Second Star (3 page)

The path opens up onto a small but pristine triangle of beach, bordered by the reeds on one side, rocky, sloping cliffs on another, and then the sparkling water. The sun reflects on the ocean like a million fingerprints.

I look around, searching for the boy with the freckles on his face and the sand on his back.

Shielding my eyes from the glare of the setting sun, I can make out the shadow of the boy paddling out, already beyond the break of the waves.

Suddenly, he sits up and lifts one arm into the air: he’s waving. I look behind myself to make sure that it’s me he’s waving at.

He shouts, “You made it!” as though he’d been waiting for me to arrive. His voice carries over the surf.

He turns back to the ocean and begins to paddle into a wave.

“I made it,” I echo, but too quietly to be heard.

Behind the boy, moving so fast that I can barely make her out, is a small girl with wild blond hair. In between their rides, the pair sit up on their surfboards, rising and falling gently, until they finally let the waves bring them back to shore. I wait. Just under the cliffs, a handful of boys crouch around a fire burning down to its embers, filling the air with a warm, smoky scent.

“Nice to see you again,” the boy says when he pulls his board out of the water.

I smile. “I wasn’t sure you’d recognize me.”

He grins. “You’re kind of hard to forget.”

I can feel myself blushing. Of course, I remind myself, it’s hard to forget a girl you nearly decapitated with your surfboard.

“Who’s this?” the blonde asks, stepping out from behind him. She doesn’t look at me but at the boy, who’s at least a foot taller than she is. Her skin is tan and freckled, her teeth bright white. Without meaning to, I fold my arms across my chest, trying to cover up my skin, so pale by comparison.

“Don’t know,” the boy says, grinning and leaning down to muss the girl’s hair. They could be brother and sister, even though they look nothing alike.

“I’m Wendy.”

“Wendy,” he repeats, wiping his hand on his board shorts then holding it out in front of him. “Pete,” he says, his smile inviting me to take his hand.

“Pete.” I nod, reaching out and closing my fingers around his. His hand is cool from the ocean, and when we touch, I shiver.

“I’m Belle,” the blonde says, interrupting the moment. Abruptly, Pete drops my hand.

I smile at her. “That was some amazing surfing.”

Belle shrugs, then turns her back on me, dragging her board toward the water.

“You’re amazing, too,” I add, turning to Pete. “I’ve spent a lot of time watching people surf. I watched my brothers for years.”

“
Watching
people surf?” Pete echoes, his lips widening into a grin. His freckles make his teeth look even whiter. “Your brothers never made you get on a board?”

I shake my head. Michael and John had been surfing for a year when I asked John if he’d teach me. I’d wanted to share in it, too. But Michael started laughing before John could answer.

“Sorry,” Michael said, in a tone that made it clear he wasn’t at all sorry. “You do know that the ocean is full of water, right? Might mess up your pretty hair.”

Now, standing on the beach next to Pete, I wonder whether things would have been different if I’d learned to surf. Maybe they wouldn’t have run away. Or maybe they would have taken me with them.

“Surfing wasn’t something they shared with me,” I say finally.

“Don’t worry.” Pete props his board so that it stands up on the sand and he leans toward me. “I’m an excellent teacher.”

I shake my head. I can conduct my research just fine on dry land. “No, thanks,” I say. “I’ll just hang out here.”

“Life isn’t about watching from the beach, Wendy.” He points to the water, where Belle is paddling toward a wave that is about to open, dropping into its mouth until it looks like the wave will snap shut with her inside it. But she comes out the other side and immediately turns around, paddling back out into the water, not even winded.

“I taught Belle,” he says. “Look at her go.”

A feeling like jealousy weaves its way tightly around my ribs, tugging me in the direction of the water. Something shifts inside of me: I want to be out there on the waves.

“Okay,” I say, “I’ll try.”

5

The sun is hanging only halfway in the sky; the heat of the day is burning off. Before today, I’d always waded into the water one toe at a time, giggling and squealing at the cold, watching my brothers run out ahead of me. But today, I rushed into the water after Pete. And now, an hour later, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve fallen off his board. Every time, water shoots up my nose and fills my mouth. Salt clings to my eyelashes until my eyes sting.

