The others grab a bag each too, while everyone thanks me, which I wave off. We leave the supermarket and Bonnie says it would have been smarter to drive into town because now we're going to have to lug the groceries a kilometre to the house.
At least the view is nice. The ocean is far lower than the town, so to get down to the beach, people have to take stairs from the grassy edge of the cliffs down to the sand. From up here, you can see the white caps of seafoam and how the waves come in and out. We walk through a park, leafy green trees surrounding us. The sun rises higher in the sky.
I walk behind the others, and Kennedy lingers to walk with me. "You didn't have to pay," she says.
"I wanted to."
Kennedy looks at me, and I tense up. Sometimes she gives me this assessing look that makes me wonder if I've done something wrong — if I said the wrong thing, if my hair is messy, if I'm just simply odd. She has that look on her face now.
Then she smiles like I've passed her test, and sighs, jokingly exasperated. "You're cute," she says, taking my hand. We walk in silence for the rest of the way, though it's not an angry silence. It's the usual silence that lingers between Kennedy and me.
6
Liam: Green Tea
Curls of wind travel from over the ocean and crash against the five of us. Beside me, Bonnie wraps her arms around herself. "I thought the beach was warm," she says, teeth chattering.
"Not in April," Kennedy says.
"Leaving the house without a jacket doesn't seem like such a good idea, does it?" Erin asks from the front of our group. She walks beside Kennedy and Curtis, who are holding hands, while Bonnie and I wander behind. We're walking through the park that's on the cliffs above the beach, heading towards the centre of town.
Tonight, when no one felt like cooking, despite all the groceries we bought earlier today, we decided to get takeaway fish and chips and have a picnic in the park.
"My phone said it'd be warm tonight," Bonnie grumbles. She's wearing a thin long-sleeve shirt and corduroy pants. "I should have dressed like you," she says to me.
I'm wearing a shirt, a hoodie and a jacket, with a beanie pulled over my head. "You said I looked like I was dressed for the snow!"
"Yeah, well." Bonnie shakes her mane of hair out of her face. "They say beauty is pain."
"Here," I say, stopping and pulling off my jacket.
"Oh, Liam, no —"
"Take it," I say, handing it to her.
After a moment of hesitation, she takes it. "Thanks. You sure you're not cold without it?"
"I'm fine." My hoodie is pretty thick, and I've warmed up from our walk.
We pass restaurants with outdoor seating and glowing heat lamps. On the beach below us, middle-aged and elderly couples walk barefoot on the wet sand, holding their shoes. A group of pre-teens shriek as they run past them.
This town is beautiful. I'm so lucky I get to be here. I guess I should be grateful to Curtis for that, but if Kennedy wasn't inviting Curtis, she would have invited me in his place.
"I'll remember to give it back to you," Bonnie says.
I jerk my attention back to her. "Hmm?"
"The jacket."
"Oh. Yeah, I need that back. That's a limited edition piece of merchandise."
"For a TV show, right?" She tries to look at the embroidery of anime characters at the back.
I nod and give her a brief explanation of the plot that doesn't do the amazingness of the show any justice. "I scoured the internet to find it and I found it on eBay and then I had to go through outbidding everyone else. Then I had to get it shipped from Japan which was expensive as hell. God, that was exhausting."
Ahead of me, Curtis snorts. Was that because of me? Surely he's not listening in to Bonnie and my conversation. Doesn't he have better things to do, like talk to Kennedy?
Then again, he and Kennedy don't seem to talk much and have the same boring conversations over and over. Although, maybe they have riveting conversations when I'm not around. I wouldn't bet money on it, though.
