She stood atop the gray dunes looking out across the black sea.
Don’t groan. It is, quite plainly, just the truth. The Dunes, though, should be styled as a proper place. They aren’t just any dunes. They are The Dunes. At the entrance to the Greyport Public Beach exists one of those mythic small town spots where teenagers congregate to do the things their parents willfully believe they would never do. Greyport, being a coastal community in New England, saw its public beach all but abandoned during the school year and The Dunes provided a kind of cover from the peering eyes of the neighboring houses that made its patrons feel a shroud of invisibility. Once one crossed over that first sandy hill they stepped into a Neverland where the rules and responsibilities of harbortown teenage life no longer applied. Now, just to be clear, this isn’t a world of unrealistic magic. They were never anything less than obvious. One day people might learn that voices carry, especially a group of voices becoming increasingly drunk by the ocean. Oh, and also, fire is not invisible in this world. Everybody can see it. Even from behind large mounds of sand.
To their credit, though, it never usually got “out of hand,” whatever the reasonable limits of that qualification may be. He never heard any scandalously extreme levels of debauchery. The occasional “What’s?” would be thrown around for a tense moment until they wore out. And there were the requisite high-pitched, full-throated screams that would send a shiver and bolt him upright, but inevitably turn into a round of laughter.
It also didn’t happen too often. Only once every few weeks was it really impactful enough to be considered an event. Like, the kind that people might whisper loudly about on Monday. The kind that would accompany the quaint adage, “everybody was there.” Innocuous enough, but unaware of its alienating implications … or maybe completely aware of it.
There were a few people who were … those people. The in-charge kind of people. Without fail, they claimed the scene on Fridays, but even on the occasional Tuesday or Wednesday, he would smell that familiar smokey smell, hear the rumble of voices and look out to see the glow from behind the sand and the reeds. Shadows darting around it from time to time. Whether it was going to be a quiet hang or venture into the land of the rager was apparently at the discretion of this core crew. Who they were, he didn’t actually know. Not by face, anyway.
She was the first of them he ever really saw. Like, really saw.
Now, don’t get all weird. He had no interest in being a total voyeur creepo. Really. His bedroom nook, where he spent most nights drawing or reading before bed, just happened to look out over the dunes. Sorry, The Dunes. A room he chose for this exact reason. It was his favorite spot in the whole of the house. It wasn’t until they had been there for a few nights that he learned that many of his classmates considered this a sacred place. At first, he was annoyed. An interruption in an otherwise idyllic scene. The one sliver of a silver lining in this whole mess of a situation he found himself in.
He didn’t want to move, of course. Few teenagers do, right? Not that he had many friends in Madison, but he had grown comfortable in his familiar journey of isolation there. And everybody else seemed to as well. He had painstakingly earned his identity as a Loner and, while maybe not respected for it, at least wasn’t made a fuss about anymore. Moving to Greyport meant he would need to put in all that thankless work again. It could take years to finally be accepted for his lack of acceptance. But what the landlocked Madison couldn’t offer him was the sullen boy's dream of staring out at a cold, dark, vacant ocean every night. And when he was sure that everybody else was asleep and The Dunes had turned to ash, he could slip outside and in just a number of steps … fourteen from the porch to the sea wall and then ten down the stairs, to be exact … he could sink his naked feet into soft, chilly, prickly sand and breathe in a kind of solitude that seemed impossible. Most kids who are yanked out of their perfectly mundane, entirely tolerable lives and thrown into a brand new unknown don’t experience such a luxury, he reasoned, so that was a little bit of a something.
And then they showed up. Their disembodied voices sullying his quiet compromise, their orange firelight distracting from the still darkness of the harbor and the ocean beyond it. And the screams. The freaking screams. If this is what friends got you - a kind of faux joyful noise pollution - maybe he was better off.
After a while, though, you do become accustomed to regular annoyances. It was at times, even welcome. His was the nearest house, but it was still a good maybe quarter mile away, so they were rarely loud enough to be more than a distant buzz. And the smell of the fire never reached a point of being overwhelming, especially if he closed his window, which he didn’t love to do, but was hardly a burden. He also learned that the beachside of Greyport died a very sudden death after Labor Day. Without warning, his neighborhood had gone from the bustling, overcrowded personification of an anxiety attack to the apparent aftermath of an apocalypse. Not a messy one like with zombies or explosions, but something maybe more sinister where everyone just evaporates and their houses remain perfectly preserved and only seagulls survive and everyday seems painted in a cold grayscale, sort of proving the town’s name. It was this dismal and dreary peace of the off season that helped him start to fall in love with his new home and during these months, the occasional company of his more socially skilled peers was less icing on an already overly adorned cake and more a brief burst of life and color that, even for him, if he was being tragically and embarrassingly honest, was not unwelcome. At least, not intolerable.
