Wherever You Go #Wattys2016

Chapter Six

Keagen POV!!!

Dammit, Mika! I swear, this girl will be the death of me. Standing there, in my room; looking at my photographs, my art- I just want to take pictures of her all day long. Those eyes of her just draw me in so I'm drowning in their depths. I want to kiss her, but I just met her, and she's Ash's friends. Normally, that makes her off limits.

Plus all this new shit with Theo... And I know something's up with Adam too. Yeah, he's all moody, but he doesn't ever get pissed at new people like Mika. He obviously has some history with her, or something- maybe to do with that old friend of his from out of town- the one who passed away last year. Simon, I think his name was. Or something common, like Daniel. Ever since he died, Adam was always really mad at the world, including his own brother. And me. Adam used to be one of my best friends, before. He taught me how to play guitar when his dad started to get bad again, when I was eleven and he was thirteen. He was like an older brother to Ash and I. When Ash was fourteen and got asked to Homecoming by some sophomore- I don't even remember his name- Adam grumbled and threatened. And when the same kid broke up with her a month later, Adam broke the kid's nose. "Accidentally," my ass. When Ash started dating Spencer Newman, Adam stood a few feet away, practicing his baseball swing and his death stare. Spencer was never a problem, though. He's a few years older. Now, Ash and I are almost eighteen- twelve days! And Spencer is nineteen and a half, almost twenty, like Adam. Our parents were pretty nervous about Aisling and Spencer, but he's been nothing but perfect for her since day one. They met when Ash and I were sophomores and Spencer and Adam were seniors.

I've had a few girlfriends over a few summers, but no one serious. Just pretty tourists who stop in for a summer adventure and are gone by mid-August. Girls I never see again once their families back up and go home. Only one girl ever came back, and even she never stuck around very long after.

Her name was Kylie Markham. I met her the summer before eighth grade at the beach. We were at the awkward stage in our lives where we wanted to act like younger kids and build sandcastles all day but still be more adult-like and walk on the beach for hours and take artsy sunset pictures, seeing if we could walk into the horizon line. We'd sit on the beach with sunburned shoulders and watch the sun from behind dark sunglasses. Well, I had sunburned shoulders- Kylie always tanned.

Kylie wasn't Ash's friend, though, not really. Ash had a group of close-knit locals- all artists of some form- that had been friends since middle school or earlier. They were an easy gang to hang out with, but sometimes they could be a bit exclusive to non-artsy types. Kylie didn't fit into that group. She was tall and skinny and super-outgoing. Her hair was dark like cocoa and cut right about her shoulders, curly with humidity and almost perpetually damp from the salty ocean. Her skin was dark from tanning and could lay out on the sand for hours without getting burned. My closest friend since childhood, as well as Ash's, had always been SPF 50+. Probably would be for life, unless we moved to Greenland or something.

That summer was racing down the hot sand, balancing an ice cream cone in each hand and daring each other not to spill it. It was me teaching her guitar chords and singing Frank Sinatra songs while we balanced on the edges of the pier railings, no matter how many times George from the Burger Shack told us off. We woke up early to see the sunrise and spend about a hundred dollars of her summer fund and my birthday money on a Polaroid camera to use up six rolls of film on artsy beach shots and fireworks on the Fourth of July. Kylie was my first girlfriend, my first summer "romance," or "fling," or whatever you wanted to call it. She was my first real kiss. She came back, the summer after our freshman year. But it wasn't the same. We were in high school then, and we had crossed certain lines that made our friendship seem awkward and flimsy like the old Polaroids I still had tacked to my wall from that very first summer.