Summer was officially over, and even though all the families who spent their vacation at the Inn had packed up and gone home, the dining room was crowded for our famous homemade breakfast buffet. Thirty-six guests, all excited for a week-long wilderness retreat. It was our first corporate booking, and I was feeling pretty impressed with myself, since they found us through the new Britannia Beach Inn website I developed for my granddad. He originally hadn’t wanted the Inn to have an online presence because he didn’t have the staff to handle more guests. We needed the extra revenue to afford repairs on the hundred-and-thirty-year-old building, though. When I made the decision to move back to Britannia and promised to help out before and after school, he finally gave me the go-ahead.
Fully aware of how late it was getting, I sped to restock the pastry basket with warm cinnamon buns and poured fresh-brewed coffee for a table of non-outdoorsy-looking women, decked out in expensive hiking gear. It was already seven-thirty. The only bus from Britannia Beach to Squamish in the morning stopped in front of the Inn at seven forty-two. I needed to catch it if I wanted to make it to school. As I rushed to clear another stack of dirty dishes from a table, my granddad stepped up to the buffet table and scooped fresh scrambled eggs into a warming tray. “You better get going, sweetheart. You don’t want to miss the bus.”
“You mean, you don’t want me to miss the bus.”
He chuckled. “True. I am a little too busy to drive you into Squamish today.”
I kissed his cheek and removed my apron. “I’m going.”
“Don’t forget the meeting with the real-estate agent is at five o’clock today if you want to be here.”
“Oh.” I stopped and spun around, surprised. “I thought you were going to cancel that.”
As he stirred the pot of oatmeal with more attention than it needed, he glanced up to gauge my reaction, which he likely knew wasn’t going to be supportive. “I want to hear what he has to say.”
“Why? If I can keep attracting corporate retreat bookings, you’ll start making a profit again.”
“That’s a big if, Derian. I appreciate all the work you’ve done on the website, and I couldn’t have run things around here all summer if you hadn’t moved back, but you only have two more years of high school. I need to plan for when you leave for university. There’s no harm in hearing what he has to say.”
No harm? Except that living with my mom in Vancouver had been a disaster, and I had nowhere else to live, and selling the only place that still held good memories of my dad was something I couldn’t deal with on top of all that. “What if it gets bought by a company that just tears it down and redevelops the entire village?”
“There might be a buyer who will renovate the Inn and keep the heritage houses in the village.”
I glanced at the yellowed antique clock again. I needed to leave, but I also desperately wanted to talk him out of the meeting before I left. “We can renovate it just as easily as someone else.”
He sighed and seemed hesitant to break it to me, “It’s too expensive.”
I swept my arm through the air for emphasis. “Look at how busy we are. Our corporate retreat clients will generate extra income in the off season.”
“This is the one and only corporate booking we’ve had. We have to explore our options. Sorry, sweetheart.” He turned, holding the empty pancake tray, and retreated into the kitchen.
He was right, but I wished he wasn’t. Deflated, I turned and headed through the lobby. My bedroom was on the first floor at the end of the hall. I zig-zagged past the guest rooms, trying to avoid the floorboards that creaked—not that it mattered since my door squeaked loudly enough to be heard back in the dining room.
To be perfectly honest, my bedroom was one of the many rooms that needed to be renovated, or torn down. Only one of the outlets worked, the window didn’t stay open without something propping it up, and the wallpaper was faded and curled at the seams. My bathroom was in even worse shape than my bedroom. The toilet handle didn’t work and could only be flushed by pulling on the rusted chain. The tiles on the wall occasionally fell off the plaster and smashed into the rusted claw-foot tub. And the hot water was only hot about thirty percent of the time. Everything was the same as it had been when my mom was growing up. It was hard to imagine it any other way. But when I actually took notice, it was kind of impossible to ignore the fact that it was run down.
Trying to forget about the potential sale, I scrubbed my face and brushed my teeth. Unfortunately, my hair had to stay hanging boringly down my back in waves since there wasn’t enough time to straighten it. After tossing my yoga pants and Britannia Beach Inn polo shirt into the hamper, I dressed in a skirt, sweater and boots, and grabbed my canvas school bag. Without pausing to look in the mirror, I left out of the side emergency exit door next to my bedroom and jogged across the parking lot towards the highway and the bus stop.
Before I reached the shoulder of the highway, the bus blew by. I raced along the gravel, arms waving. But the driver didn’t see me, or didn’t care.
