Page 97 of Summer Love

We run along Crescent Beach on the boardwalk. The air is thick, clinging to my skin. The skatepark slides past on our left, ramps and rails ghostly in the gray morning. Farther on, to our right, the pier and its pilings, disappearing into the mist. The sea is almost invisible, but you can hear it—a low, steady rumble.

I adjust my pace. I could go at least twice as fast, but Noah’s already struggling. His breathing’s gone wheezy, his strides heavy.

Past the pier, the path leaves the sand and turns toward the cliff. The climb starts almost right away, steep, rocky—a trail that punishes knees and lungs. The ground is uneven, roots break the surface, stones roll under our feet. The mist thickens between the pines and the cypress trees.

Out of breath, Noah slows. When I was a teenager, we used to run this route together. Often just the two of us, sometimes with Jace. Noah could keep up. He’d talk while he ran, laugh when I passed him on the climbs.

A few years without exercise and too many cigarettes leave their mark.

In the last hundred yards, the trail gets even steeper. Noah’s swearing picks up. I wait for him at the top, barely winded. He arrives thirty seconds later, red-faced and drenched in sweat. He doubles over, hands on his knees, mouth open.

“You okay?” I ask.

He flips me off.

Star Park is ahead of us, in the mist.

The chain-link fence appears first. The metal’s eaten away by sea spray, rust flaking off in orange patches. Behind it, the rides’ silhouettes take shape—the still Ferris wheel, the skeleton of the carousel, the caved-in roof of the haunted house. The fog swallows the structures farthest off.

The park is dead. The wind sets a metal frame creaking. Moisture has swollen the wood of the booths, cracked the paint. Moss climbs the posts. Sand has taken over the walkways.

A scrap of yellow-and-black police tape hangs from the fence to my right, faded by sun and rain, snagged between two links. I walk past without stopping.

A little farther on, I spot a big hole in the fence, the edges bent inward.

“Want to go in?” I say.

“We’re not… allowed in here,” Noah pants. “Evan’ll… haul us in.”

“Five minutes. I’m not getting on the rides, I’ll be fine.”

He shakes his head. But when I slip through the hole, he follows, grumbling, forced to twist himself sideways to fit.

The silence inside is thicker. The sound of the sea reaches us muffled, filtered through the structures and the fog. Our footsteps crunch over the debris.

We walk between the booths. Their paint peels off in long ribbons—red, yellow, blue, the colors of a place that used to be happy.

We skirt an overturned popcorn cart. The bumper cars are buried under sand and weeds, seats split open, steering wheels bent. Vegetation has reclaimed every open space—the cracks, the seams, the steps.

It smells of damp, iron, and salt.

I look up at the Ferris wheel.

It’s enormous—bigger than I remember, or maybe the mist makes it look more imposing. The cars hang motionless, except one that sways. It creaks in the wind.

The number painted on its side: 17.

The wind, the height, the lights below… It all comes back.

The summer I’m seventeen. Star Park is swarming with people, music blares from the speakers, neon flickers and lights up faces in pink and blue. The group’s somewhere below, between the bumper cars and the shooting gallery, out of sight now.

Car 17 stops at the top.

Jace is next to me. We kissed yesterday morning on the beach and haven’t talked about it since. We haven’t told anyone. Tonight, we managed to get on the Ferris wheel alone without it looking planned—or maybe it did look planned.

The wind is warm. Jace has draped his arm along the edge of the car, just behind me—not around my shoulders. All of Coral Bay is below us—the lights of the pier, the white line of foam, the rooftops of Main Street.

Jace turns to me… and he kisses me.