailed, highly thought-out timeline of what would have happened if he hadn’t died.
“In one of her classes, your aunt said they send kids to school to learn math and grammar and history, but they never teach them about their own minds,” Sam said, leaning closer to me.
“She told me that too. That we spend so much time on addition and subtraction but no time at all on how to control anxiety, how to manage anger, how to understand our emotions.”
“It seems like a pretty big miss, right?”
“Yeah, it does.”
I closed my eyes and tried to block out all distractions. But even the act of trying to block out distractions was a distraction, and I found myself irritated and angry.
“Try this,” Sam said. “Sometimes it helps me when I’m feeling overwhelmed. Close your eyes and follow the music. Not the words, but the music. Think about the notes in your head and make yourself tune everything else out. Don’t try to concentrate so much as let yourself drift into it.”
Drift into it. Okay. I closed my eyes again, and this time I thought of the music like a physical thing, like something manifesting inside my head. One song ended, and “Time in a Bottle” began—I hadn’t heard the song before, but he said the title early on. I gave the notes a shape and let them move and act of their own accord. And it worked—suddenly my whole universe was Jim Croce singing about time and love and the fleeting nature of both. The sounds of the beach, the sounds of Abe and Em and Mikaela arguing . . . everything faded away until it was just me. Just me and a guitar and a voice.
When the song ended, I opened my eyes. Sam was staring at me so intently, I started laughing.
“What?” he said, self-conscious. “What did I do?”
“Nothing. It worked! It really worked.”
We stayed there long after the record had run out, and the water now was four or five feet high around the base of the tower. We would get soaked on our way down; we’d have to swim to shore. But that was okay because I had towels in my car and none of us minded a little water.
Em went first, whooping as she flew through the air, tucking her legs into her chest in order to create as big a splash as possible. Then Abe went, more gracefully, and Mikaela, the most graceful of all. It was just Sam and me on the platform and the three of them on the narrow sliver of beach, laughing and shaking water from their hair.
“There won’t be long for it,” Sam said, and he meant the tower but it felt like he also meant something else, and I didn’t know what it was. I was about to ask him, but he took my hand and we jumped together. I didn’t even bother trying to keep my head above water. I let the ocean rush over me. I took my time standing up, and the salt water ran into my eyes and my mouth, and, completely soaked and shivering, we walked back to my car. I turned the heat up while we stood around and toweled off.
Zen came out of the store and watched us, and Mikaela danced around, refusing a towel, already rattling off plans for what she wanted to make next.
We said good-bye to them and drove Sam back to Magic Grooves to get his bike.
I left the car running and walked Sam to his bike, which was chained up at the side of the building.
“Thanks for meeting us,” I said.
“Anytime,” he replied. He unlocked his chain and wound it around the middle bar of the bike, then straightened up. “I hope your aunt’s letters keep bringing us together.”
“I’m sure they will. She loved it down here.”
In the car I watched him bike away down the road, and Abe and Em made kissing noises and hummed the old song about love and marriage in trees.
“Lottie loves someone,” Em said in a singsongy, incredibly annoying voice.
“I don’t love anyone. I’ve known him for a week,” I said.
“Lottie has a crush on someone,” Abe amended.
But that didn’t feel right either. That was too glib a word to describe it. Everything was too complicated to accurately explain. Did I have feelings for Sam? I didn’t know. It was all jumbled in my head, like there was too much information to process and not enough room to properly sort it out.
I ignored Em and Abe until they got the hint and left me alone.
That night I hooked the record player up in my room and listened to “Time in a Bottle” on repeat, feeling like it was trying to tell me something I didn’t yet have the capability to understand.
“Alvin?” Margo asked, her voice seeming exceptionally small in the darkness.
“Yeah?”
“What do you think you would have wanted to do? If you weren’t going to be thirteen forever?”
“Oh,” he said. The question made him instantly sad. A month ago, a year ago, if you had asked Alvin Hatter whether he had wanted to live forever, the answer would have come quickly. Of course! Who wouldn’t want to live forever?
But the reality had sunk in quickly.
Their parents were gone.
Their grandfather was dead.
The only place they were truly safe was a rather drafty and spooky house in the middle of endless, lonely woods.
Everything felt miserable and spoiled.
He would have given anything to give this curse of a gift back. Let the Overcoat Man have it! Let the Everlife Society claim it for their own! Alvin didn’t want it at all.
But he couldn’t say that to his sister.
He was, after all, the older one.
The eternal thirteen-year-old to the eternal eleven-year-old.
He had to be positive, for her sake.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said after a minute, trying hard to make his voice light and airy. “I can still do so much now. And I have more time to do it too. So that’s pretty cool.”