Free The Summer I Learned to Fly by Dana Reinhardt

magazine or two and we’d spend the whole day by the surf.
    I ran down the stairs to meet Emmett, and it wasn’t until he mirrored my expression back to me that I realized I was grinning from ear to ear.
    “What?”
    I couldn’t come out and say I’m happy, really happy, for the first time in a long while . “Nothing.”
    “Okay then.” He shrugged.
    He followed me into the kitchen, where I grabbed some fruit and cheese. He’d brought a backpack too, and we filled his with the food, leaving room in mine for towels, water, and Hum.
    Emmett motioned for me to lead the way and he closed the front door behind us.
    I always went to lifeguard station 21, where the beach was the widest and the water the calmest. It was the only beach I knew, and I could do the fifteen-minute walk there with my eyes closed. First you had to turn left out the front door, which I did, just as Emmett turned to the right.
    We stopped, spun around, and faced each other. It was funny, the choreography of a sitcom. We were both so sure we were in sync we assumed words didn’t need to be spoken.
    “This way.” He waved me toward him.
    “Really?” I shot him my most skeptical look.
    “I promise.”
    I shrugged. “Okay then.”
    I walked toward him and he reached out. I thought he was about to put his arm around me, but instead he gave me a friendly shove and we were on our way.
    The walk to Emmett’s beach took almost twice as long as the walk to mine, but I held back from pointing this out. I was working on not having to be right all the time. It was the by-product of being an only child, I guessed. In my house there was my room, my stuff, my clothes—I didn’t have to share anything, not even ideas and opinions.
    I was stubborn. Mom had been telling me so since I was old enough to understand and then reject the label, which of course meant I was being stubborn about being stubborn. She said I inherited this from my father. It was right there on his List of Biggest Flaws in capital letters: STUBBORNNESS .
    Emmett’s beach required that we scramble down some rocks just around the northern bend of a cove. The first thing I noticed was that there wasn’t a lifeguard station. I was a good swimmer, maybe even an excellent swimmer, but that didn’t mean I didn’t need a lifeguard. I believed nobody was above the law of the ocean.
    We jumped down from the last rocks onto a small stretch of white sand that backed up to a steep cliff. It was a secret spot of beach, the kind nobody knows about. Nobody except for a group of kids gathered around a table built from two tree stumps spanned by an old surfboard. They were those elusive older, wiser teens. The ones who at school would never give a seventh grader the time of day.
    “Emmett!” one shouted. Emmett gave a friendly wave and led me toward them.
    Someone had a guitar. But the music stopped as we approached.
    “Hey, guys,” Emmett said. “This is Robin.”
    “Robin!” they shouted in unison. I’d never had a group shout my name in unison, never mind that Robin wasn’t my name anymore. This day already felt like it was happening to somebody else, so the name suited me just fine.
    The guitarist returned to his playing and singing and the others returned to listening and Emmett leaned over toward me and pointed.
    “Jasper, Christian, Molly, Deirdre.”
    Three were smoking cigarettes. Two had tattoos. Molly had a ring in her upper lip.
    “And the person I really wanted to you meet,” he whispered as he pointed to the guitarist, “is Finn.”
    Finn was older. He had a beard, for one thing. Strawberry-colored and shaggy. He wore a wool cap over his strawberry hair. His guitar was covered in stickers and his fingers were filled with silver rings.
    The song sounded familiar. Like a lullaby, something someone had sung to me once, though Mom wasn’t much of a singer.
    “Finn’s a busker,” Emmett said into my ear. I liked the way it sounded even if I didn’t know what it meant.