* * *

I suddenly sat bolt upright.

  “Where’s Marti?” The question was directed at no one in particular, but Madelene seemed to be the only one paying any attention to me. She looked around her, drunkenly.

  “Gosh, I don’t know. Probably went to the bathroom, Meggy. I wouldn’t worry.”

Meggy?

Only Marti called me that. I wanted to stay and unload a serving of sarcasm on her, but I was too busy looking through the crowd. How had I let her slip away from me? I jumped up onto the hood of a car that was parked on the sand.

  “Hey get off!” Some blonde surfer dude called. I didn’t listen. I had to find her before she did something really stupid. My eyes preyed on the crowd, searching, searching. They darted back and forth between tall and short, dark and pale, fat and skinny, straining for a glimpse of a thin girl with long dark hair in a faded tank top and denim shorts.

Where are you Marti?

There. I saw her on the boardwalk, making her way towards the boating docks.

I leapt down from the car, just as the boy who had shouted at me was making his way over, and started off as fast as I could.

I pushed and shoved until my feet hit the splinter-filled boards of the docks. Shops along the water were full to the brim with rich kids fritting away their folks’ money. As the throng thinned I was able to run, feeling dizzy with the heat of the night and breathless with nerves.

 I made it to the edge of the dock. Marti wasn’t there. I looked all around me, frantic. Then, spying a short path back to the mainland, I saw her in the distance, standing up in a little parking lot next to a red BMW. There was someone with her, but I couldn’t make out his face.

I started up the path, gripping the rail. The small dock rose perilously over the water up to the shore, and wood was slick and hard to balance on.

  I made it to the top and crept close enough to the car to hear their conversation. I had come intending to tell Marti outright that she was being an absolute idiot and make her abandon whatever she was planning. But now that I was here, I had no words. I suddenly felt as shy and afraid as I had been my first day of kindergarten. So I stayed back in the shadows of the beach ferns, waiting.

And listening.

 

 

  “What do you want to do? Go and find him?” Marti’s companion had a low voice, soft and kind. Somehow it relaxed me. I could hear worry in it, which somehow made me feel better about him. Like maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Maybe he was like me and actually cared about her.

He sounded young. Around our age. That made me feel better too. But I still couldn’t see him clearly.

  “I don’t know.” Marti answered. Her voice sounded strange and distant.

  “You know I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

At that I was back to worrying. Surely she wouldn’t run off with this twit. Oh why couldn’t I say something?




( P.S. Just so you know, Mozzie didn't die! )