Apple Core

Eight: The beach

Stomach full and heart exploding with happiness, I set out with my mother in the direction of the beach, a basket of sandwiches and fruit in the back seat of the car. We were so happy, laughing and talking and just forgetting the conversation we had had that morning.

Then, the world was all one color: blue. Nothing existed but the sky and the sea. A few clouds passed by every once in a while, disturbing the general blueness, but otherwise it was all one color.

I could hear the sounds of people on the seashore, making mud pies or sand castles, flipping pages of magazines or squeezing out sunscreen from plastic tubes. Those people seemed in another universe altogether, a place other than the one I was in. All that existed to me was the sky and the sea, the stillness of it all.

"Clyde!" said my mother, bringing me out of my own world and back into theirs, "Clyde, sandwiches!"

I got out of the blue sea and onto the mat on the ground my mother had put. I grabbed a cheese sandwich with my wet hand, making it slightly soggy and a bit saltier on the edges. My mother and I laughed and talked as the sun lowered in the sky and the shade of the sea began to change.

I grabbed an apple out of the basket. The sea turned the color of fire as I reached the core. I was so happy, that I attempted a bite of it, but immediately choked from the bitterness. The rest of the core, seeds and all, I buried under the sand while my mother wasn't looking.

I sat there and watched the sun disappear, a hemisphere, then less, then gone, as the lifeguards shooed the swimmers away. My mother and I packed and left. I took with me a bag of seashells I had collected.

In the car, I couldn't stop yawning. The conversations ended then. The sky was black with a grey crescent moon, and my mother could barely stay awake herself. It had been the best day of my life.

I forced myself to at least change my clothes before going to bed, I was going to shower later. I dragged myself into my bed, and threw the covers on top of me. I could hear the synced breaths of the other three people living in the house. My father had been murdered eleven or so years ago, I thought as I fell into a deep sleep.

Soon, before I could even blink, the three months of summer vacations were coming to a close. I still hadn't solved the puzzle yet, but I knew I would someday. It was always at the back of my mind, something I thought of in my spare time, a puzzle scattered across the floor.

On the last day before I started sixth grade, Ralph and I played football in the park. "I wish I was older." said Ralph randomly.

"Older?" I asked, "I wish I was going to eighth grade. You're much older than me."

"I mean, like, really old," he said, "like, twenty-eight. I wanna have kids, Clyde. What are you gonna name your first kid?"

"It's too early for that." I said, because it was, but also because I had no answer to his question.

"Well," he said, "I think I'm gonna call mine Derek. I really miss Derek."

I wanted to lighten the mood, so I said, "what if it's a girl?"

He thought for a second, kicking the ball back to me, then said, "Dereka," and began laughing.

The ball got into one of the bushes. "I'm fed up with football," I said, "when will it snow again?"

"For someone as smart as you, you should at least know the date," he said.

"Me? Smart?" I asked.

"I don't think so anymore. Is 'Me? Smart?' even proper grammar?"

"Ralph!" I said. He began to laugh. The football was forgotten.

"I miss Derek," I said, "it's just not the same without him."

"Dude," he said, "did you see how fast these months went by? By this rate, he'll be back next week."

I smiled. We carried on playing. The sun grew lower in the sky and it became too dark to see. We headed to our homes.</

As I lay awake that night, as I always did the day before school began, I thought about time. Why was it that suddenly, months seemed like minutes and seconds seemed like years? It didn't make sense. I had thought that time was fixed, that it didn't change or stop or slow down.

But now, with the summer days I spent doing nothing, it seemed like life suddenly felt much faster, like somebody had crumpled the days together and thrown the memories of them into my mind.

And as my eyes closed, I reminded my self that the next time they would open, I'd have to study.