My brows went up.
“You okay?” he asked, and for some inexplicable reason, I got the sense he wasn’t asking about my foot.
“I’m fine,” I told him, because I was. Or, I would be.
“Uh huh,” he muttered, glancing away from me. His dark brows were furrowed in concentration and his eyes were fixed on the crashing waves. He didn’t say anything else and neither did I. We just sat in silence until, precisely six minutes later, Aunt Colette’s car rolled into the parking lot. It was hard to miss her arrival, seeing as she drove an exact replica of the infamous Thelma and Louise cliff-diving convertible — a turquoise blue 1966 Ford Thunderbird she kept in pristine condition.
The Lifeguard God wheeled my bike from the rack at the edge of the parking lot and stowed it in the trunk while Aunt Colette made a fuss over me, cooing and brushing at my tear-stained face, hauling most my weight up against the long length of her side and helping me hobble into the passenger seat. When I was settled, I heard her chatting to the LG by the trunk but, by this point, I was in the throes of deep mortification and couldn’t bring myself to listen to their conversation.
The most beautiful boy I’d ever seen in my life had held me in his arms and carried me against his chest and blown on my foot and been my real, actual superhero, and that knowledge was as thrilling as it was humiliating. My small body simply could not contain all the emotions whirling around inside it. I was going to fly apart into a million pieces if we stayed here much longer, in plain view of those intense green eyes that seemed to see everything, all at once, every little detail and all the big ones, too.
Aunt Colette slid behind the wheel and strapped in. I listened to the click of her seatbelt, then turned to grab my own when she told me to buckle up. Swiveling in my seat, I saw the beautiful boy in all his glory standing there beside the passenger door, looking down at me. I tilted my face up to meet his eyes one last time and managed to overcome my mortification long enough to utter two words.
“Thank you.”
He nodded. “See you around, Firecracker.”
And he did.
Because not one week later, when my foot was fully healed and I was again allowed to take my bike out on sunny days, I rode straight back to that beach on Winter Island. I was practically giddy with anticipation to see the LG — my hero, my savior, extractor-of-urchin-spines and applier-of-goopy-stuff, the most beautiful boy to ever grace the beaches of Massachusetts, of New England, of the whole freaking universe, so far as I was concerned.
But when I stowed my bike in the (surprisingly full) rack and walked down onto the beach, everything was different. The once-empty stretch of sand was peppered with towels and chairs. And on those towels and chairs… were girls.
Dozens of girls.
Dozens of gorgeous, older girls who filled out their bathing suit tops in a way I wouldn’t for years and years to come. And they were not shy about showing off these attributes to the Lifeguard God.
MyLifeguard God!
But it was clear he wasn’t just mine anymore. My secret was out. In the space of a week, he’d gone from the subject of one awkward preteen girl’s hero-worship to the star of every girl in Salem’s sexual fantasies.
I couldn’t compete. I was ten. I was flat as a pancake. Flatter, actually. I couldn’t get him to so much as look my direction, with all that perky flesh on display. Not to mention, he was five years older than me — an age difference that might not matter down the line, but most definitely did at that time. The five years separating ten from fifteen might as well have been five million lightyears.
I knew this.
I persisted anyway.
Day after day, I sat on my stupid polka-dotted towel in my stupid polka-dotted one-piece suit, crossed my spindly arms over my pancake-flat chest, watching my LG flirt with girls his own age — girls who had boobs and hips and midnight curfews — and positivelyseething. And then, as July slipped into August and he still hadn’t looked my way, not even once, I finished seething and started the sad business of accepting reality.
This was something I was used to doing. Reality, more often than not, sucked. In my experience, if you were lucky, you’d get three months of good for every nine months of bad, like my Salem summer arrangement. That was the way things worked in the world of Gwen.
So, I got up from my towel, plunked on my sparkly pink helmet, pedaled my way home to Aunt Colette’s, and started going to a different beach on the other side of town to look for my shells. One where there were no lifeguards on duty and no sea urchins to step on.
Over time, I resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to ever look into those green eyes again, or hear that deep voice calling meFirecracker— which, for no particular reason at all, had become my favorite word in the entire English language.
* * *
I was wrong,of course.
I did hear that voice again, but not for three whole summers. The wait was worth it, though, because, along with the voice, I finally got the name to accompany it. His name. And it was a good one.
Graham Graves.
It rolled off the tongue. It looked good in print, which I discovered when I wrote it in my journal about a hundred and twenty five times in a row. Better than that, his initials were G.G., just like mine, which was more irrefutable evidence from the universe that we were simply meant to be.
Graham Graves and Gwendolyn Goode.
I thought his was a perfect name for a Lifeguard God, who by then was no longer a mere beachside attraction but a full-on heartthrob. He was the talk of the town, which was how I learned his name in the first place. Everyone talked about the Graves family, seeing as they owned half the city and had done so since the 1600s, but they especially talked about Graham. He was the subject of relentless gossip — mostly about whatever new girl he was currently stringing along, whose heart he’d most recently left pulverized, and which lucky fool would be next.