“Great,” I mumbled. There was nobody to cover for my granddad during the time it would take to drive me into town. School wasn’t going to happen. Not a good start to starting over. Maybe there was no point in going back, period. If the Inn went up for sale, it didn’t make sense to go back to school after a year away, only to move again.
My eighteen-year-old next-door neighbour Trevor stepped off his porch and leaned against the side of his 4Runner, watching my mopey walk with an amused look on his face. We hadn’t seen each other since the end of June because he’d been away travelling in South America on a motorbike all summer. He looked extra rugged, but still like himself in his standard white T-shirt and dark jeans. “Need a ride?”
I honestly wanted to go back to my room and curl up under the covers. My granddad would probably insist on leaving the guests unattended and driving me himself, though, so I said, “Yeah, I guess so.” I walked across the lot to where he was parked and reached up to hug him. “Welcome home.”
“You too.” He squeezed his arms and wrapped me in a warmth that did feel like home, but it reminded me that Britannia Beach might not be my home for long. I stepped back and tucked my hair behind my ears as I glanced at our tiny old mining village—twelve heritage houses, a small diner, a church, and a couple of tourist shops—backed up against the base of the forested mountain and across the highway from the beach. It was quaint, but old and easy to miss.
Not wanting to think about the fate of the village, I focused back on the immediate problem. “I don’t want you to make a special trip into town just for me. Were you headed into Squamish anyway?”
“Yup. I picked up a shift at the docks. And Kailyn needs a ride to her program.” He reached over to take my school bag and placed it in the back of the truck.
“Thank you. My granddad thanks you, too.”
“No problem.”
“How was your motorcycle trip?”
He eyed my outfit with an expression that was difficult to read. A skirt and boots were a change for me compared to the tomboyish ponytail, jeans, and bulky sweaters I normally wore. I wanted to make a statement at school that I wasn’t the same quiet, boring Derian they had known before I moved away. Based on Trevor’s reaction, it wasn’t producing the statement I had hoped for. “The trip was good,” he finally answered.
“Why are you looking at me funny?”
“I’m not. You look nice,” he said, but it sounded more like he was just being polite.
I ran my hand down the side of the beige skirt my mom bought during one of her attempts to make me more urban chic. “Do you think the skirt’s too short?”
He grinned as if I’d cracked a joke.
Embarrassed that he thought my attempt to reinvent myself was humorous, I mumbled, “Never mind,” then changed the subject. “I didn’t know you were back. You could have come over for breakfast.”
“I was going to, but we got home late last night. The jet lag made me sleep through my alarm.”
I nodded, distracted by the years of memories of our families eating breakfast together at the Inn. Growing up, Trevor and I used to always play together, but after he went to high school, the only time we ever really hung out was with our dads and his sister at breakfast. We hadn’t eaten breakfast together since before my dad’s accident, and I suddenly realized how much I missed it—another one of the many things that came to an abrupt end when my dad died.
As if Trevor could read my mind, he reached over with one arm and hugged me into his chest. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. He knew how close I had been to my dad, and he knew how my world imploded after the accident. Although his familiarity was comforting, I stepped back to end the hug. My grief was surfacing, and I didn’t want it to. Everyone at school knew why I had moved away for a year. The stares and whispers were going to be hard enough to face without also being an emotional wreck at the same time.
Trevor checked my expression to make sure I was okay, then shoved my shoulder in a playful way to get me to smile. “You can make me breakfast tomorrow. Kiki, let’s get a move on,” he called back towards the house at his sister. She was born with Down syndrome and, although she was older than him, Trevor had been helping to take care of her since their mom took off. He opened the front passenger door for me as Kailyn stepped out onto the porch of their house and locked the door with the key she wore around her neck. “Are you getting in?” Trevor asked me.
“Kailyn likes the front seat. I’ll sit in the back.”
He stepped forward and opened the back door for me before he walked around and hopped into the driver’s seat. Kailyn climbed into the front passenger seat and slammed the door. She clicked her seatbelt on, tucked her straight blonde bob behind her ears, and opened one of the pre-teen magazines she was crazy about, even though she was nineteen. Her freshly applied lip balm made the air smell like the Strawberry Shortcake doll I played with when I was little.
“Hi, Kailyn,” I said as Trevor pulled out of the Inn’s parking lot and turned north on the Sea-to-Sky highway to head to Squamish.
Kailyn didn’t say hi back, but she asked without looking up from the magazine, “Did you know that Austin Sullivan’s favourite thing to eat is Hawaiian pizza? And his birthday is on April seventeenth?”
