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.
I shake my head, but my teeth have begun to chatter. Pete sits down next to me, pulling me close. He rests his arm around my shoulder lazily, as though we’ve been sitting like this for years. And the truth is, it feels like we have. I lean into the weight of his body, soaking up his warmth.
Pete surprises me by asking, “So who are your brothers anyway?”
Maybe Pete’s seen them, I think suddenly. This is exactly the kind of place where they would have come to surf. I can’t believe I didn’t ask sooner.
“John and Michael Darling. They’re twins. They’ve been missing since September, but I’m going to find them.”
I pull my phone from the pocket of my cover-up and bring up a picture of my brothers. I know I should probably call my parents, or at least Fiona, tell them where I am, but I can’t help feeling almost relieved when I see that there’s no cell reception here.
“Here,” I say, holding the phone up hopefully. “That’s them.”
Pete leans in to look at the picture. The light from the phone casts shadows across the rocks and illuminates Pete’s face so that I can see his freckles. I wonder how long it would take to count them all. For a second, I’m certain he’s about to tell me that he knows them. But instead, he says, “They look like you.”
“What?” I say, surprised. “No, they don’t. They never have, except for our eyes. They’ve always had…” I cut myself off, not sure exactly how to put it.
Pete smiles at me, his teeth white in the moonlight. His face is so close to mine that when he speaks I can feel his breath on my lips.
“What have they always had?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. That kind of magnetic quality that some people are just born with. Like famous people, you know, so that you just want to follow them around to see what they’ll do next.”
“They sound pretty special,” he says.
I nod. “You don’t recognize them, do you? You’ve never seen them here?”
Pete hands me back my phone. “I wish I could tell you I knew where they were.”
I sigh. “Me, too.”
Pete leans in, his forehead touching mine. “You’ve got kind of a magnetic quality, too, you know.”
My cheeks grow hot. “I do?”
Pete just smiles. Every fiber of my body wants to stay close to this boy, but still I pull away, just a little, just enough to put some air between us. Instead of looking at Pete I look up at the sky; the moon is bright and the stars reflect off the ocean like a million tiny lights. When I was little, my brothers and I made wishes on the stars every night. My mother said we should each wish on the first star we saw, but John said that stars were like birthday cakes: you had to wish on your own, and if all three of us chose the same star—the first star—then our wishes wouldn’t come true. Since John and Michael shared a birthday cake every year, John said, he and Michael could make their wishes together on the first star we saw, but I had to make my wish on the second star. I smile now, remembering how serious John was about it.
Suddenly, above the roar of the waves, I hear something. A low beat, as though someone in the distance is banging an enormous drum. A rhythm so deep I can feel it vibrating through the rocks below us.
“Do you hear that?” I ask. The music sounds so strange alongside the waves that I almost think I’m imagining it.
“It’s Jas. He lives in one of the houses up there,” Pete says, gesturing to the cliffs above us.
The music grows louder, a rough kind of harmony against the waves.
“Is he having a party or something?”
“Or something,” Pete says, making a face. The anger in his expression looks strange on him, like he’s wearing a shirt that just doesn’t fit.
“Who is he?” I ask.
“He’s a lot of things. Including a drug dealer. Parties are how he gets new recruits.”
“Pot? Or—?”
“Fairy dust.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” I say, though it’s not that surprising. I’ve never tried drugs. I’ve hardly ever had a real drink. “Not that I’m an expert.”
“Not something you want to be an expert on, believe me.”
I shrug. “I’m a nerd.”
“If you’re such a nerd, why were you at the beach today instead of at school?”
“It’s summer. School’s out,” I say, looking at him incredulously. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who doesn’t know what season it is. But then I guess he doesn’t exactly need to keep track of the days and weeks and months of the year here. “I just graduated actually. I’m starting college in September.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Stanford.” I gesture vaguely to somewhere up the coast, even though Stanford’s hours and hours away, and nowhere near the water.
“You must be pretty smart.”
I shake my head. “Only about the things you can find in books.”
He leans close to me again, and I don’t think I could pull away now if I wanted to.
Besides, I don’t want to.
I can feel Pete’s warm breath on my face, his arm wrapped like a scarf around my neck, blocking out the wind. I can smell the salt water on his skin, or maybe it’s the salt water on my skin. We’re so close that I can’t tell. I’ve never really noticed the moment right before a kiss, when everything almost freezes. I close my eyes. The surf sounds as though the waves are crashing in slow motion. The wind is a moan rather than a whistle.