I haven’t even come close to standing up on his board.

“The surest way to get worked is to try to turn back after you’ve started paddling in,” Pete tells me.

“I’m not turning back,” I say stubbornly.

“You’re not moving forward.”

I shake my head and chew on my bottom lip, studying the waves. This really shouldn’t be so hard, right? Hundreds of people stand up on waves every day. Thousands. Tens of thousands, maybe. Pete treads water beside me as I pull myself back up onto the board and try again. And wipe out again.

“You’re thinking too hard,” Pete says. “Or you’re not thinking of the right thing.”

“I’m thinking about getting onto this board,” I spit irritably as I come up for air. “What else should I be thinking about?”

Pete steadies the board between us. “Surfing says a lot about a person, you know?”

I shake my head. I certainly don’t know.

Pete floats on his back and doesn’t look at me when he says, “I’m guessing you’re a straight-A student who doesn’t like to cry and could turn worrying into an art form.” Pete straightens himself out, face-to-face with me again. “Am I right?” He grins.

I look down into the water, surprised that it’s clear enough to see my feet kicking out beneath me. “I have a lot to worry about.”

Pete shakes his head. “You can’t bring all of that with you here.” He taps the board. “Worries weigh you down. You need to be light enough to fly.”

Fly
, I tell myself, looking at the sky above us, seagulls screaming overhead. Behind us, the ocean stretches out endlessly, so beautiful that it’s hard to believe it might have swallowed my brothers whole.

I lift my chin off the surfboard to look at the beach. The sun is reflected on the cliffs in a rainbow of colors, like someone painted them there. The light is dancing like fireflies on the water, which is surprisingly warm, like a current of warm water flows right into this cove, just for them. The water is even clearer here than it is down the coast. My brothers would have called these waves glassy and hollow, perfect for a ride.

And then I look at Pete, his face lit up by the setting sun. He looks perfectly at ease, like he was made for this very spot.

“Where are we?” I breathe softly.

“What?” Pete murmurs.

“Doesn’t this place have a name?”

He smiles. “Kensington,” he says, and he makes the word sound like music.

“Kensington,” I repeat, the word heavy in my mouth. I look around us, at the beach with sand so white it seems to exist outside of time. The last of the sunset is reflected on white rocks on the cliffs, the smoke from the fire rising up beneath them. And the ocean, which has always existed outside of time: it was here long before we were, and it will be here long after we’re gone. I know one thing for sure: I’m not leaving this place until I’ve taken a wave.

Pete whispers, “Think of something that makes you happy.”

Once more, I pull myself up onto the board so that I’m lying flat on my belly.
Think of something that makes you happy
. I close my eyes and think of Nana. Nana’s great big paws on my lap; the soft place between her ears. Nana’s giant tongue giving gentle kisses, and her great brown eyes, always waiting for me to come home, the tail that wags every time I walk in the door. Our parents got Nana for all three of us to share, but the dog singled me out almost immediately. Even John and Michael took to calling her “Wendy’s dog.” When she was a puppy, Nana slid over the tile floor of our house like a mop; she had to learn to walk on the slick surface without slipping. Nana has always belonged to me, the way John and Michael always belonged to each other.

I’m so focused on Nana that, at first, I don’t notice that Pete is pulling himself up onto the board behind me. He lies on top of me, his chin settling in the small of my back, sending a pleasant shiver up my spine.

“What are you doing?” I ask, but I don’t mind how close he is. I feel warm.

“Trust me,” Pete says. “Let me take the lead.”

He paddles us out toward the wave. His hands move like fins through the water, and he directs the surfboard to just the right spot, under the lip of a wave just ready to crest.

Pete plants his own feet before pulling me up after him. He presses his body close to mine, so that my feet are in between his own, my back flat against his front, as though together we are one surfer on the board, not two. And together, we ride the wave.

The ocean stretches out beyond us, endless and beautiful. I have never, not in a plane, not in the glass house set up on top of the hill, not driving on mountains to get to beach after beach, felt this close to the sky, this far from earth.

