I kiss my mom goodnight, and she’s upstairs and in bed by the time I’m washing up.
Most of the summer people who didn’t come out for Memorial Day Weekend, the first official start of summer, will start straggling east over the next week or so. I’m not as uneager as Jonah is, though. I have tons of old friends I’m excited to catch up with and a lot of them aren’t any kind of ‘snobs’.
I smile, ignoring my constantly buzzing phone, which I proceed to turn off. Jonah is more than a little pissed, and though my heart skips once or twice in anxiety over how he will react tomorrow at the beach, for tonight, his problem is, well, his problem.
2
Jonah is more pissed than usual at last night’s defiance, but I have a way of calming his ire with the right combination of words and tones, a task I find much easier when he’s relatively sober. His large, stocky body still carries the stress of the previous night in the tension of his broad shoulders, though, and it makes me anxious.
He and his friends lounge lazily on their boards, not-so-surreptitiously vaping what is definitely not nicotine as they watch me and my fellow lifeguards-in-training from the sand, all warm and comfortable in the early morning sun, as we go through our exercises in the freezing ocean.
It takes until at least mid-summer before the ocean water off Long Island’s southern shore becomes anything less than painfully freezing without a wetsuit, and as our lifeguard “uniform” include nothing but a less than flattering red one-piece swimsuit, I spend most of the time shivering and clenching my teeth to prevent them from chattering.
Fortunately, I’m a strong swimmer, and despite the strong undertow, I get through the training session easily enough, learning how to safely flip an unconscious victim from front to back without compromising potential neck injuries, and strapping them onto a standard backboard.
Jonah hoots when I’m first to finish our training laps, shouting “that’s my girl” for all to hear, and I can’t help but roll my eyes. As if he hasn’t already made that clear to everyone in Atlantic West.
He meets me in the shallow surf and flings an arm around me, still shivering with my own arms tightly crossed for heat. Jonah is big and warm, but I need a towel, and I head over to his board where I left mine, and grab it.
“My bad,” Jonah murmurs as an afterthought, not that I expected him to consider I might want my towel after ninety minutes in what felt like a pool of ice. Jonah is better at considering his own needs than those of others, despite having spent the better part of our senior year trying to convince me otherwise. I realize now, of course, that his sweet gestures were more about his needs than mine, then, too—in that case his need to claim me as his girl.
He tosses me his water bottle, and I thank him, knowing how much I need to hydrate despite barely feeling like I’ve had a workout. Cold water is tricky like that, which is part of the reason I love to swim rather than run or go to a gym. I just prefer the ocean later in the season, or a heated pool. Which the Aqualina Beach Club—where, in spite of Jonah’s whining—I’ll be working this summer, as soon as I finish my certification on Friday.
Jonah would prefer I work for the town itself, or at least at the Gold Coast Beach Club. But not only does Aqualina pay significantly better, but I have just as many friends who belong there as I do at Gold Coast, and while years ago the former was known to be patronized more by the summer people, and the latter, us locals, that’s no longer the case, and it hasn’t been for more than a decade. As our property values rose and people intermingled, friendships desegregated the clubs over time, and these days it’s more a matter of simple preference than perceived class. Our parents are more cliquey than we are, frankly.
But Jonah holds strange, old grudges I never could understand, and he seems to take my choice to wor
k at Aqualina as some kind of mild betrayal. After a good two months of arguing over it, however, Jonah has more or less accepted it. The clubs are literally side by side, anyway, and there aren’t more than thirty yards of beach between them. No one stays exclusively at their own clubs, anyway, and who cares where people happen to enter, or keep their cabana? My mom and I still have our cabana at Gold Coast regardless, right around the corner from the one Jonah’s family has kept for as long as I’ve known him.
“Ah, shit. And so it begins,” Jonah gripes, his gaze launching over my shoulder and to the junior cabana boys scrambling to set up umbrellas for a family of five. “Fucking summer people.”
I shake my head and brush him off with a laugh. He’s been friends with enough of the seasonal visitors for years, and has even dated a few of the girls, so his hypocritical attitude about them in general makes little sense to me. Any day now I will find him partying with kids he’s known since childhood in from Manhattan, saving his derisive “summer people” comments for specific company, myself included. He can be so predictable.
“Come on, J, I’m hungry,” I tell him.
“Boardwalk Bagels?” he offers, and I smile. Whatever his shortcomings, he knows me as well as anyone, and there’s something comforting about that.
Just like that, we fall into our summer routine, no less predesigned than a school class schedule, and his boys and I flock away from the water and toward our favorite breakfast spot, where my best friend Jillian will hook us up with free coffee, and Jonah will down a disgustingly large and greasy egg and bacon sandwich.
After saying hi to Jill, I hang outside with my iced latte and nosh on a bagel ball as the boys wait for their food order, letting the ever-warming sun chase away the last of my goosebumps from the ocean.
It’s then that I see the first summer person I know pull into the small, awkwardly spaced parking lot. His window rolls down, his aviators hiding mischievous brown eyes I’ve known since our camp days. “Lizzie girl!” Randy shouts as he exits his jeep, not bothering to lock it or even close his windows, it being a small beach town and all.
“Long time no see.” I give him the usual, first-summer-sighting reply, and he grins widely, long, lanky arms flinging around me and lifting me into a bear hug.
“Damn straight, girl,” Randy replies. He always was one of the nicer kids, always up for a laugh, always down for a party. “That’s it, it’s time for summer to officially commence.” He takes a big, dramatic breath. “I’m here,” he says dramatically, as if the entire town were awaiting his presence before summer could actually begin. He always did make me laugh.
“Is that so?” I ask him.
“Hell yeah. Where’s the party tonight?” Because there always is a party in the summer, every night.
It’s then that I hear what must be his passenger side door slam shut, and I jolt, not having realized there was anyone else in the car with him.
A tall—at least six feet—boy, or man, lean but built in ways his tank top does everything to compliment, struts to join us, in no particular rush. I frown, because I know everyone in this town, even the summer people, and while there’s something deeply familiar about him, I can’t quite place him. Until he pushes his sunglasses up over his head, and then my goosebumps return with a mocking vengeance. Because it sure as hell isn’t a result of being cold.
Noah Reed.
“Hey, Liza.” His full lips quirk into a small smirk. “Long time...”