At last! My days of being bored out of my mind at the beach were over. It was like starting a whole new vacation—one where I was friends with the lifeguard!
The next morning, I could hardly wait to get out of the house, even though Nick wasn’t on the stand yet. But I was ready when he got there…with Kiki and Emery by my side, as usual. (It actually wasn’t so bad having them around. When Karen and Jay realized that I was entertaining them all the time, they started to pay me five dollars an hour! I was saving up for some more board shorts and a bikini—one that fit, this time.)
“Hi, Nick!” I said, appearing a few minutes after he sat down. (I had to play it cool, after all.)
“Oh, hi, Samantha. How’re you doing? Are these your sisters?” he asked.
Kiki jumped up and down and nodded, and Emery started barking. Jeez.
“Oh no,” I said.
Kiki crossed her arms and frowned.
“Actually, they’re my mom’s friend’s kids,” I explained. “This is Kiki.” I patted her head and she waved. “And Emery.” She wagged her invisible tail and panted.
“Nice to meet you guys,” said Nick. Then he thoughtfully rubbed his chin. “So I guess you don’t know the rules,” he said, looking from one little girl to the other.
“What?” Kiki asked. She looked suddenly nervous. “Can’t we pee in the ocean? My dad told me it’s okay.”
I cringed a little, but Nick just shook his head and grinned. Then he pointed to Emery. “No dogs on the beach,” he said.
The girls’ eyes grew wide—while I bit my lip to keep from laughing.
Kiki pulled Emery to her feet. “She’s not really a dog!” she said.
Nick grinned at me, then at them. “Ah! Phew,” he said. “I thought you guys were going to get me in trouble.”
Kiki sighed—and I might have sighed, too. Nick the lifeguard was cute and had a good sense of humor. (Much better than Jeremy Ryan’s, that was for sure.) He might just be the perfect guy, I thought.
A second later, though, a look of concern crossed Kiki’s face again. “So is it okay to pee in the ocean?” she asked.
Nick nodded matter-of-factly. “It is,” he said, “if you’re at least five feet away from other swimmers.”
“Got it!” said Kiki. “I’m gonna go tell Daddy!” And just like that, she and Emery raced off to the parents’ semicircle of chairs, down the beach.
“I’ve got to thank you,” I told Nick.
“Why?” he asked me.
“Because I’m in the water with them a lot,” I said. “And we’re usually way less than five feet apart.”
He laughed and twirled his whistle. “Don’t mention it.”
“So did you catch anything at the pier yesterday?” I asked him. “I’m sorry I didn’t say good-bye, but my dad suddenly got all, ‘We’ve gotta go and get these fish on ice.’” I held up my hands and shook them, like my dad does when he gets antsy.
Nick chuckled. “Oh, that’s okay. I caught a few small ones,” he said. “But did I see your picture up on the bulletin board when I left?”
I’m sure my giant smile at that moment set some sort of personal record.
“Yes, you did!” I said, turning beet red despite my thick layer of SPF 40.
“Hey, Chip!” He turned to another guard who was walking up with a big orange umbrella. He looked a little older, and not quite as cute, but he had an excellent tan. “Guess what?” Nick told him. “This girl just caught the biggest fish yet this season down at the pier. A twenty-two-pound mackerel!”
“No kidding!” Chip said. He passed the umbrella up to Nick, then high-fived me with both hands. “Dude! You rock!”
Dude! I thought. This summer suddenly rocks, too!
If only Liza and Mina had been there with me, it would have been truly perfect. I know they’re a little shier than I am, but they would have loved Nick and the other lifeguards. Not only was there Chip, who was starting college that fall, but there was also Lexy, who could do backflips (and who was Chip’s girlfriend, too). Plus Caleb, and Tate, and Jasmine…who used to live in New Jersey, also! It was so funny—all this time I’d been looking around for someone to hang out with. And they were right in front of me the whole time, on the lifeguard stand!
I honestly wasn’t sure which was better: making new friends, or finally having a foolproof way to get Josh and Brian to leave me alone. (Even they knew better than to pull their annoying pranks right in front of a lifeguard.) Now when Juliette finally came out to the beach in the afternoons, I almost didn’t notice. I was just so happy to be treated like a teenager by Nick and his friends, even if Juliette still wouldn’t give me the time of day.
(And, okay, I might have let them think that I was thirteen, not twelve. But turning twelve honestly seemed so long ago already…)
Anyway, the summer was really, truly looking up! And to make it even better, I got a big envelope from Mina a few days later—which included not only a three-page (!) letter, but also a gift: sheet music for my guitar with all kinds of cute paintings by Mina in the margins. (She is so talented. Really!) I guess Mina assumed I might have learned how to play the thing already. (And who would blame her?) Unfortunately, I had not. Still, I immediately grabbed the music—it was “Under the Boardwalk,” an old 60s song—got out my guitar, and headed to the back porch to give it a shot.
