What I Thought Was True

And I can glimpse it all, trace the path we’ve come along, like the lines on a map. Four kids lying on the sand, fireworks as bright as shooting stars. Two friends on the dock, looking out at the unknown. A little boy leaping for his life, an older one doing the same. A firefly glowing in the night, caught by a boy who shows it to a girl. This girl bending to that boy’s kiss. An old woman who hasn’t forgotten what it was like to be a young one, leaning back on her glider, rocking her feet against the floorboards, looks out over the water, the ocean that changes and never changes. Horizons that seem like endings but only bend farther into the sky, curving into something new, beginning all over again.

I love you, you know, I told him, that night at the Field House. Sort of fiercely, in this aggressive tone I immediately wished I could take back—a challenge more than an admission.

But Cass gets it. He gets me.

“I do,” he said simply. And I knew he did. That that was true.

Cass is a better dancer than I am—not hard—but we know how, we know now, how to move together, so he dips and twirls me to the music, dance steps I never knew before.

“You’re leading,” he breathes against my cheek.

And I am. “Sorry,” I whisper.

“S’okay,” he says. And it is.

By chance, and maybe a little bit by design, we’re going to the same university, State College. He to study cartography, me, thanks to a Daughters of Portuguese Fishermen scholarship (granddaughter, really, but Grandpa Ben talked his way around the logistics), to study English lit.

Hey,” Cass says, coming up next to me, jacket already off, sleeves already unbuttoned and rolled up. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

the distance between summer people and island people shorter than the causeway, only as long as it takes to step across the invisible line that only exists if you insist on it.

All the things that stay the same . . . and everything that’s changed

Em can dive now, clean and clear into the water, coming up with a smile. And Hideout smells like chorine.

He got into the Coast Guard Academy, will go there in the fall. He watches Viv for a minute, then his eyes drift out over the ocean in the distance, out to his own horizon

survived comments of Spence’s like, “Wow. I’ve never been faithful this long. Or at all.”

I used my superior managerial skills,” she said.

“You threatened to cry, didn’t you? Spence can’t handle that.