Another Day Read Free Page A

with that. I call out his name, and it’s like I’m still singing along to a song.
    He looks at me for a moment, and I think,
Oh no, this is the part where he tells me I look like an idiot.
But then he’s running down to me, grabbing hold of me, swinging me around. He’s heard the song, and now we’re dancing. We’re laughing and racing each other to the water. When we get there, we splash-war, feeling the tide against our legs. I reach down for some shells, and Justin joins me, looking for colors that won’t be the same when they’re dry, looking for sea glass and spirals. The water feels so good, and standing still feels so good, because there’s a whole ocean pulling at me and I have the strength to stay where I am.
    Justin’s face is completely unguarded. His body is entirely relaxed. I never see him like this. We are playing, but it’s not the kind of playing that boyfriends and girlfriends do, where there’s strategy and scorekeeping and secret moves. No, we have scissored ourselves away from all that.
    I ask him to build a sand castle with me. I tell him how Liza always had to have her own, next to mine. She would build a huge mountain with a deep moat around it, while I would make a small, detailed house with a front door and a garage. Basically, I was building the dollhouse I was never able to have, while Liza was creating the fortress she felt she needed. She would never touch my castle—she wasn’t the kind of older sister who needed to destroy the competition. But she wouldn’t let me touch hers, either. We’d leave them when we were done, for the tide to take away. Sometimes our parents would come over. To me, they’d say,
How pretty!
To Liza, it would be,
How tall!
    I want Justin to work on a sand castle with me. I want us to experience what it’s like to build something together. We don’t have any shovels or buckets. Everything has to be done with our hands. He takes the phrase
sand castle
literally—starting with the square foundation, creating a drawbridge with his finger. I work on the turrets and the towers—balconies are precarious, but spires are possible. At random moments, he compliments me—little words like
nice
and
neat
and
sweet
—and I feel like the beach is somehow unlocking this vocabulary from the dungeon where he’s kept it all these months. I always felt—maybe hoped—that the words were in there somewhere. And now I know they are.
    It isn’t very warm out, but I can feel the sun on my cheeks and my neck. We could gather more shells and begin to decorate, but I am starting to tire of the building, and putting our focus there. When the last tower is complete, I suggest we wander for a little while.
    “Are you pleased with our creation?” he asks.
    And I say, “Very.”
    We head to the water to wash off our hands. Justin stares back at the beach, back at our castle, and seems lost for a moment. Lost, but in a good place.
    “What is it?” I ask.
    He looks at me, eyes so kind, and says, “Thank you.”
    I am sure he has said these two words to me before, but never like this, never in a way that would make me want to remember them.
    “For what?” I ask. What I mean is:
Why now? Why finally?
    “For this,” he says. “For all of it.”
    I want so much to trust it. I want so much to think we’ve finally shifted to the place I always thought we could get to. But it’s too simple. It feels too simple.
    “It’s okay,” he tells me. “It’s okay to be happy.”
    I have wanted this for so long. This is not how I pictured it, but nothing ever is. I am overwhelmed by how much I love him. I don’t hate him at all. There’s not a single part of me that hates him. There is only love. And it isn’t terrifying. It is the opposite of terrifying.
    I am crying because I’m happy and I’m crying because I don’t think I ever realized how much I was expecting to be unhappy. I am crying because, for the first time in a long time, life makes sense.
    He sees me crying