“Oh yes, I’m keeping it in my bra,” Mary said. She stopped and waited for me. “Why are you being such a grump?”
“Bonfires are pointless.”
“You’ve already established thateverythingis pointless. I assumed bonfires fell under that umbrella.”
“They do.”
“What’s really bothering you, my poor little grumpy sister?”
We’d reached Main Street, the longest street inBy-the-Sea. It ran north to south and cut the island in half down the middle. You could get all the way from Bottle Hill to the ferry dock on this road. I stood in the middle of it, staring down into the darkness that was punctuated every hundred feet or so by a streetlamp.
In a little over two months, Mary and I would take this road all the way to the docks. We’d board the ferry for the first time in our lives and take it to the mainland. I was going to a small college just far enough from the ocean that for the first time in my life I wouldn’t be able to smell salt. Mary would get on a plane and fly south. Her school was on the very tip of the mainland, right on the water. She was tied to the water, my sister. Moods like tides, temper like a hungry shark.
“Georgie?” Mary asked, when a few moments had passed and I still hadn’t moved from the middle of the road. Not like there was anyreasonto. We’d counted once; there were fewer than forty cars on By-the-Sea, and we were almost guaranteed to run into none of them at this time of night.
“Just thinking,” I said.
“About... ?”
“College, I guess.”
Mary made a noise in the back of her throat that meant something like “Really? This again?” and at the same time conveyed how unlikely it was that we had come from the same place, the same womb. At the same time, even.
Sometimes I wondered about that myself. I mean, we looked nothing alike. Mary was a blond, and I was a brunette. Mary had brown eyes, and I had green. Mary liked bonfires, and I thought they were pointless. Mary was going far away to a college on the water, and I was having heart palpitations in the middle of the road thinking about a simple little ferry ride.
“Are you still worried about that?” Mary asked. “Georgina, you’re going to be fine. You’re the smartest person in our class, everyone loves you, and there are bound to be more girls who like girls over there than there are here. It’s a simple numbers game.”
“Well, at least you have your priorities straight,” I said.
“Kissing is important. You’ve only kissed one person in your entire life. That’s weird.”
“I think it’s weirder that you’re methodically making your way through every boy on this very small island.”
“God, youarea grump,” Mary said.
As we spoke, Mary had gradually floated higher and higher into the air. She was a solid five inches off the ground now, and I didn’t think she even realized it. My sister had always been lazy about her powers—she went through week-long periods where she practiced diligently, trying to figure out how to control them, learning how to direct her body through the air, but more often than not, she couldn’t be bothered.
It worried me. It was one thing trying to keep my sister’spowers a secret from a tiny island, but what would it be like for her to try and hide them from the entire mainland? From her university? From her new roommate?
“Mary,” I said sternly, pointing at her feet.
She rolled her eyes and gradually sank back to earth. “There’s no one around.”
“That’s not the point. You know you’re supposed to be trying to control it.”
“I can’t think about it every second of every day,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Let’s just get this over with,” I said.
I pushed past her, sure of my footing even in the darkness, because I knew the way by heart, because I knew every single way on this island, every single rock or fallen branch that might trip me up. You could walk from one end to the other in two hours, and that’s if you were really taking your time.
We weren’t going far. The Beach was a fifteen-minute walk from our house. That was the official, in-the-tourist-book name for where we were going, one of six beaches on By-the-Sea. (Yes, there was a tourist book for our tiny island. It was made and printed by Willard Jacoby, and I don’t think he’d ever sold a single copy.) The Beach was the smallest of the six, a little cove popular with the locals and unpopular with the tourists because of a series of signs warning of frequent shark attacks. The signs, while a blatant lie designed to keep the Beach tourist-free, wereincredibly effective; they featured sunblock-nosed stick figures in bathing suits missing arms or legs or huge chunks of their torsos.
The bonfire was held on the Beach every year on the summer solstice. School had been out for a month already, but this was the official start of summer and By-the-Sea’s singularly minded two-month tourist season.
The island’s population of young people, including the thirty-six of us who made up that year’s graduating class, collected on the Beach, drank summer punch, vomited into the waves, and skinny-dipped. I had gone every year since I was thirteen, and this would be my last one. We were done now, Mary and I. Graduated. Elevated. Voilà.
I was only here because of her. She loved this sort of thing. She was born for oceanside bonfires, long gauzy dresses and uncombed hair, the scent of salt like a blanket you can’t peel off your skin. She was born for the smell of water, for the way it sank into your bones, stained your skin, dyed your blood a deep, salty blue.