When school started, he did come to know some of the voices. Mostly by means of reasonable deduction. Spend more than a few days in any High School and you start to figure out who might be the types to gather around a bonfire drinking beer. He assumed they were drinking beer, anyway, he wasn’t such a rube to think they were having soda. Zeroing in on those key characters, he could pinpoint some recognizable tones. Mostly, though, he just realized that the majority of that type of teenager all sort of sound the same and they sound a lot like the echoes he heard from his nook.
Tonight had not been particularly raucous, but drew a larger crowd than was typical for a Tuesday. Maybe she just needed some space. He could respect that, certainly. He knew her instantly. In the breezy moonlight, he saw the long, wavy white blonde hair that stretched almost impossibly far down her back and was a standout in the halls of Greyport High, where the rest of his female-identified or other past-the-shoulders hair growing schoolmates seemed to lack the patience or care or confidence to commit to such lengths. And, don’t start groaning again, it wasn’t like she walked with an invisible fan in front of her or anything cinematic like that. It’s just that in a place like this, little things stand out. Butt-touching hair was a thing that only she had and here it was, actually blowing behind her like the credits were about to roll on a prestigious film he would never see that won all the awards and commissioned an original power ballad that sounded just like all the other sappy power ballads he would never listen to commissioned for all of the other award winning films he would never see, but he suddenly sort of understood because that kind of sound would pair perfectly with the scene playing out before him. She wore only a denim jacket over what, from his vantage point, seemed like an inappropriately flimsy dress for such a cold night. Beautiful, yes, especially as the shine of its white satiny finish glistened in almost unison with her hair, but highly impractical.
She skipped down The Dunes toward the beach. Not in an overly precious way, but in that way that when you’re going down a hill of sand, you’re forced to go faster than a walk, but try to avoid slipping into an uncontrollable run. So, you sort of - skip. She skidded to a halt and then walked purposefully toward the Greyport jetty, which was sometimes bathed in darkness, but gloriously illuminated at certain points on full moon nights. He had to admit, it was particularly inviting this evening, but he did not appreciate bearing witness to someone who had potentially consumed alcoholic beverages and was wearing a slippery long dress and who … was she wearing shoes? … No, she was not. And someone with tractionless bare feet, climbing up the very dangerously large and very dangerously wet-from-the-crashing-waves rocks. He did not like that at all.
Surely someone would follow her. They would notice her missing and run after her. This is maybe a thing she does after a few beers. Just wanders off. He willed for somebody to emerge from behind The Dunes. He could see their socializing shadows amid the dancing fiery beams. He could hear the murmur of their conversation. Why was nobody noticing her absence? She’s the only one with hair that long.
She mounted the jetty with miraculous ease. Phew. Ok. Just wait right there and eventually someone will come or you can just hop back down because you’ve got your kicks in … and, there she goes. Hopping foot by foot across each boulder, traveling deeper and deeper out to sea, soon to evade even the moonlight. It was too much to bear, even for someone so committed to avoiding engagement of any kind with any other human. He dropped his sketch pad and bounded from the room. He accidentally skipped the last step on his way downstairs and only just caught himself before tumbling into the front/back door. To clarify, these houses along the water were built so that what would, in any other house, be the front facade actually faced away from the street and toward the ocean. You are welcome for that fun fact.
Anyway, his mother looked up from the living room chair with genuine concern and his sister from her spot on the couch with an eye roll. His father was already asleep, as he would need to be up in just a matter of hours for work.
“There’s a girl on the jetty.” It took almost all of his breath to release it.
“What?” It bordered on accusatory and caused all color to drain instantly from her face. For parents, it seems, the idea that any young person could be in peril was for their own young person to be in peril.
