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“What! That’s crazy,” Evie said.
“We needed that time to grow up a bit,” Julia explained. “But when I saw him again, my heart told me it was right. That it was the only thing.”
The girls held the thought for a moment of quiet reflection. Overhead, a seagull cawed, flapping back toward the coast.
“Who did you date in high school, Alana?” Nora asked, drawing her blonde curls into a ponytail.
“Oh. Huh.” Alana’s stomach curdled at her own chaotic story.
“Alana dated the football star, of course,” Julia teased. “She was the Nantucket High School beauty queen, after all.”
“Yeah.” Alana rolled her eyes. “But he dumped me.”
“What?” Evie sounded incredulous.
“He wanted to run off and live this whole other life. He had a football scholarship to Notre Dame,” Alana explained.
“He was incredible on the field,” Charlie breathed. “Still one of the best quarterbacks I’ve ever seen play.”
On the other side of Evie, Sarah’s eyes bugged from her head.
“What happened to him?” Harlow asked.
“Eh. It doesn’t matter. He couldn’t see a future with me, and I had to find a way to get over it,” Alana said with a shrug.
Sarah stuttered into her question. “But do you, um. Do you ever think about him?”
“She just said she figured out how to get over it,” Harlow pointed out, sounding flippant.
“No, no, Harlow. It’s okay. It’s a good question,” Alana said. “I don’t think we ever stop thinking about people who were important to us. Especially lately, he’s been heavy on my mind, I guess, because I ended up with such a bad guy. If memory serves me correctly, my high school boyfriend was incredibly sweet and loving.”
“When you weren’t fighting and breaking up,” Julia corrected.
Alana’s laughter was melodic across the waves. “We were teenagers. No offense to you girls, but there’s so, so much that you have to experience firsthand before you can fully understand it. My high school boyfriend and I really loved each other, I think. But we couldn’t understand what we had before we didn’t have it anymore. Before real life caught up to us.”
The teenage girls exchanged glances, taking this to heart.
Alana then leaned back toward Sarah, who still looked like she’d just seen a ghost.
“But this boy doesn’t sound like he deserves to take up one square inch of that beautiful mind of yours, Sarah,” she breathed. “If you can scrub him out, do it. You’ll free up space for something better and more beautiful than ever.”
