“Let’s go,” he says, cocking his head toward the kitchen door.
It’s not locked, still open from our time outside, and it swings easily and without noise. In high school when we didn’t want to wake anyone, we’d sneak out through it. It was as good to us then as it is now.
Outside, the night is cold. Stone grabs a hoodie off the outdoor chair where it’s been siting since I left it last night—and hands it to me. When you live at the beach there is almost always a stray sweatshirt outside. This one is surprisingly dry.
I gesture to my sweater, already on. “You take it,” I say.
He loops his arms through the sleeves—it’s small on him, but not by much.
“Come on,” he says. He cuffs his pants at the ankle, and we take the steps down to the ocean. The sand is wet and dense, and there isn’t much beach. The tide is high, just a sliver remains to walk down.
I know before he holds out his hand where we’re going togo. The Greek. A dilapidated, crumbling, splinter-filled house that has never been sold or occupied. At least not in the twenty years since we first went there. It’s about half a football field down the beach, sandwiched between a blue-and-white beach house owned by the founders of that popular diaper company and the rocks.
Everyone on Broad Beach knew that’s where kids went to party. Parents liked it because at least we were close by and accessible. If it was past midnight, they knew where to find us. But for us—we thought we were pulling off something major.
The house was already named long before Stone and I ever entered high school. The Greek, after a frat house, a meeting place, somewhere with sticky, beer-stained floors and broken glass windows. It had all of those things.
There were old, wooden steps up to the back deck that didn’t quite reach the shore. Even when we were kids we’d have to leap up onto the first one and climb from there. It made the whole thing feel even more special, isolated—you had to work to get there.
“Wow,” I say when we reach it. “It looks even worse, if that’s possible.”
Stone laughs lightly beside me.
“You think teenagers still come here?”
“Not anymore,” he says. “They just party in their houses now. Parents are cooler. Or they care less than they used to.”
I remember Bonnie offering us wine with dinner.If you’re going to drink I’d rather you do it here.
“Yours didn’t,” I say.
I can’t see Stone’s face as he hops up onto the first step and offers me his hand. “Watch the wood,” he says. He points to where it’s splintered.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” I push off the sand, and then grip his hand to steady myself.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I say truthfully. “I don’t know how to talk about Bonnie.”
We climb the remaining stairs, and then we’re on the deck. It’s black and green with mold and white with age. The spots sing out, iridescent in the dark night.
“We don’t have to,” Stone says. “Seriously, I’d rather not tonight. There’s plenty else to say.”
I look through the broken glass windows inside. There’s no furniture—there never was. Although at one point a kid brought an old abandoned mattress over. That’s long since decomposed.
Moss grows over the countertops and the floorboards.
“We’re probably better off outside,” I say. “I care more about asbestos than I used to.”
“I really can’t say the same.”
Stone holds my gaze for a moment. It’s dark out here, but the moon is near full, and its reflection off the water offers just enough light to see everything I need to.
I take a seat at the edge of the deck and dangle my feet off the side. Stone folds himself down beside me.
I’m thinking, now, about my twenty-third birthday. How he’d taken me to Duke’s on the water for fish tacos and then blindfolded me in the car. He’d driven me back to this house, but before we got there we pulled into the parking lot at the Trancas shopping center. It’s where we had gone in high school when we needed somewhere we could be alone together. When our busy houses were bustling and the doors to both our bedrooms had to be open.
I remember the way the leather of his back seat felt against myskin, how he lay my body over the arm rest. I remember the windows fogging to a tilt, the beads of sweat on his forehead, the way he’d drawn slow and lazy circles until I was breaking. For years I couldn’t drive by that corner of PCH without a sting of memories. Our parking lot. Sometimes it felt like we were still there.