He didn’t have the ability to break his momentum to answer her, he unlocked and unbolted the door and flew out into the night. He knew she would implicitly understand and follow behind him. Only when his feet hit the cold and crunchy grass did he realize that in his haste he, too, had forgotten his shoes and, most regrettably, his pants. For people before and past certain ages, when faced with the potential for imminent danger, shallow vanities may be rightfully disregarded, but for a teenager, being in one’s underwear in a space outside of your own bedroom or bathroom is a devastating humiliation. He nearly tripped over himself as this reality hit and his ego began pulling on the reins before he mounted the stairs to the beach.
“You look fine. Go.” A mother always knows.
And he did, right? He had, after all, thankfully, graduated to boxers by now so he could probably reasonably argue to anyone attempting to mock him that they were … shorts. Not underwear, no. Shorts. Pajama shorts. Is that embarrassing? Jeez, it’s hard to run in sand.
It took maybe longer than it should have for him to focus on the landscape he was pummeling toward. Noticeably absent from the outstretched arm of rocks reaching into the ocean was a girl. Any girl. Any person. He stopped suddenly. He never knew panic could grow panic.
“Where is she?”
“I swear, Mom, she was there. Walking out”
He pointed as if that were proof, but began mistrusting his own brain. She was there. Definitely, he thought. And there’s no way she could have made it down in that amount of time. She’d at least still be climbing back up The Dunes. He shook off the doubt and took off running again. He could hear his mother panting behind him.
“Be careful,” she cautioned as he leapt up onto the lowest rock.
Even if one wanted to, it was impossible to move swiftly on such a cold, slimy surface. It felt like walking along melting ice. He scoured both sides of the jetty - into the canal leading to the harbor, into the ocean that stretched out in front of his house and off into forever - as he maneuvered his way along the perilous obstacle course. A moment of relief came when he remembered there was a drop, a sort of trench that, during high tides, would allow for a small channel to flow through creating a break in the jetty and at low tides would clear out so you could, if you so desired, continue your journey on to the very last rock. His family had stood there to fish one particularly cloudy morning. None of them enjoyed it, but it was a valiant attempt at appreciating their new surroundings. She must be sitting in there. It was low tide now, so she could be sitting on one of those same rocks they had planted themselves on that endlessly short morning. She just wanted to get away for a second. To hide. That was it. There she would be. He felt that Christmas morning kind of anticipatory rush. The kind that is only blissful because you know it will be rewarded.
But, there she was not.
He stopped, leaning over the cliff into this now seemingly monstrous abyss. He watched the waves crash into and drain from it. Crash. Ebb. Crash. Ebb. She was nowhere. The moon was bright, her dress was white, and the ocean was relatively calm. Even if she had fallen into the water, he would have seen her in the shallow tide. He looked all around the immediate vicinity and then out at the infiniti of the sea. Had he dreamt it? He took the deepest breath he could muster to try and remind himself of his own sanity. Icy. Salty. Clean. Alive. Awake. Asleep. Dying? The sharp sting of the impending winter on his bare feet was now catching up to him. Adrenaline waning.
He could hear his name echoing foggily in the distance as if on a delay. He turned to see the high beams of flashlights moving toward him. Red and blue streaking the sky beyond the peaks of The Dunes. She must have told his sister to call the police. Moms tend to do the right thing. But, now he wondered if he had imagined it all or even just exaggerated the situation in his head. Was she back sitting around the fire drinking beers? Had he just ruined the night for everybody? The cops had broken up gatherings at The Dunes countless times before, but not usually on a night as tame as this one.
He began his walk back in shame. He flipped up the protective layer of his hoodie in an effort to remain as anonymous as possible, certain that he would be greeted by the group of them, all staring at this lunatic narc in his underwear. They wouldn’t have otherwise been aware of his presence. He would have been perfectly outside the scope of their radar. Not a Nothing, not a Nobody. Nothing’s and Nobody’s are so because they are acknowledged as such. A non-entity. A person never to be seen, never to be remembered. Who can slip through without so much as a whisper. But, he would no longer be afforded such a luxury. He had to go and give himself a very visible identity. That guy. Who did that thing. That time. Remember him?
About halfway along, he met the police. One of the officers stopped and escorted him back along the jetty to the beach, while two others continued on. They’re looking for her. And because of him. He went to turn his head back, but felt the hand of the officer guiding him forward.
“Let’s go, buddy.”
