Free Local Girl Swept Away by Ellen Wittlinger

felt my cheeks color. “I don’t know.”
    Finn was careful not to look at me. “You’re so nosy, Tess. Maybe Jackie doesn’t want a boyfriend. Did you ever think of that?”
    “Bull. Everybody wants a boyfriend. Unless they want a girlfriend.” Tess took off her wet sneakers and slipped into flip-flops. “You should be Jackie’s boyfriend, Finn,” she said lightly.
    “Tessie!” I couldn’t believe she’d said that.
    “Ignore her,” Finn said, flatly. “She thinks she’s being outrageous, but she’s just annoying.”
    “No, I’m not!” Tess pouted.
    Finn dried his hands on his jeans and bolted out the door.
    “It just makes sense,” Tess said to me. “You guys have known each other forever and you’re both tall and nice-looking. And you know Mom loves you, Jackie, and so do I.”
    “Tessie, you can’t pick out partners for other people. It doesn’t work that way.”
    “But you’ve always liked Finn, haven’t you? I watched you two walk on the beach once. You looked right together.”
    I was starting to feel sick. Why did everybody but Finn think he and I would make a great couple? “Tessie, I like Finn, but that’s not the point. Besides, he’s still in love with Lorna.”
    “Well, he can’t be in love with her
forever
,” Tess said, with the certainty of a thirteen-year-old.
    Finn pulled his gently used Prius up to the door and honked the horn. “Come on, Tess. I want to get home. Jackie, your art stuff is in the backseat so I might as well drop you off too.”
    He sounded resigned to his duty.
    “I can walk. I always walk—”
    “Get in, Jackie. Don’t be silly.”
    The command surprised me, but I figured he was embarrassed by Tess’s remarks too. I climbed silently into the backseat.
    Tess got in the front and slammed the door. She was quiet for a minute as Finn turned the car toward the West End. Then she turned and glared at her brother.
    “Lorna’s not coming back. You know that, right?”

9.
    I liked to leave my house early so I could meander to the Blue Moon, taking pictures along the way. This morning I walked down Cottage Street past the clapboard house where Lucas used to live, and felt the familiar ache of longing for my disappeared childhood. I wanted to feel it, wanted to roll around in nostalgia a little bit.
    All four of us used to live in the West End within a few blocks of each other until Lucas’s dads saved up enough money to open the bed-and-breakfast inn on the other end of town. Finn still lived in his family’s enormous place on the bay beach, with views all the way up the arm of the Cape to Wellfleet, and Lorna’s mother still owned her ramshackle house on nearby Franklin Street. At least I assumed she did—I hadn’t seen her in months. I felt like my ten-year-old self was following me down the streets where we used to run, a pack of loud, skinny, barefoot monkeys, pushing and shoving each other, laughing at just about everything. Now I was a kind of tourist, looking for the remains of my life, taking photographs of what we’d left behind.
    I went to the breakwater first. I’d probably taken more pictures of the breakwater than of any other spot in town—at all times of the day, in every kind of weather. Since the accident, I didn’t walk out on it anymore—I hadn’t all summer—but I still liked seeing it through the lens, framing it in the viewfinder.
    Walking back into town along the beach, I slowed down at Dugan’s Cottages, a row of shabby shacks that rented during the summer to last-minute vacationers willing to tolerate a little mold to have the beach outside their door. Unheated and without insulation, they were boarded up from the end of August through late May. The spot was prime real estate, and developers had tried to buy it for years, but Mrs. Dugan wouldn’t sell. She said she wanted to keep one little piece of Provincetown the way it had been for half a century.
    When we were kids, Dugan’s Cottages were our off-season