resurface

3

It looked like a rock at first or maybe debris, something dark and lump-like in the distance, but as I got closer, I made out the outlines of a person, dressed in dark colors, sitting hunched over in a heap. There was only one person it could be.

Macon.

My chest twisted and that familiar pang vibrated out from my heart and through my whole body. It made me hyperaware of my thumping pulse, the tightening in my throat, and the cramping in my stomach.

It was like this every time I saw him. Part of me wanted to keep going, run by like I hadn't seen him or like I couldn't be bothered to care. The truth was that I shouldn't acknowledge him. Even if he called out to me and asked me to stop, I should keep running—from him and the way I felt about him. He had done far worse to me in the past year.

In the end, it was the other part of me that won out.

The part that still loved him.

I did what I probably always would. I slowed when I approached and came to a complete stop about five feet away. I couldn't seem to resist dropping everything else when it came to him.

"Emma," he said without looking up.

If you lived in Seaside and saw a lanky blond girl running on the beach, there was only one person it could be too. No matter how much he wanted to forget our history together, this town was only so big.

"Hey." My voice didn't seem like my own. It was breathy from the last mile and a half, but it was also tight and thick, laced with all the different everythings that we had been to each other once and all the different everythings that had happened around us. We had more history than any two people should.

He still didn't look up from the brown paper bag in his hand, some unidentified kind of alcohol inside.

Macon had been a boy I knew inside and out when we were kids. He was almost two full years older than me, but we played together and fought together for as long as I could remember. We built cities in the sand, painted a rather terrible mural on the side of the Seaside movie theater, went body surfing when the sun went down, and ate saltwater taffy until it made us sick. He had attempted to teach me to serve and spike a volleyball, and he'd been responsible for the worst and most ridiculous looking sunburn I'd ever had.

That's who we had been as kids.

Then his sister disappeared.

Macon Anderson-Wright didn't recover after that. He grew up withdrawn. For a long time he didn't really talk to anyone. When he bothered to make an appearance at school, he was moody and sullen and always getting into fights with anyone who looked at him sideways. He smoked and drank and was quick to curse people out. I didn't really know who he was anymore.

Then I found him. I was a sophomore, he was a senior. It was a Friday night in February, the kind of night when true winter sets in. The temperature had dropped to biting and the wind off the ocean was sharp enough to cut skin. Macon was sitting on the rocks at the lighthouse in just a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, halfway to letting himself freeze to death. His face red, nose running, eyelashes frozen. He hadn't heard me when I came up and called his name, and he seemed only partially aware when I reached out and laid my gloved hand against his ice cold skin.

I put my arms around him, pulled him to his feet, walked him home, and wrapped him up in blankets in his bedroom. Before I left, he squeezed me hand and said, "I can't believe she's gone." We talked about her after that. We stayed up all night, huddled together in his bed, wrapped up in his comforter. We relived all of our favorite memories of Ivy, like the time she led us down into the sewers on a wild goose chase for some kind of hidden treasure or when she and I followed Macon and Dan to the lighthouse and offered them marshmallows and chocolate in exchange for telling us ghost stories, and the time she broke her arm in an attempt to prove Macon wrong after he insisted she would get hurt if she jumped off the carousel. We laughed and we cried and we clung to each other.