“This is my favorite place.”
“Now, Jessica,” Dad said. “Leave David alone.”
I think I was his favorite child right then. We’d gone to Chez Condrez for Jessica’s sixteenth birthday and it had cost Dad about a hundred and twenty-five bucks.
“I wouldn’t have driven all the way home if I’d known this is where we were going to eat,” she complained.
“Two hours, Jess,” I said. “Big deal. You should be willing to drive twenty hours just to wish me a happy birthday.”
“Yeah,” she said, “and almost get killed on the ride to the restaurant.”
“We didn’t almost get killed.”
“I also can’t believe they gave you a driver’s license,” she muttered.
“Hey, look!” Greg said. We were eating so cheap that I’d asked Mom and Dad if he could come with us. “They’ve got a ‘Help Wanted’ sign up!”
“I don’t know why you don’t get certified and lifeguard with me,” I told him.
“Because I want something I can keep doing after school starts. Besides that, I bet if I work here I can get you an employee discount!”
“Aren’t you guys going to Florida right after school gets out?” Jessica asked.
“Yup!” I said, grinning.
“Isn’t the pool going to be kinda mad when you miss the whole first week of work?” she asked me.
“I told them about it during the interview,” I explained. “They said we could work around it.”
Three weeks later Greg started his new job.
“I can’t believe they don’t make you wear a hairnet,” I said. Greg’s ponytail was hanging out the back of a cap that said: Hunter’s Pizza and Subs.
“That’s why I like working here,” he answered. “They don’t make me wash my hands after I go to the bathroom either.”
He handed my sub over the counter.
“Enjoy.”
I smirked at him and took a bite.
“Has Laci found a job yet?” Greg asked.
“Yfs, su dot,” I nodded. “Sfs gft un jsb nt kndys.”
“How’s that sub?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at me.
“Sf ghoud,” I said, nodding again.
He waited for me to swallow.
“So what’s she doing?”
“She’s going to be working at Kennedy’s.”
“That men’s clothing store in the mall?”
“Yep,” I said.
“Just for the summer?”
“She’s not sure,” I said. “That’s when they’re busiest – renting tuxes for weddings and stuff – but she might stay on part-time after school starts again.”
“When does she start?” Greg asked.
“Next week.”
“What about you?”
“The day after we get back from Florida,” I said.
I could hardly wait.
~ ~ ~
SUMMER ARRIVED QUICKLY and the day after school ended I flew to Florida with Greg’s family. I got to sit next to the window on the plane. Greg’s grandmother was waiting for us at the airport.
“Oh, Charlotte!” she said. “How’s my baby?” She squatted down next to Charlotte and they gave each other a big hug.
“Look what I got for you for graduating from kindergarten!” she said. She held out a shirt that matched her own . . . it was turquoise with blue and pink butterflies.
“Greg!” she said, reaching up to hug him because he was taller than she was now. “How’s my favorite grandson?” He was her only grandson.
I got hugged next.
“David! How’s my other favorite grandson?”
She had t-shirts for both of us too. Greg’s was green with a white sea turtle on the back. Mine was a washed-out red with a white logo on the chest pocket. The logo was a cross with the word “Lifeguard” above it, and “Tarpon Springs, Fla.” underneath. I liked it a lot and was especially glad that Greg and I didn’t wind up with matching shirts.
Greg’s grandmother lived in Crystal Beach, about five miles south of Tarpon Springs. Her house was small with only two bedrooms. Greg’s parents would get the extra bedroom and Charlotte and Greg and I were going to sleep in the living room – one of us on the couch, one of us on an Aerobed, and one of us in a sleeping bag on the floor.
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” I offered, feeling very honored that I’d been invited along at all.
Charlotte’s eyes filled up with tears and she began wailing. “I wanted to sleep on the floor! I wanted to sleep on the floor!”
I got the couch.
Greg’s grandmother had a gas log fireplace (I couldn’t imagine when she ever needed it) and a mantle covered with framed photos. I studied them while Greg was blowing up his Aerobed.
“Who’s this?” I asked, showing him a picture of a boy about ten years old who was holding a baby. “That’s not you and Charlotte . . . is it?”
He looked up at it and nodded. “Yup.”
“Man, I can’t believe that’s you!” I said. His hair was in a crew cut and blond . . . almost white. He was wearing shorts and his skin was dark brown.