“No. I don’t even know who Austin Sullivan is,” I answered, never really that up on trends.
“Gah!” She slammed the magazine down in her lap exaggeratedly. “Deri. You’re so silly. Everyone knows who Austin Sullivan is. He sings the song that goes, ‘When I see your eyes, eyes, eyes, I want to cry, cry, cry.’ You know.” She sang in her husky monotone voice. I didn’t recognize the song at all.
Trevor looked over his shoulder at me and smiled because my face obviously showed my utter ignorance of pop culture. He joined in and sang the lyrics with Kailyn. “Recognize it now?” he asked me with a wink.
“No. Let me see his picture. Maybe I’ll recognize him.” I leaned forward to peek over Kailyn’s shoulder. She showed me a magazine page with a collage of twenty different teen idols. I had no idea which one was him, so I said, “Oh yeah, he’s really cute.”
“He looks like my brother, don’t you think?”
“Really?” I sat forward. “Show me again. Which one is he?”
She held the magazine up and pointed to a ruggedly handsome outdoorsy-type guy who had dark hair and light eyes. He was on a farm, shirtless, with a cut chest and abs, leaning up against a wood fence. He did look like Trevor. I sat back in my seat and Kailyn grinned wide enough that her chubby, freckled cheeks made her eyes squint shut. “Deri thinks Austin Sullivan is really cute, and he looks just like you. That means she thinks you’re really cute. Did you know that?”
Trevor didn’t turn his head, but I could see his eyes in the rearview mirror. They darted for a second to look at me.
Kailyn turned in her seat to face me. “You and Trevor should get married one day,” she whispered loudly.
Right. As if that would ever happen. Trevor could have any girl he wanted, and the introverted tomboy next door wasn’t even on the list. He smiled—maybe because the idea of getting married to someone he thought of as a kid sister was ridiculous, or maybe because he couldn’t wait to tease me for saying a guy who looks like him is cute. Either way, the entire topic of conversation made me uncomfortable. Fortunately, one of Austin Sullivan’s songs came on the radio. Kailyn turned the radio up, and we drove along the winding highway without talking.
The road followed the coastline with the ocean on our left and the mountain rock faces to our right. It was one of the most pristine places on earth to live. I definitely didn’t want to have to leave it behind again. When we arrived at the community centre for adults with disabilities, Trevor turned the radio volume down and whistled through his teeth to break Kailyn’s attention from her magazine. “We’re here.”
She climbed out of the truck without saying thanks or goodbye and slammed the door. Her wide strides made her stocky body sway from side to side. After she disappeared inside the building, Trevor looked over his shoulder at me. I thought he was going to embarrass me for the Austin Sullivan comparison. Instead, he asked, “Aren’t you going to get in the front?”
“Oh yeah, right.” I jumped out of the truck and hopped into the front passenger seat.
As he pulled out of the community centre’s parking lot and headed back onto the highway, a bizarre image flicked through my mind: a girl’s head smashed against the ground, and her blonde hair turned red from the blood pooled on the floor.
Trevor glanced at me, concerned, as he waited for me to tell him what I saw. I didn’t want to. My meaningless intuition visions, inherited from grandmother’s grandmother, started when I was about three. Back then, I’d see things like a dish fall off the counter before it actually did, or I’d point to where the whales were going to breach long before they showed up. When I was little, I thought everyone could see things before they happened. I was shocked when Trevor told me he couldn’t. He used to play games with me to test if I could guess what card he was holding or what picture he drew, but I always failed. The intuition never worked on demand like that. It wasn’t something I could will. Instead, I would randomly show up at his house wearing my full snowsuit and toque and mitts, ready for the storm that wasn’t forecasted. He’d look up at the blue sky and bright sunshine, sceptical, but he trusted me enough to go back inside to put his snowsuit on too.
Being able to see things in advance started to bother me when I was about nine because the scattered visions and subtle senses began to only happen for upsetting things. I once had a dream the neighbour’s dog was going to get hit by a car, so I sat outside their yard all day to make sure he didn’t get out. I was really proud of myself for saving him until it happened a week later. It was frustrating to not know when it would happen, and I felt so guilty. When I was twelve, I had a vision that my grandmother got sick and died in the hospital. Three weeks after the vision, she was diagnosed with cancer. She died a year later.
After I saw my dad’s car accident happen, I attempted to block all my intuitions. I promised myself the new Derian would no longer have visions. Unfortunately, despite determined effort on my part, I couldn’t stop them.
