I press my back against the wall, hoping to squeeze past them unnoticed.
The guy holding the camera waves a flippant hand in my direction. “I accidentally bumped into her and dropped it.”
Marcos looks at me and then back at Douchebag Blue Eyes. There’s something in the way they look at each other—something unspoken. It’s as if they’re communicating in a silent language I don’t understand.
Marcos squeezes past us and opens the bathroom door. “I’ll meet you in the car, we’re about to dock.”
I find myself alone with camera guy again, but all I want to do is escape and go back to my father’s car. The guy is focusing on Marcos’s camera, attempting to piece it back together when he says, “I wasn’t propositioning you. I saw you take the bread and thought you could use the help.”
I tilt my head when he makes eye contact with me, studying his expression as I search for the telling lie. I don’t know what’s worse—him propositioning me, or him feeling sorry for me.
I want to respond with something clever, or anything at all really, but I just stand frozen as we stare at each other. Something about this guy is digging into me, like his aura has claws.
There’s a heaviness behind his reflective eyes that I assumed only people like me were familiar with. What could possibly be so terrible about this guy’s life that would lead me to believe he’s damaged?
But I can tell he is. Damaged people recognize other damaged people. It’s like a club you don’t want a membership to.
“Can I have my memory card back?” he asks, holding out his hand.
I’m not returning every picture he just took of me without my permission. I bend down and retrieve the twenty from the floor. I put it in his hand. “Here’s twenty bucks. Buy yourself a new one.”
With that, I spin and escape out the door. I grip the memory card in my hand while I make my way back through the rows of cars, toward my father’s.
I climb into the passenger seat and close the door quietly because my father is on the phone. It sounds like a business call. I reach into the back seat and slip the memory card into my backpack. When I face forward again, the two guys are exiting the indoor section of the ferry.
Marcos is on his phone and the other guy is staring down at the camera, still trying to put it back together as they make their way over to a car near ours. I sink into my seat, hoping they don’t see me.
They climb into a BMW two rows over, on my father’s side of the car.
My father ends his phone call and starts the car, just as the ferry begins to dock. Only half of the sun remains dangling in the sky. The other half is swallowed by earth and sea, and I kind of wish the sea could do the same to me right about now.
“Sara is so excited to meet you,” my father says, starting the car. “Other than her boyfriend, there aren’t a lot of regulars on the peninsula. It’s mostly vacation homes. Airbnb, Vrbo, things like that. It’s a lot of new people coming and going every few days, so it’s good she’ll have a friend.”
The cars begin exiting the ferry by row. I don’t know why, but I glance past my father at the BMW as it crawls past us. Camera guy is looking out his window now.
I stiffen when he spots me in the passenger seat.
We lock eyes, and his stare is unwavering as they pass. I don’t like that my body is responding to that stare, so I look away and glance out my window. “What is Sara’s boyfriend’s name?”
Everything in me is hoping it isn’t Marcos or his douchebag friend with the pretty eyes.
“Marcos.”
Of course it is.
FOUR
The house isn’t quite as extravagant as I had feared, but it’s still the nicest house I’ve ever been in.
It’s beachfront and two-story, built high up on stilts like every other house in this neighborhood. You have to climb two sets of stairs before you even reach the first floor.
I pause when we reach the top of the second set of steps before following my father into his house to meet his new family.
I take in the view for a moment. It’s like a wall of ocean and beach in front of us as far as I can see. The water looks like it’s alive. Heaving. Breathing. It’s both magnificent and terrifying.
I wonder if my mother ever saw the ocean before she died. She was born and raised in Kentucky, in the same town she died in last night. I don’t ever remember hearing stories of any trips she took, or seeing pictures of childhood vacations. That makes me sad for her. I didn’t realize what seeing the ocean would mean to me, but now that I’ve seen it, I want every human on earth to experience it.