“I know,” he said. “I’m just as pale as you now.”
“I’m going to get a tan while I’m down here,” I told him.
“You’d better wear sunscreen while you’re down here.”
I looked at another picture. I could tell that it was a young Mr. and Mrs. White, faces pressed together, smiling with goggles and ski hats and gloves. White snow was in the background.
There was an eight by ten school photo of Greg . . . probably taken in about the first or second grade. Tucked in the corner of the frame was a picture of me and Greg and Laci, smiling and sitting at the picnic table at Cross Lake with playing cards in front of us.
“Hey!” I said. “I’m up here too!”
“You’ve made the big time now,” Greg acknowledged, unplugging the Aerobed cord. “My grandma’s mantle.”
“I can’t believe I am swimming in the Gulf of Mexico,” I told Greg as we bobbed up and down in the waves. “This is so cool. Hey! Look at that!”
A nearby boat was pulling a parasail.
“I got to do that once,” Greg said. “It was pretty neat. You’re flying above everybody and you can see sharks in the water and stuff.”
“Sharks?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You look down and there’s people swimming with sharks right around ’em and they don’t even know it . . .”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Oh, brother,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Most of them are only like . . . this big.” He held his hands about two feet apart.
“You’re serious? There’re sharks around here?”
“Well, this is part of the Atlantic ocean . . .”
“I’m getting out . . .” I said, starting to fight the waves to get to shore. Then I stepped on something.
“There’s something down there!” I said, trying to keep my feet off the bottom.
“Sand, maybe?” Greg asked.
“No, I’m serious,” I said, “something weird.”
“It’s probably just a shark.”
“You’re not funny!” I said, tentatively putting a foot down again. “Oh! There’s another one!”
Greg dunked his head under the water and emerged a few seconds later with something in his hand.
“This maybe?” he asked, extending his arm to me.
I looked at it, hesitantly.
“What is that?” I asked.
“It’s just a sand dollar.”
“It doesn’t look like a sand dollar,” I said, taking it from him. It was brown and velvety. “How come it’s not all smooth and white?”
“Because it’s still alive,” Greg explained, and I almost dropped it. “When they harvest them they lay them out in the sun and when they die all these little hairs fall off and they turn white.”
I looked carefully. All the little hairs were moving, trying to make
it go somewhere. I tossed it gently into deeper water and went under, feeling around on the floor bottom until I found two more. I popped up with them.
“Look! I caught sand dollars!” I said.
“Are you going to keep them?” Greg asked.
“No, I’m going to let them go,” I said. “They’re cool though!”
“That’s about the millionth time you’ve said ‘cool’ since we got here yesterday,” Greg smiled.
“Oh, right. Like you didn’t do the same thing after you moved to Cavendish,” I said. “Cool . . . snow! Cool . . . an icicle! Cool . . . a snowdrift! Cool . . . sleet!”
“Cool!” he said, pointing behind me. “A shark!”
“Very funny!” I answered, knowing that he was only kidding, yet still having to turn around anyway. I took a few involuntary steps back toward the shore, trying not to crush any sand dollars.
The next day we went to another beach. I was really grateful that Charlotte was around so that I had an excuse for catching sand fleas, collecting shells and making drip castles (which I was pretty much an expert at by now). Greg tolerated my second childhood fairly well.
“Do you think you can tear yourself away from the beach for the day tomorrow?” he asked.
“Probably,” I said. “Why?”
“I thought we’d get together with some of my old friends and do some biking on the Pinellas trail.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
We had a great time with Greg’s old friends and although they were very nice (I had not really expected otherwise), I understood why Greg had wanted me to come to Florida with him. It was natural for his friends to talk about things that had happened recently, about things that Greg didn’t know anything about, or to make jokes that only they got. Likewise, when we stopped at an arcade to play pool and Greg clawed his hand through the air, they didn’t know why I laughed.
When Greg said goodbye to them at the end of the day and told them he’d see them next year, I found myself feeling very thankful for my friends and my life in Cavendish. I was glad that no one was going to move . . . nothing was going to change.
Two days before we were scheduled to fly home we went to the aquarium in Tarpon Springs. They had a touch tank where you could pet and feed stingrays and nurse sharks. I made Charlotte go with me and I stood there amongst a bunch of little kids running my hand across slimy stingrays until a shark finally got close enough for me to touch.
