Page 4 of Neap & Spring

I plug my phone into the charger left on the nightstand without fully opening my eyes. The sound of the waves is pulling me under, and I’m too tired to fight it.

Just five minutes, I tell myself.

I’ll close my eyes for five minutes, and then I’ll deal with everything.

CHAPTER TWO

Vivienne

Iwake to my phone vibrating.

For a moment, I don’t know where I am. The room is dim, just the last dregs of twilight coming through the window, and my body feels like it’s been filled with concrete. My mouth tastes like stale coffee and brown sugar.

The phone keeps buzzing.

I reach for it and squint at the screen.

I sigh loudly in the empty room and hit accept. And I immediately regret it when both my parents’ faces fill the screen, talking over each other before I can even say hello.

“Finally! We’ve been trying to reach you for —”

“Twelve hours, Vivienne! Twelve hours without —”

“We thought you drove into a ditch somewhere!”

“Hi,” I croak, my voice rough from sleep. “I’m alive.”

“Oh, thank God,” my mom exhales, pressing one hand to her chest. She’s in the kitchen. I can see the marble countertops behind her and the bowl of lemons she keeps on the island because she saw it in a magazine once. “We were starting to worry.”

“You always worry,” I push myself up to sit, which turns out to be more of a project than it should be. My head is lobbying hard to go back horizontal. I swing my legs off the bed anyway.

I shuffle to the open window while they’re still talking, suddenly needing fresh air.

“Because you drive across the coast by yourself without telling us when you’ve arrived safely,” my dad chimes in. He’s wearing his reading glasses, which means we’ve interrupted his nightly ritual of doing the crossword puzzle while pretending he’s not looking up half the answers on his phone.

“I texted you that I was leaving San Diego.”

“At the crack of dawn!”

“I’m a morning person.”

“You’re a person who doesn’t sleep,” my mom corrects, and she’s not wrong.

Through the window, I can see the ocean, dark now except for the white caps of waves catching the moonlight. I press my palm against the glass, feeling the cold seep through.

“I’m fine,” I watch my breath fog the window. “I got here safe. The place is cute. You’d love it, Mom.”

“Where is ‘here’ exactly?” My dad’s voice cuts in, a little aggrieved. “You never told us where this job even is.”

“Oh, uh —” I glance around like the name of the town might be written on the walls. “Westerly Point. It’s a coastal town, a couple of hours north of … somewhere.” I shrug, hoping my lack of preparation doesn’t come across.

There’s a long pause.

“Westerly Point?” my mom repeats with a small frown.

“Yeah, why?”

“Isn’t that —” She looks at my dad, then back at me, her eyes lighting up the way they do when she’s about to remind me of some mom-memory where she can recall every detail of every conversation we’ve ever had. “Isn’t that where that boy you had a thing for in Paris was from?”