Pete lets the wave take us all the way back to the beach, the board sliding to a stop over the sand.

“What’d you think?” he asks me.

My back is still to him; I step off the board and curl my toes into the wet sand. I try to imagine what my brothers would say if they could see me now, but I’m almost positive that they’d be speechless.

I turn around and say, “I want another one.”

Pete laughs and throws his arms around me, folding me into a bear hug, his wet skin cool against mine, yet still I feel warm. He lifts me and spins me in a circle. I close my eyes, so that I can’t even tell which way I’m facing when he puts me down.

When I open my eyes, I see that the ocean is black: the sun has set completely. The fire has dwindled down to smoke. Belle and the other boys are nowhere to be seen. I didn’t realize that I’d been here long enough for darkness to fall.

“I should probably get going,” I say quickly. “Can I give you a ride home?”

Pete just shakes his head, laughing lightly. “I live here,” he says, pointing to the cliff rising above us. “That’s home.”

I step back. In the darkness, I can make out a series of low buildings on top of the cliff. There are houses lining the cliff, overlooking the water below. “You live here?”

“We all do.”

“Who?”

“The boys. And me. And Belle.” He points to the house closest to the cliff directly above us. “That one’s ours.” From here, I can barely make out its edges. In one of the second floor windows, a light switches on. Someone’s bedroom, maybe.

“Who lives in the rest of them?” I ask, and Pete steps away from me, as though I said something wrong.

“Most of them are empty,” he says, kicking the sand at his feet. “They were built years ago. You know, luxury homes on the beach.”

I nod. In my mind’s eye, I see the houses left abandoned, expected to fall apart, with floors still gleamingly clean, the windows still crystal clear. “It’s so beautiful here.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t safe,” he says, gesturing to the cliffs above. “Those cliffs used to go all the way out to the ocean. This beach was a totally different shape. There were cliffs lined with houses.”

I look up at the cliffs; it seems like they’ve been standing there a thousand years. It seems impossible that they were ever shaped differently.

“What happened? Beach erosion or something?”

Pete shakes his head. “A wave.”

“How could a wave get up that high?” The cliffs have to be fifty feet above us. A hundred.

“In the right conditions, waves can get as high as skyscrapers.”

I remember what the cops said about the waves this winter; the waves were forty feet high the day those boys they claim were my brothers disappeared.

“So the cliffs just vanished?”

Pete nods. “The waves dragged them out to sea. And the houses right along with them. After that, no one wanted to live in Kensington.”

“I can imagine.”

Pete laughs as though I’ve said something terribly funny. I blush.

“I better go,” I say.

Pete laughs again, more quietly now. “Wendy,” he says, and I like the sound of my name in his mouth. “The tide’s in. You’re stuck here.”

“What?”

“You parked out at the lookout, right?” he says, pointing in the direction from which I came. “When the tide’s out, you can go back and forth from there no problem, but once it’s in, the path floods.”

He makes it sound perfectly reasonable, to be stuck here with him until the ocean shifts. I want to tell him he’s crazy, but I can’t help remembering that the sand I walked across to get here was heavy with water, as though it had been drenched not too long ago.

I uncross my arms. “How long till it goes out again?”

“A few hours.”

I bite my lip. Water beads up on my skin, drips from my hair. The temperature is dropping.

“Don’t worry,” Pete says, putting his hand on my back, exactly where his chin rested when we surfed together. Warmth blossoms over my whole body. “You’re safe as long as you stay with me.”

6

“Come on,” Pete says. He picks a sweatshirt up from the sand, pulls it over his head, and hands me my cover-up. “It’s already dark,” he adds, tugging gently on my arm.

There is a set of wooden stairs, practically a ladder, built into the cliffs, winding its way to the houses above. I follow Pete up, but when we’re about halfway, he steps away from the stairs onto the cliff.

“Here,” Pete says, pulling me up onto an enormous flat rock that juts out over the side. “Have a seat.”

I curl into a ball, feet tucked tight against my thighs. From here, I can see the entire beach. The water reflects the moonlight so that each wave is luminous.

“Cold?” Pete asks, rubbing his hands together.