The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(14)

After swallowing half the cold water in her bottle, she propped herself onto her elbows, and looked across the beach through the aqua tint of her sunglasses. Last year at high school, her best friend Madison had developed an almost obsessional crush on a senior named Eric Hall, and for at least half of the year Madison could barely even look you in the eye if she was anywhere near a place where Eric might be. She was always hunting in the distance, down school hallways, and across the cafeteria, for a possible appearance of the mythical lacrosse player. It had annoyed Joan to no end, but now, on the beach, she felt herself doing the same thing. Scanning the shimmery bodies on the wide expanse of the beach, looking for anyone who might be Richard.

And it wasn’t a crush. She had zero interest in kissing Richard or doing anything else with him. No, it was something more than that. The things he’d said last night, the matter-of-fact way he’d talked about killing his cousin, had done something entirely different to her, made her feel dangerously alive, almost intoxicated. She’d been drunk a few times in her life, mostly on warm beer snuck to an outdoor party, or else on something gross like the bottle of Frangelico she and three other gymnasts drank during a sleepover at Madison’s house.

But those times hadn’t compared to the summer before, when her parents had hosted a garden party. Her dad’s best friend, an older Canadian man named Angus, who wore white suits and had a white beard, had been making himself a martini in the kitchen when Joan wandered in to look through the kid’s cooler for more Sprite.

“You’re drinking a martini,” she’d said to Angus.

“You have a good eye. Have you had one?”

“No,” she said. “I’m not even fifteen yet.”

“They’re quite delicious. I’d offer to make you one, but then I’d get in trouble when people saw you tottering around the garden with a martini in your hand. What’s in your glass there?”

Joan’s glass was mostly ice at this point, plus a wedge of lime and two cherry stems. “It’s just ice,” she said.

“Well, here you go, then,” Angus said, stepping carefully toward her and tipping the full contents of his martini glass into hers. “Drink it very slowly. And know that I will deny this interaction ever happened.”

She’d returned to the garden and began to sip her martini. It was so incredibly strong it made her eyes water, but there was also something so pure and adult about the way it tasted. It burned her tongue, but in a good way. It was gone too soon, and when she got up from her patio seat and walked across the party, everything was heightened. The smell of the flowers, the snippets of adult conversations, the sun on her hair. She felt as though she could levitate if she’d wanted to, that she was weightless.

“What shows do you watch, if any?”

She turned, and three of her mother’s friends were looking in her direction. They’d been talking about TV shows—she’d heard them earlier—and she stepped into their circle, still holding the ice-cold glass, and joined the conversation. At first, she’d wondered if they could tell she was drunk, but they didn’t seem to be able to. They were all talking about ER, and then Friends, and Joan was telling them how Joey and Phoebe were secretly the smartest ones on the show, and they were all laughing.

Later, she thought about how easy it was to be an adult, how easy it was to make other people like you. She was no longer drunk, but she felt powerful, like she’d gotten away with something. It had been an electrifying day, and there had been a moment, lost now, where she remembered knowing something that no one else in the world knew. It had both thrilled her and filled her with a kind of righteous anger. But now she couldn’t remember exactly what it was she had known.

And that was oddly how she’d felt the night before in the library at the Windward Resort, listening to Richard talk about killing his cousin, and offering up suggestions. Being free to say those words had felt like drinking a martini in front of a gardenful of adults, all who had no idea how the world actually worked.

Because if Richard had been saying those things to an adult, they would think he was kidding. But down deep Joan knew Richard had been serious, and it hadn’t bothered her at all.

A greenhead was biting her thigh and she slapped at it. It lay dazed on her blanket and she flicked it away. She watched it struggling in the sand for a while, then lost interest. She stood up, then walked down to the water. A woman in a black skirted bathing suit stood hip high in the ocean, gently splashing herself with water, girding herself to go all the way in.

Joan waded in, annoyed to find the water really was that cold, numbing her ankle bones. She took a few steps out to where there was a dip in the sand then sank in past her hips. She made a tiny gasp, and the woman in the one-piece laughed and said something about how cold it was. Joan shrugged and dove under the approaching wave, then swam out to where the waves weren’t breaking, the water starting to numb her skin all over. She swam back and forth for a while until her lungs hurt then tipped her head back and floated on the surface, closing her eyes. She could hear kids screaming, but they sounded as though they were far away.

As she stepped out of the surf she scanned the beach, looking for her blanket, and that was when she spotted Richard—she was pretty sure it was him—walking high up along the edge of the dunes. When she reached her belongings, he was about a hundred yards down the beach, but she could still see him. She dried off quickly and began to follow. He must have been walking slowly, since, in just a few minutes, she wasn’t that far behind him. Suddenly, she felt self-conscious and slowed down. What was her plan? Was she going to catch up with him, see if he wanted company? Or did it make sense to just bump into him randomly?