“Okay, Mamá,” I said.
“Okay? Okay, you agree, or okay, you’re going to be difficult?”
“Okay, I have customers.”
Asigh.
“Está bien.Come by later so we can finish this. And Selena?”
“Yeah?”
“Try to be happy about this, mi corazón. Not everything has to be a fight.”
She hung up.
I set the phone on the counter and stood still for a long time.
Not everything has to be a fight.
No.
Just the things that mattered to me.
I’d spentthe whole day tryingnotto think about how my carefully laid plans were all being ripped out from under me. I’d closed the shack at four p.m., which was the time most people stopped pretending they wanted anything without alcohol in it on the beach. I turned that business over to The Salty Siren and replaced my sensible work shoes with running sneakers.
That’s what I needed: a run. It wasn’t as good as being on the court, didn’t “spark joy” or whatever, but it was efficient and kept my cardio up. And with music blaring and my lungs burning, it was hard to focus on the other ache in my chest.
I kept today’s run to a short five-miler. I had a ritual to prepare for tonight.
The new moon found me on the beach at midnight.
Not the main beach—my spot.
Everyone in Crescent Cove had a spot, whether they admitted it or not. Mine was a small cove about a mile north of the boardwalk, where a small tidal cave sat behind a hidden stretch of white sand. You couldn’t see it from the road. You had to know it was there.
The full moon was what my tournament was synced to, its tidal pull creating the perfect conditions in the cove for the turtlehatchlings making their first crawl to the sea. I’d always synced the volleyball tournament with it. It was when my magic was strongest all year, powered by the excitement and community energy of my tournament. I used it for the only real spell I ever did—a protection spell for those adorable little babies and all the other creatures that came across my beach. It took weeks of preparation.
The new moon was the start of the cycle. It was the setting of intentions, the moment you told the universe what you wanted, even if the universe had a well-documented history of not giving a shit.
My mother would have laughed at my “spot.” She could call ocean magic miles from shore, although she preferred the dock, where the convergence of ocean and the eyes of the townsfolk gave her the extra boost she pretended she didn’t need. But me? I needed this exact place, where the sand held the day’s warmth, where the rocks had been worn smooth by centuries of tides, where the ocean whispered things I could almost,almostunderstand.
The sand was warm between my toes, the perfect temperature that reminded you it was alive, that billions of tiny fragments were shifting and breathing beneath your feet. I’d brought my supplies in a canvas bag that had seen better decades: a mason jar of ocean water collected at high tide during the last full moon, five shells I’d found over the past month—each one had called to me in its own tiny way, though I’d die before admitting that—and a candle I’d have to light like some kind of medieval peasant.
Real witches lit their candles with magic. I lit mine with corner-store matches and spite.
The ritual wasn’t anything formal—goddess knew I’d tried the formal ones, watched Lupe whisper incantations and seen the air actually shimmer in response. My ritual was more like…a conversation. Or maybe a confession. I arranged the shells in a circle, placed the candle in the center, and sat cross-legged just inside the boundary, my palms pressed flat against the sand.
“Hi,” I whispered to the darkness. “It’s me again.”
The ocean answered how it always did—by continuing to exist, magnificently indifferent to my presence. But the sand beneath my fingers hummed, an old friend who had been waiting for me. I was on my beach, and maybe, in this exact spot at this exact moment, I was enough.
I closed my eyes and tried to do what my tía called “sinking into the element.” For her, it meant becoming one with the water, letting her consciousness ebb and flow until she couldn’t tell where she ended and the ocean began. For me, it meant sitting very still and trying to feel something, anything, beyond the sand making my ass numb.
But tonight, it was different.
Maybe it was the new moon, pulling at that tiny reservoir of magic deep inside me. Maybe it was my mother’s voice still ringing in my ears,atención de verdad, as if everything I’d poured into this place for the last decade was meaningless. Maybe it was the fact that somewhere out there, a corporate surf circus was packing its branded water bottles and comeback-tour golden boy, all of it aimed at MY beach.
I pressed my palms deeper into the sand, and I felt it. The sand held the heat of a thousand summer days, the weight of a million footsteps, the echo of children laughing and lovers promising and seagulls calling.
