I will stop drawing baseball threads around my scars with a Sharpie. I will stop.
I hadn’t stopped yet. Three nights ago, after a deflating doctor’s visit—“No, we can’t do more surgery right now”—I’d gone back to the habit.
Folding the paper into a tiny square, I placed it on my nightstand and removed another. This was a tedious process. The papers weren’t uniform and the hole was small. Ideally, everything—memory, secret, or thought—went in and stayed in.
When I unfolded the next one, I laughed. It was much older.
I have now watched every single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Twice.
God, why couldn’t the sender have picked that one?
I didn’t even remember writing that. It must have been a while ago; I’ve seen the series five times now. There was no telling all the crap I’d shoved into Big over the past five years. As I held him, I realized there was no way to know what was there and what was missing. No way to know if someone had read everything or just that one thing. Searching for the skinny-dipping slip and hoping to God that, somehow, someone had seen it fall out and had returned it to me discreetly was the only choice I had.
Of course, if that were the case, they wouldn’t have typed and delivered it like a cloak-and-dagger asshole.
Still, I wished for a simple answer.
Not everything I removed from Big required an in-depth read. I bypassed plenty on Trent, the wreck, Gina and Gray, funny memories, ridiculous theories, and a slightly embarrassing number of overdramatic thoughts about everything from my period to my parents. Forty-one tries later, I hit the jackpot.
I turned thirteen years old today and I went skinny-dipping with Trent McCall.
I hadn’t expected to find it. But there it was. Despite my worries over who and how and what, the memory itself made me laugh.
I stared at my window now—wishing for a tap, tap, tap.
The night I wrote about started when Trent raised my windowpane a little after midnight. It had been my birthday for three minutes. “Sadie May, come with me. I have a plan.”
Trent was good with plans. I hopped down beside him rather than ask what it was. He always had bread crumbs in his voice, and I followed them like a fairy tale.
Sneaking out was a novelty we both enjoyed, and so far, we hadn’t been caught. We biked the two miles to the end of Santa Rosa Boulevard, then the remaining few miles toward Destin. Traffic on 98 zipped by us, but Trent never slowed down. I kept my eyes on the pavement as he pulled into the public parking on our side of the Destin Bridge.
“What are we doing?” I asked as we chained our bikes to a sign.
“Smoking, drinking, and skinning.”
“Excuse me?”
He tapped his backpack. “You’re a teenager now. We have to make it real.”
“We didn’t make it real when you turned thirteen,” I argued, but really, I was pretty damn excited for whatever came next.
“That’s because you weren’t thirteen yet.”
We laughed at his logic and walked through the soft sand toward the water’s edge. The west jetty stretched like a long rock finger into the Gulf, creating a semi-boundary between the bay, Destin Harbor, and the open ocean. The jetty, like most things at the beach, looked closer than it was. Piers and markers often tricked your eyes, but Trent and I had made this walk to fish and snorkel plenty of times. Lights from the bridge and a nearly full moon accented the water with golden stripes. At one of the nearby bars, some wannabe Jimmy Buffett strummed his guitar and sang about pirates. The music and the moonlight and the wind felt like our best friends.
Trent interrupted the walk with words. Questions. Always questions. What did I want for my birthday? (A visit to FSU’s planetarium.) Were we going to see my grandmother? (No.) Did I think Gray would get me a cool gift? (Yes. He’d given me a gift early—a metal stamped necklace with the longitude and latitude of the Fountain of Youth Park.)