Free The Borderkind by Christopher Golden Page A

here in this bizarre, hidden village.
    What would Julianna have thought of the place?
    Oliver thought she would have coped perfectly well. All her life, she had been the one who could adapt to her surroundings; the one without fear of change. How could he not have fallen in love with her, trapped as he was by his inability to escape his father’s expectations?
    He had no memory of their first meeting—which was really no surprise, considering they must have been toddlers at the time—but Oliver’s recollection of the first time he had ever really
noticed
Julianna was incredibly vivid.
    Every summer, Bascombe & Cox held a picnic at Beacon Point Park for all of their employees. From Max Bascombe, the most senior of senior partners, to Sam Small in the mailroom, every member of the law firm’s staff would attend, with spouses and children in tow. Beacon Point Park overlooked the ocean, and several crumbling concrete staircases led down the breakwater to a private beach, where the picnickers would toss Frisbees or play volleyball, and the brave might take a brief dip in the cold northern waters.
    At the end of a rocky promontory stood the lighthouse that gave the park its name. There was no prettier spot in all of Wessex County.
    When not in the water, the kids would ramble across the green lawn of the park, playing soccer or Frisbee, while the grownups fired up half a dozen barbecue grills. The firm could have afforded to have the whole thing catered, but Max Bascombe liked to make a big show of the generals cooking for the troops. They ate at picnic tables under the shade trees that surrounded the open lawn. The children, in the moments when they paid any attention at all to the adults, were always greatly amused by the rare spectacle of their parents becoming pleasantly inebriated.
    Oliver’s memory of these summer picnics was idyllic. He was sure there had been incidents and arguments worthy of scandal, perhaps when some lawyer got a little too drunk for his own good, but he could not remember any of them. With his father playing host and chief cook, he and Collette had been free of his usual stern regard; free to simply be children, instead of
Max Bascombe’s children.
    In retrospect, he knew that Julianna had always been pretty. But she had been quiet and serious, so that—even though they were in school together, and saw one another at the summer picnics, and perhaps even passed the ball to one another in those haphazard Beacon Point Park soccer games—to him she was just another girl.
    In late July, the month before high school began, that changed.
    In the midst of the ritual of the Bascombe & Cox summer picnic, Oliver and several of the other boys—many of whom he saw only once a year, as their families did not live in Kitteridge—were playing catch with a Nerf football in the ocean. They dove over waves, passing the sodden ball back and forth, salt water splashing in their faces.
    Oliver had just tossed the blue-and-orange Nerf to Danny Hilliard, blinking salt from his eyes. He blinked hard and reached up to rub them, to clear his vision. A strong wave staggered him, and as he got his footing again he turned.
    As he opened his eyes, he saw motion out on the jetty. Someone was out there, moving from rock to rock, out past the lighthouse. It took him a moment to recognize the long, wavy, auburn hair; to realize that it was Julianna Whitney out there on the promontory. In a purple bikini top and cutoff denim shorts, and barefoot, she leaped so lightly across the gaps in the rocks that she seemed to be dancing.
    Captured by her grace, and by the aura of loneliness that seemed to encircle her, Oliver watched as the slender girl made her way all the way to the huge rock that thrust up at the end of the jetty. The waves crashed against it, sprayed up into the air, and rained down upon it.
    Julianna threw her arms back as a crashing wave soaked her. The droplets of ocean water sparkled with prismatic color. Even from