“What did you see?” Trevor asked.
I should have known he wouldn’t let me off the hook. “Nothing. It was a headache.”
He frowned and focused on the road. “I’ve known you most of your life. I know what it means when you get that look on your face. You don’t have to pretend you don’t get premonitions. It’s me.”
“They aren’t premonitions. They’re useless images, like crazy dreams. It was nothing. Nothing that makes any sense.”
“They aren’t useless. Search and Rescue teams are helped by intuitive and clairvoyant people all the time. While I was in Peru, I met a woman who finds missing children. I told her about you. She recommended I read her book. She says people with natural intuition can practice and get better at it, just like any other skill. I brought it home for you to read.”
I opened my bag and dug through it, hoping there was something I could use as a distraction to avoid the conversation. There wasn’t anything. “Why would I want to get good at seeing traumatic things I can’t do anything about?”
“The better you get at it, the more likely it will be useful. Maybe you’ll save someone’s life someday.”
I slouched in the seat and crossed my arms over my chest, fixing my attention on the rock face next to the highway. “A lot of good it did my dad. I saw it happen in exact, excruciating detail and couldn’t prevent it. He still died.”
Trevor glanced at me with empathy in his eyes. “Your dad’s accident wasn’t your fault, Deri.”
I shrugged and fought to swallow down the emotion in my throat. “Either way, I want to practice not having intuition at all, not practice to get better at it.”
We drove in silence. He probably wanted to convince me my brain glitch was a huge asset, but fortunately he let it go. “How are you feeling about being back at school in Squamish?”
Thankful to talk about anything other than my flawed neurology, I said, “Excited and nervous, I guess. It will be awkward at first when they all try to be sensitive about my dad. Hopefully that won’t last long and everything goes back to normal.” As soon as I said it, I regretted using the word “normal”. My life was never going back to the way it was. It was never going to feel normal again. I exhaled, trying to steel myself for the day ahead.
“It’s going to be okay.”
In an attempt to lighten the mood, I joked, “Yeah. Anything is better than living with my mom.”
A deep crease etched between his eyebrows. “She’s not that bad,” he said quietly.
Before my dad died, my mom lived in our apartment in downtown Vancouver and only came up to Britannia on the weekends, which was great growing up. Living full-time with my dad at the Inn had worked perfectly since he and I were essentially the same person—nature-lovers, bookish, and artistic. The opposite of my mom. Since Trevor’s mom left them, he always thought I should appreciate the fact that I, at least, had a mom, even if she and I had nothing in common. My whole childhood, he had encouraged me to try harder to get along with her.
I knew I needed to get over my issues with my mom, especially after losing my dad. I just didn’t know how. After my dad died, my mom refused to drive on the highway between Vancouver and Britannia, where the accident happened. She acted like it was a panic attack thing, but I knew it was just her convenient excuse to never step foot in Britannia Beach again and to guilt me into moving to Vancouver.
I tried to make living with her work. I really did. I enrolled in the stuffy private school she had always wanted me to go to. I joined the clubs she thought would look good on my university applications. I attended the counselling sessions she insisted on, so I could “process my grief”. None of it made any difference. I missed my friends in Squamish, I missed my granddad, and most of all I missed Britannia Beach. My mom and I got on each other’s nerves. Her standards for everything were impossibly high, she worried so much it was suffocating, and I hated every minute of living in the loud, crowded city. Moving back to the Inn saved me. And I wasn’t sure I could survive losing it too.
Trevor and I didn’t talk for the rest of the drive, which was something I actually always appreciated about him. He was comfortable with quiet, like my dad. And like me. But his silence felt different, more serious. As if something had changed between us in the year I was gone. He didn’t even look at me again until we pulled up in front of my school and shifted into park.
Things still felt odd between us. I wasn’t sure how to handle it and ended up sounding awkwardly formal. “Thank you for the ride, Trevor. Have a good day.”
“I’ll be done work at four-thirty if you want a ride home.”
“Sure. I’ll meet you back here.”
After I stepped out and shut the door, the window rolled down.
“Hey.” He grinned with his chin tilted in a cocky way. “Do you really think I’m good-looking like that guy in Kailyn’s magazine?”
And there it was. We were back to normal. The teasing was going to be relentless. I shook my head and made a snarky face. “Don’t let it go to your gigantic head.”
“Too late.” He waved and drove away.
At least our relationship felt familiar and easy again. Which was good, since I had a feeling going back to my old school was going to be way harder than I had anticipated.