The condominiums have become too thick and they now hide the ocean completely. Patches of sand creep up through the parking lots, though, and skirt the blacktop.
I’ve only looked away for a second, but when I glance back at the road in front of me, my eyes catch silver. A dark windshield. A Lexus emblem. My whole body goes rigid. The silver barrels toward us on the opposite side of the median. The borders of my vision creep inward, narrowing my focus. I feel my teeth begin to chatter. Then my breaths begin catching painfully in my chest, as if they’re rubbing up against a nail.
“Lake?” The voice is distant.
It’s replaced with the sound of crunching metal. Glass that explodes and rains down like glitter. I know that I’m screaming. Blond hair streaks in front of me. I want to reach for it. To pull it back. But my seatbelt strangles me.
I feel myself wrenched sideways. The steering wheel is stripped from my hand.
“Brakes! Hit the brakes!” The voice smashes through the grate of twisting steel. My eyes fly open and my heart comes to a full stop for one single moment. I slam my foot into the brake.
I lurch forward. My hands stop my forehead from hitting the steering wheel. My car jerks short and I’m slammed back into the headrest. My heartbeat has resumed and it’s now thundering in my chest like hooves in the Kentucky Derby. I stare up at the rustling fronds of a palm tree, inches from the front emblem on my car.
“What…” Ringo pants beside me. His hand slips from the steering wheel. “Was…that?”
“I—” I blink, bewildered by the easy sound of traffic behind us. “I’m sorry,” I stammer, open the car door and stumble out. “I just have to—I have to get out of here.”
“Wait. Where are you going?”
I kick off my shoes and begin following the narrow path of sand to where I know it will broaden. I trace the smell of the ocean, let the salt fill my lungs. When I hear the other door slam, I don’t look back. I cut between two white condos and the sea comes into view.
Walking on thick sand is more challenging than any other kind of walking. My feet start going more sideways than forward and I’m forced to concentrate, to engage my thighs and my torso muscles to continue pressing onward at the same pace. When I’m firmly on the beach, halfway between the condominiums and the ocean, I give up and plop onto the sand. It’s hot and I bury my feet up to the ankles and wrap my arms around my knees.
Tears run over my lips, mixing with the salt already starting to gather on my skin from where the wind has touched it. A few minutes later, I feel grains of sand being kicked up nearby and look up to find Ringo beside me.
“I thought I was okay.” I sniffle. “I hadn’t expected—”
He sits quietly, still wearing his sneakers. His knees fall to the side and he swirls his finger in the diamond-shaped window of beach between his legs, drawing spiral after spiral.
“It was a silver Lexus,” I offer. “The car that Penny hit. It was a silver Lexus and we hit it and then they were both dead.” I drop my chin and shake my head. Something about the way I phrased this feels final. Like the period at the end of a sentence at the end of a paragraph at the end of a page at the end of a novel. And when I reach the end, I feel as though my insides have been turned upside down and emptied out. “I don’t know. I guess when I saw that car on the road coming toward us, I just sort of…lost it.” The driver of the Lexus died too, I’d later found out. Her daughter was in the backseat. The little girl survived.
“Hmmm.” Ringo murmurs. He’s sitting on my right side, which means that when I look over, all I can see is the red blotch blighting that side of his face. The skin looks so damaged, it hurts me to look at.
I fake a laugh and wipe away the smear of tears spreading down my cheeks. “Bet you’re wishing you didn’t take that ride now, huh?” I flick sand over my toes. A shudder runs down my back and I’m able to release the final shreds of the accident memory. “You know I didn’t, like, plan to almost kill us. Sorry.”
He shrugs. “It’s not like I had anything else on the schedule.” His voice is a little too sad, as though he’s saying that dying today wouldn’t be more traumatic than anything else that could occur on a given day. He pulls his knees back up together and lays his cheek on one to look at me. “It blows, you know.”
“Yeah…I know.”
“No, I mean, like it really, truly sucks. Like I’m talking the world’s largest Hoover-vac suckage. No, wait, the universe’s biggest black hole. That kind of suckitude.” He pauses. “Anyway, sometimes I think you just need someone else to recognize it too. How cosmically unfair life is.”
“Nobody ever said life was fair.” I take on an authoritative voice as though I’m reciting a phrase I’ve heard a thousand times before because it is a phrase I’ve heard a thousand times before.
Ringo sits up straight. “See, that is the garbage people say to make themselves feel better about their good luck. Your situation is balls, Lake.”
My shoulders jerk with a puff of laughter that’s gone before it starts. “Thanks,” I say, using my fingers to sift through the sand for bits of shell. “It totally is…balls.” Maybe it’s the ocean, or maybe Ringo’s right that it does feel better to have someone acknowledge how bad I have it, but I do feel just the tiniest bit calmer.
“Balls!” Ringo yells out toward the sea. He raises his eyebrow at me in challenge.
I glance around. A few families dot the shoreline. I take in a long breath. “Balls!” I scream. “This. Is. Balls!” I listen to my voice as it’s carried off by the wind. The screaming has quieted my thoughts. At least for the moment.
He lies back, stretching out his legs, and rests the back of his head straight in the sand and stares up. “You’ve got to decide somehow, though.”
I wipe tears and snot with the back of my hand. At least Ringo isn’t someone I care about impressing. “Yeah, somehow. Any ideas how?” I consider telling him about Matt and about my plan to betray my family’s trust, but the moment passes and I let it.
“So it’s really not just an automatic boyfriend pick?”
I think for a moment. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Okay, then.”