Buddy. Gross. He hated well-intended patronizing. Any intelligent person does. He imagined this man had probably spent a good amount of time among The Dunes himself. He, then, regretted this judgment when, with startling empathy, he was being pulled to a stop and a jacket large enough to cover anything embarrassing was being tied around his waist.
“Thanks.”
“Just in case there’s a crowd.”
But, there wasn’t. They got to the beach to find a fourth officer talking to both of his parents. His just awoken father was looking particularly befuddled, but had been blessed with enough forethought to toss on a pair of jeans and a sweater. His sister was walking down the beach with a pair of sweats and some sneakers for him, looking surprisingly benevolent.
The two beached officers took him aside to have him recount the story. They occasionally looked at each other inquisitively, sometimes suspiciously, but he wrote this off as just the way cops probably feel like they have to look at each other while someone is talking. Their way of asserting their upper hand and maybe tripping up someone with their feet less truthfully stable. They had no such person in this instant and he relayed his account for them with remarkable clarity and ease. It was a moment of pretty empowered self assurance. He couldn’t have remembered something so vividly if it had all been an illusion, right? There was a rush of relief. He had given this away now. His job was done and these people could take it from him. And none of his peers saw him in his underwear.
“It doesn’t seem like anyone was in The Dunes tonight, though, son.”
Ugh. Son. Wait, what?
“What do you mean? Of course there were people in the dunes.”
“Didn’t see so much as an empty beer can.”
“I saw them. I saw the fire, I heard the voices.”
“If there was a fire, there’d be smoke.”
It was only just now that he realized the flashing lights of the police cars had pulled focus from the now glaringly absent familiar flicker. And the man was right, right? When you put out a fire, especially that quickly, there would be a trace of it floating off into the sky …
“I swear, it was …”
“I had a pretty wild imagination myself when I was kid, son. Let’s just say you did the right thing by alerting your mom and running over here when you thought you saw what you thought you saw. But it must’ve just been the full moon playing tricks on you.”
He shivered to shake off the rehearsed pretension that was just oozed all over him. That might work on a prepubescent ignoramus, but he didn’t think he saw what he saw, he saw it. He could hear those voices, he could smell that smoke, he could see her hair …
“Megan Thatcher.”
“What?”
“That’s who it was. Megan Thatcher. She goes to my school. I know who she is, I know she was there. Can’t you just go to her house or call her parents or something?”
“It’s a little late …”
“Then, I’ll drop it. I’ll know that you were right. Just moon tricks or my imagination or whatever.”
“Of course we will.” The jacket-lending cop had now officially, officially made up for that unfortunate, but now very forgivable buddy moment. He reasoned it must be a term they were trained to use on a potentially hysterical young person. “You go home, though. Go to bed. It’s in our hands now.”
“I will. Thank you.”
The grumpier cop trailed off in a naturally suited huff as he lumbered through the sand, making sure to punctuate his discomfort with a variety of beleaguered sound effects. The kinder one lingered for a moment. Maybe to be generous, but also possibly to avoid walking with his disgruntled coworker.
“We’ll take care of it, don’t worry.”
“I really did see her out there, I wouldn’t make that up. Maybe she walked back before I got to the beach, I don’t know -”
“I believe you. Ok? It’s not yours to worry about anymore.” He patted his shoulder in that way he imagined a baseball coach might. He lacked the experience, but understood the reference. And he felt comforted by it. He trusted this statement, whether it was genuine or not. The only real problem was his wavering belief in himself.
It was a living dead kind of walk back up to the house. A numbness. A haze. His mom offered to make him tea or hot chocolate. He didn’t feel like his stomach would welcome even the simplest of things, so he politely declined. He floated unconsciously upstairs and showered the sand and the cold off his body. The hot water was relieving, but the calm brought questions. He couldn’t shake the very real memory of Megan on those rocks. There one moment, gone the next. He couldn’t challenge himself to make it anything less than something that was really really real.
He sat back in his nook looking out over The Dunes and the jetty and the sea in a replay. But they were no longer familiar. They had started anew. The moon no longer lit up that same spot, but it might as well have because he could see every inch of it. He could see her. He could feel himself seeing her. He could hear them. He could smell the smoke. But it was all now coated in a glaze of confusion. Every one of his senses couldn’t be betraying him, right?
Right?
What just happened?