Page 54 of Just Like the Brontë Sisters

“I’ve been waiting for you,” I said.

“I know.”

When she didn’t sit down next to me, I stood. “Amanda, I love you.” I took her hand and tilted my head down to kiss her but she giggled and took a step back. The tide was coming in and the waves kissed the inch of pink foam that separated her feet from the sand.

“Mitch, it’s time we go our own ways. I didn’t want to have to tell you at school and I thought you should have a chance to digest the information before we see each other tomorrow in math class.” In the moonlight, her eyes shone like dark ocean waves, so blue they were almost black. I couldn’t speak. No words would come so I just stepped closer to her again. This time my effort to kiss her would work and we wouldn’t have just broken up. She put her hands against my chest and pushed me back. “I mean it, Mitch. Our relationship has run its course. Time to move on.”

After a week and a half?

Her words echoed what my mother had said to me, right before Dad and I had moved out of our Minneapolis home. “Why can’t you come with us?” I’d asked.

“Your dad and I aren’t getting along anymore,” she’d answered.

“Then I’ll stay here with you.”

She’d shaken her head. “No. I have things I need to do, Mitch. This life doesn’t fit me anymore. I need to move on before it’s too late.”

But dad and I were the ones who’d moved, from the polar vortex to the land of endless summer. I’d wake up every day sweating and the heat would linger underneath my skin no matter how high the air conditioner ran.

“You don’t get to do that,” I told Amanda now. “You can’t just end things whenever you feel like it.”

“Of course I can.”

Then the ocean jerked back like it was having a seizure. For a moment, the water receded into a jet-black funnel, just like Amanda’s eyes, but immediately it shot back up, erupting into a massive tidal wave. A tidal wave in Florida is a huge irregularity; oceanographers had declared the possibility all but impossible. But I was drenched by water that reached as high as the moon. Salt filled my mouth and I gagged. I tried to swim, struggling against the waves, but my feet sank into the sand and I couldn’t move from the spot where I had stood when Amanda Butler broke my heart.

I’m not sure how much time passed before the tidal wave receded, but I do know that it swallowed Amanda whole. One moment she was standing on the beach with me and the next she was gone. I walked home, changed out of my wet clothes, and went to bed.

The next day at school, the principal came to our class. He cleared his throat, pushed his index finger against his glasses so that they rested further up his nose, and let his hand skim his balding head. “Class, I’m afraid I have bad news. Amanda Butler is missing. Her parents called this morning and said she was not in her bed when they went to wake her. There is no trace of her and we could use your help. Have any of you seen or heard from Amanda in the past twelve hours?”

I sat on my hand to keep from raising it. On the board, Ms. Palmer had written an equation, one I had spent hours the night before trying to figure out. I had worked on this equation when I could have been calling Amanda. At the time, I was sure that I knew the values of x and of y, but now the numbers crashed like waves before my eyes and I realized that they had absolutely no value.

None at all.

Fast forward fifteen years. I was no longer a child, no longer too young for a girlfriend, no longer too young for a wife. I had become a father but still I was a bereft young boy, confused and alone, stuck on land while a tidal wave swept away everything that mattered most.