Murmurs from the parents.
Even the judges looked away. They didn’t ask her to line up with the other girls.
Lucky was wrong. They didn’t love her. She should never have tried out. It was stupid to think she could make the team.
She grabbed her backpack and raced from the field. Ran all the way home and burst into the kitchen.
Her mother was at the sink.
“Good heavens, where have you been? Have you been crying? Why is your face all streaked with dirt?”
Julie ran her arm across her eyes. “He said they would like me. He said he would be there, and he wasn’t. He’s a liar. I hate him.”
“Who? What’s happened?”
And the story came pouring out.
“Well,” her mother said when Julie had gasped and hiccupped to the end. “It’s just as well. Those girls have far more experience than you. It was silly of Lucky to give you false hopes. And besides, they have to practice almost every afternoon. Better to spend your afternoons studying.”
And with that, her mother brushed away the dirt and Julie’s dream in one single swipe of her dish towel.
“He promised. I’ll never believe him ever again.”
“Go upstairs and clean up, things will look better after dinner.”
But Julie didn’t go upstairs; she went out the kitchen door and hurled the hateful baton into the garbage can. Then she ran to the very back corner of the yard and cried until she was afraid she was going to throw up.
She could never show her face in school again. They had laughed at her. And worse, they’d felt sorry for her. Even the grown-ups.
She felt something nudge her knee. She moved her hands away from her face to see the bulb of her cheap baton, its streamers crumpled and broken—and a dirty hand holding it. It was the boy Lucky had brought home a few days before. He’d been the dirtiest boy she’d ever seen.
“Here.” He thrust the baton at her. “Don’t quit. You’re good at it.”
“No, I’m not. I should have never tried. Lucky’s a liar.”
The boy’s fists clenched. “No, he’s not.”
“Oh yeah? He left you, too. Maybe he won’t even come back for you.”
His eyes blazed black; she stepped back from the intensity of his rage, then ran into the house and up the stairs and locked herself in her room.
She said she would never trust Lucky ever again. But she had, over and over. Sometimes he was there, sometimes he disappeared for days or weeks at a time, like he’d gone out and forgotten how to get home. He’d come back, looking tired and saying he was sorry, and she’d believe him, until the next time he let her down.
Missing her college graduation may have been the last straw, but it was missing her baton tryout that hurt the most.
“Hey, Jules,” Kayla said. “Are you sleeping back there?”
“Huh? No,” said Julie, her cheeks flushed with remembered humiliation. Maybe she was asleep. Maybe she’d been asleep for a long time.
They stopped as soon as they crossed the Delaware state line, long enough for Kayla to pass out ham and cheese sandwiches and bottled iced tea that she’d packed in one of the coolers.
When they hit the road again, Julie began scrolling the internet for information about Lucky’s Beach Bar and Grill.
She searched the usual “Ten Best Beach Bars on the Delaware Coast”–type sites. No Lucky’s BB and G.
She went on to the less popular sites. “Eureka. Number twenty on the ‘Other Places’ list. One dollar sign. Why am I not surprised? One review. ‘The shore’s best-kept secret for those who long for the old glory days of surfing.’”
“What about the current glory days of surfing?” Aggie asked. “Do you think there will be any surfers? That could be fun.”
Daly’s Junction turned out to be miles south of Rehoboth and Dewey Beach and a drive through a national park where the land was so narrow you could sometimes see the ocean and the bay merely by turning your head.
Julie was about to tell Kayla to turn around and head back to their motel when the GPS announced they had arrived at their destination: a four-way stop consisting of a convenience store, an empty lot, a gas station, and a boarded-over one-story building with a for lease sign in the window. But no Lucky’s.
“This doesn’t look promising,” Julie said.
“Well, the ocean’s on our left, so if it’s a beach bar . . .” Kayla made the turn onto a two-lane road only to be immediately surrounded by marshland.
“Really not promising,” added Julie.
“It’s an adventure,” Kayla said, sounding skeptical.
“There better be surfers at the end of this road,” Aggie said.
“I just hope there’s a way out,” Julie said. In more ways than one, she added to herself.
A few minutes later, they rounded a bend into a neighborhood of saltbox cottages lined up side by side and arranged in square blocks perpendicular to the main street.
Two blocks later they crossed over a narrow bridge, passed a modest-looking marina, and drove into a downtown area of colorfully painted Victorian storefronts.
“This is more like it,” Aggie said.
“Cute,” Kayla agreed. “Somebody should put up a sign on the highway.”
Even without a sign, it was fairly busy.
Kayla drove slowly, while Aggie and Julie scanned each side of the street for Lucky’s Beach Bar and Grill. There was a post office and Poppy’s Fish Market on the right. On the left, a yellow cottage had been repurposed into a convenience store. They had just passed a red-striped ice-cream stand at the end of the first block when Aggie pointed. “There it is!”
An opening between two buildings with a sign that said beach. And below it a sign for surf’s up. And below that beach bar and grill. The first word had been x-ed out and lucky’s had been painted over it in bright red lettering.
Julie slid a little lower in her seat, though the seat belt kept her from sliding out of sight. Which was what she’d like to do. He probably wouldn’t be there. But if he was, what was she going to say?
Maybe he didn’t even want to see her.
Kayla made the turn through a thicket of beach scrub and onto a wedge of hard-packed parking lot. Beyond the parking lot, a beach of white sand slid into a sparkling blue ocean stretching in both directions to the horizon.
“Wow,” Kayla said. “Talk about uninterrupted landscape.”
“Just look at that view,” Aggie added, her eyes following two surfers on their way to the water. “I’m thinking it doesn’t get much better than this.” She glanced at the other two. “And the beach isn’t bad, either.” She flashed them a cheeky grin.
It was beautiful, thought Julie.
“Now you can understand why they don’t advertise,” Kayla said. “They want to keep this all to themselves.”
Other than several cars parked around a small beach shack at the edge of the sand, the parking lot was mostly empty.
“There it is. Lucky’s Beach Bar and Grill.” Kayla hooked a right and brought the car to a stop next to a rusted-out dune buggy and a battered Jeep.
Julie just stared. Lucky’s BB and G was little better than a beach shack. It was a wide, sprawling wooden structure with a front porch and unpainted steps with a side area sheltered by a tattered canvas tent top that probably served as an outside bar. A wooden sign over the door was so faded that Julie didn’t know how Kayla had picked it out of the general malaise.