“Yep. I don’t know what I would do without you.”
She smiles, then lies back on her own towel. “What can I say? I make an excellent wing-woman.”
I close my eyes, soaking in the sun and the cool, salty air for a while. This weather is almost enough to get me to move out here.
“We should do this more often,” I tell her. “Why did it take us traveling almost three thousand miles to drink together on the beach?”
“Let’s do this every Saturday,” she says. “No. Scratch that. Let’s go every single day.”
“I don’t know if I can handle that much of you.”
She sits up and looks at me. “I don’t think you can handle that much sun.”
“I could if Miami had weather like this.”
“No, really. You’re starting to look like a lobster.”
“Huh?” I stick my leg up in the air so that I can see it. I groan when I realize she’s right. “Oh, come on. I put on sunscreen.”
“That was a while ago,” she reminds me. “And you waded into the ocean afterward.”
“Please tell me it’s just my legs.”
“Your face is a little pink too, but not as bad.”
I reach into my bag and grab the sunscreen. I begin applying it to my burned legs, even though I know the damage is already done.
“You would think a meteorologist would know better than to get sunburned,” Anne says.
I throw the bottle of sunscreen at her, but she dodges it. “You would think an assistant would be better at assisting,” I say, mocking her tone.
“My bad. I didn’t realize putting sunscreen on you was in my job description.”
“It is now.”
“We should probably get to Luca’s apartment soon and then grab dinner if we want to make it back to the airport on time.”
“You’re right. I think I’ve roasted enough anyway.”
We take a cab to the address that Luca’s last letter had come from before he disappeared for two years. The last two letters that I sent to this building were rejected by whoever lives there now. I already know that Luca isn’t here, but I have to try anyway. Just like at the blue beach house, when we knock on the apartment door, we learn that the current tenants don’t know who he is. By the time we make it to the airport, we’ve each spent a couple hundred dollars and flown a few thousand miles just to find out that the sand is darker and the air is a little cooler in San Diego.
We make it through airport security without any hiccups, but Anne seems to notice how pale I am this time.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Are you seriously scared again? You did just fine on the flight here. Why are you scared?”
It’s not something I can easily explain, especially while we’re standing so close to the TSA agents. I ignore her, but she doesn’t look like she’s going to let it go. When we make it to our gate, I open my backpack and pull out the letters from Luca. We left off at the end of junior year, so all we have left are the letters from senior year. I flip through them, knowing that what I’m looking for is at the bottom of the stack.
“Hey!” Anne scolds, grabbing the letters that I’m skipping. “I haven’t read these yet.”
“You can read them after,” I say. I find the letter that I’m looking for and hold it against my chest so that she can’t read it until I explain what I wrote first.
“What’s that?” she asks.
“The last few letters in here were from the summer after high school before I went to college. I hadn’t heard from Luca for about a month after graduation, and when he wrote to me next, he was at basic training for the Marine Corps. We always wrote mean letters to each other, but I didn’t really think it through when I wrote to him. It was bad. Really bad.”
I take a deep breath, then look at the letter that I’m hiding from Anne. I look back at her. She’s watching me, her brow furrowed, waiting for me to continue.
“I told him that I was surprised they let someone like him defend our country, and that I hoped someone’s weapon misfires in the middle of a training exercise and his head gets blown off. Then I said that they would probably give the medal of honor to whoever accidentally did it.”
