Second Star

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.

Pete’s kiss is feather-soft, a breeze from the ocean hitting my lips. The sensation isn’t like anything I’ve ever felt; his touch doesn’t even resemble the touch of the boys who’ve kissed me before. Not that it’s such a long list; my prom date last month, a series of double dates with Fiona when we were juniors, a game of spin the bottle in ninth grade.

This is something else entirely. Pete shifts his weight; now we’re lying side by side and I don’t know how long we’ve been kissing, but it feels as though we’ve always been kissing. And it feels as though we might go on kissing forever. In fact, I don’t remember the end of our kiss at all; the next thing I know, I’m waking up to the sound of Pete’s voice saying gently, “The tide’s probably on its way out by now.”

I blink, not quite sure how long I slept. Pete props his chin up on my shoulder, his fingers resting in the crook of my hip. I shiver as he stands up and reaches down for my hand, pulling me onto my feet. “Come on, I’ll walk you to your car.”

Pete doesn’t let go of my hand once we’re back down on the beach. He leads me toward the path I walked to get here. Between the reeds, the water is still higher than it was when I first got here, up over the sand and past my ankles. But Pete manages to walk through it without splashing, and I try to put my feet exactly where he puts his, nesting my small footprints inside his larger ones.

“So,” I say to his back, “how long have you lived here anyway?”

I imagine the muscles of his shoulders moving under his shirt as he shrugs. “Awhile.”

“And Belle and the boys on the beach—have they always lived with you?”

Pete doesn’t turn around when he answers me. “Not always. People come and go sometimes. But a few of us have been here all along.”

“Yeah, but who lived here before you? I mean, was the house empty when you got there? I guess you guys are squatters, right?”

I feel a pang of disappointment in my belly when my feet finally hit the dry, hard surface of the parking lot. Pete finally turns around.

“Wendy,” Pete says gently, “people around here don’t exactly like answering those kinds of questions.”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

“Belle and the boys and I—we don’t exactly trust outsiders who show up asking a lot of questions, you know what I mean?”

I nod, stiffening at the word outsider. I should have known better. I have to pay closer attention to these kinds of details if I’m going to find my brothers. These kids must be mostly runaways, and now they live down the road from some kind of criminal. Most of them are minors. None of them are supposed to be here. No one is really supposed to be here.

“I’m sorry,” I say quickly.

Pete smiles. “Nothing to apologize for. You can ask me anything you want. But you know what I mean, right? When you come back—”

“When I come back?”

Pete grins, walking me around to the driver’s seat. I turn to face him, my back against the car. He stands so close that I have to arch my neck to look into his face.

Around us, the sky has already begun to lighten. The sun will be up, and Pete and his friends will be back in the water. I blink in the light; it doesn’t feel like I’ve been here long enough for the sun to set and rise again.

I think maybe he’s going to kiss me again, but instead he backs away. I feel empty as the cold air off the water rushes to fill all the space that he had taken up.

As he turns to walk away, I call out after him. “Pete!”

He turns to face me. I take a deep breath, remembering the feeling of weightlessness on the water, the rush of the wave overhead. The weight of his body behind me when we stood on the board, beside me when we sat on the cliff.

“Thanks for the flying lesson.”

He grins again, his smile already familiar. “Anytime,” he answers. “Anytime.”