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“I want to do it,” Alex says, “but there’s this other girl.”
“Other girl?”
“Yeah. At school,” she says. “Her name is Daisy, and she’s new. But Leah is already friends with her.”
“And you want to be friends with her?”
“She’s nice,” Alex replies, staring out at the waves. “She likes the same kind of music as me, and she plays in the band. The drums.”
“Wow, she sounds awesome.”
“Yeah.”
And then the conversation fades into the soft sounds of the waves lapping the sand. One of the kids nearby shrieks and takes off down the beach, chased by the other one.
“Do you know where Daisy stays?”
“Yeah. I overheard her telling Leah that she lives in that old cottage on the beach.”
“On Boiler?”
Alex nods.
“I have an idea,” I say. “When I was your age, I started writing to my friends.”
“Writing?” Alex says the word like it’s foreign. Maybe it is for kids these days, given most of them have phones.
“So, your dad and I,” I say, excluding Olivia from the conversation since I have no idea how much she knows about her mom or wants to talk about her, “we used to write each other letters. Pen pals. All the way through middle school, high school, and after I left town. Maybe you can write to Daisy asking her about the talent show.”
“I don’t know.”
“I can even show you some of the letters your dad wrote me,” I say on a whim. “I still have them.”
“Really? You kept them that long?”
“Well, yeah. We were good friends. It might help you write one of your own.” The letters Cash had written to me were innocent. Mine were the ones fraught with tension. My crush. “What do you say? It’s worth a shot, right?”
Sometimes, things were easier to put on paper than they were to say out loud.
“Yeah.” Alex sounds noncommittal but her eyes are alight. This poor girl wants friends and to be accepted.
“Thanks for bringing me to the beach,” Alex says.
When I was a kid, I longed for my mom to spend quality time with me and take me places. I can imagine Alex wishes she had the same. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it, and she’s just happy to be out in the sun.
She runs off again, and we spend most of the morning chatting about the pen pal idea, playing in the water, then relaxing and reading while we twiddle our toes in the sun. Alex informs me that her father has turned the master bedroom, the one that used to belong to her grandfather and grandmother, into a library, and I mentally curse Cash Taylor for being so darn perfect.
Lunchtime comes, and we enter Marci’s diner, sun-kissed and hungry.
“June!” Marci rounds the counter and folds me into a hug. “You look gorgeous.”
“So do you.” Marci always looks like she’s an actress playing the part of a woman who works in a diner in a movie. She’s using a polka dot silk scarf to hold back her red hair and is in a pair of cutoff jean shorts that I’m totally going to borrow later. “Hey, Alex.”
“Hi.” Alex waves.
“Chocolate milkshake and a Heartburn special?”
“Make that two,” I say.