“Hey, cool ax!” said Jay, walking out the back door a few minutes later.
“Excuse me?” I said.
He nodded toward my instrument. “El guitar, mi amiga.” He grinned. “I didn’t know you were a musician. Brava!” he said.
I shrugged. “Well…I’m not, really. Not yet, anyway.”
“Let’s hear what you’ve got so far,” he said, sitting down at the picnic table.
So I put my fingers where the little black dots on the chord diagram told me to and strummed. I wasn’t exactly sure how it should have sounded…but I was pretty sure it should have sounded better than it did.
I sighed. “It’s not the best guitar in the world, I guess.”
Jay nodded and reached out a hand. “May I?” he asked.
“Uh, sure,” I said. I handed my “ax” over to him.
The first thing Jay did was hold up the guitar and look it over. Then he put his foot on the porch railing and set the guitar on his knee. He leaned his ear toward the neck and, making a dozen different, totally weird faces, began plucking each string and turning the tuning keys carefully.
“Just a wee bit out of tune. There,” he said, strumming all six strings smoothly a few times. Then he broke into a crazy-amazing solo I couldn’t even follow, his hands moved so fast. After a minute, he strummed one final chord, took a goofy bow, and handed it back to me. “Try it now,” he said.
“How did you do that?” I asked. My mouth was definitely hanging open. “You play really, really well!”
“Ah, that’s nothing,” he said modestly. “Bass was really my thing, back in the day when I had my band.”
Jay may have been cooler than I’d given him credit for. “What kind of band?” I asked him. Marching? Or wandering minstrel? That was just about all I could picture.
“Just your average rock and roll band,” he explained, grinning. “We called ourselves Noise Party. But that was before I found my true calling…renaissance fairs.”
Right. Rock band vs. renaissance fairs. Clearly a no-brainer.
Jay looked down at the sheet music on the table in front of me. “What are you playing there, anyway?” he asked.
“Oh, it’s called ‘Under the Boardwalk,’” I said. “My friend Mina sent it to me. She’s the one who added all the drawings. We always used to play under the boardwalk at the beach when we were little, so it’s kind of funny.” I pointed to one picture. “I think that’s supposed to be us. Too bad there’s no boardwalk at this beach…” I shrugged. “It’s too hard a song for me to play, anyway.”
“Au contraire!” Jay said quickly. He pointed to the sheet music. “It’s an easy chord change, really. ‘Under the boardwalk’—E major—‘out of the sun, under the boardwalk’—D—‘we’ll be having some fun.’ Would you like me to show you?”
By dinnertime, I’d learned the whole song—and had taught Kiki most of the words! I practically had my own little band. So what if my lead singer was five years old?
Then that night, we played miniature golf again—at the course with the giant volcano this time, finally—and I got a hole in one at the end, so I won a free game! (Despite Josh’s and Brian’s very best attempts at sabotage.)
Talk about luck changing! My summer was clearly looking up. I should have gone fishing weeks ago, I thought.
As for Nick, as the days went on, I found out a ton of things about him. His full name was Nicholas Coleman Davis and he was sixteen years old. He lived in Wilmington, North Carolina, but he spent every summer at his family’s beach cottage, which had the funny name: Conch-ed Out. This was his first year working as a lifeguard and he liked it a lot. Baseball and basketball were his favorite sports. He did not have a girlfriend. (And even though he was tan, he could still blush.) Oh, and he got his cool rope bracelet at the other surf shop on the island. (I was so going there with my mom!)
And there was one more thing: According to Nick, all of the lifeguards thought the Drift Inn was haunted.
“Really?” I asked him one afternoon on the beach when he told me. I could almost believe it—though I didn’t want to!
He shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s just what they say.”
I couldn’t help it. My mouth fell open. Haunted? Oh no! (Not that anyone really believes in that stuff, of course.)
Then Nick laughed. “No, no. I’m just kidding.”
I laughed, too, and tried my best to play it off. “Of course you were.”
Phew!
I considered going back to the fishing pier on Nick’s next day off. And this was after my dad had gone back to New Jersey! But when I asked Nick if he was going, he told me he didn’t think so.
“I’m going to go surfing,” he said, “now that the wind is offshore and the waves have kicked up by the inlet.”
“You can surf around here?” I asked. I looked out at the ocean and the one-foot-tall “whitecaps” rolling in.
“Well, not here,” Nick said, looking out at the calm water. “But down the beach about a mile. I mean, it’s no Maui or Australia or anything, but it’s better than nothing. Ever surf before?” he asked. “Maybe you should check it out!”