“I touched a shark!” I told the Whites when I met them at the alligator exhibit. They all smiled and at the gift shop I bought two shark–tooth key rings (one for Tanner and one for Mike) and two shark–tooth necklaces (one for Laci and one for Jessica).
We went out to eat that night at a restaurant called Mama’s Greek Cuisine. Greg’s grandmother told me that Tarpon Springs had a higher percentage of Greek-Americans than any other city in the United States.
“They came here with their families as sponge divers around the turn of the century,” she explained. “Then in 1947, a red tide wiped out almost all of the sponges.”
The waitress came and took our drink orders.
“Anyway,” Greg’s grandmother continued, “the sponge industry never really recovered from that, but Tarpon Springs is still famous for its sponges.”
“I never even knew there was such a thing as a sponge industry,” I said.
Greg nodded.
“We’ll walk around the sponge docks after dinner,” he said. “You’ll see.”
I started looking at my menu.
“Smelt?” I said. “They serve smelt here?”
“What’s wrong with smelt?” Greg asked.
“Nothing, I guess,” I said, “but I’m not going to order something I can catch in Lake Michigan. I want something special – something that I can’t get around home. What’s calamari?”
“Squid,” Mr. White said.
“And I think you can get that at home if you’d just go someplace to eat besides Hunter’s,” Greg told me. “You should get spanakopita or dolmades.” His parents and grandmother nodded in agreement.
“What are ‘dolmades’?” I asked.
“Right here,” Greg said, pointing at the menu. “Ground beef and rice wrapped in grape leaves and topped with an egg-lemon sauce.”
“Grape leaves?”
“Do you want me to see if they have hot dogs?” Greg asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m going to be adventurous. What’s the other thing you said?”
“Spanakopita,” Greg’s grandmother said. “It’s spinach pie with layers of phyllo dough and feta cheese.”
“Spinach?”
Greg rolled his eyes.
“No, no . . .” I said, holding up a hand. “I’m going to get one of them . . . I just can’t decide.”
“How about if I get one and you get the other and we can split ’em,” Greg suggested.
I nodded. I also ordered broiled octopus as an appetizer and baklava for dessert.
After supper we walked around the sponge docks, investigating the gift shops that were packed along the Anclote River. I was in line holding two sponges when Greg walked up to me.
“What are you getting those for?”
“For my mom and dad,” I said, holding them up. “Genuine sponges from Tarpon Springs.”
“Give me those,” he muttered under his breath. He took them from me and threw them back into a bin. “Let’s go.
“Those sponges aren’t from here,” he explained when we got outside. “That place is just a tourist trap.”
“Where are they from?”
“Imported from overseas somewhere,” he said. “Come on.”
We walked about two blocks until we came to the Tarpon Sponge Company. Greg assured me that the sponges were locally harvested. I bought four.
On our last evening we were sitting on the beach, waiting for the sun to set over the Gulf of Mexico. I was thinking to myself about the gifts that I was taking home with me. Suddenly I looked at Greg.
“What?” he asked.
“I . . . I didn’t get you anything . . . to thank you for bringing me down here.”
“Wanna know what you can do to thank me?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Come back next year,” he smiled.
“Are you serious?”
“Sure,” he said. “We can make it an annual thing . . . one day we’ll bring our wives and kids.”
I smiled back at him.
“You’ve got a deal!”
We sat there quietly for a few minutes and I let myself imagine leaving my kids with Greg and his wife while Sam and I took a walk on the beach.
“You know what’s over there?” Greg asked, pointing slightly south and interrupting my thoughts.
“Mexico?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Do you think about it a lot?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he nodded, glancing at me. “Do you?”
“Every day.”
“Do you think you’ll ever go back there?”
“I don’t really want to,” I admitted. “That probably sounds terrible, doesn’t it?”
“No,” he said. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“It would be easier just to get rich and write a check and let somebody else do it.”
“Another good reason to be an engineer,” he said with a smile.
“Don’t get me wrong,” I told him. “If I’m supposed to go back . . . I will.”
“I know,” he answered quietly. We both sat in silence and watched the sun drop below the waves.
~ ~ ~
MY NEW JOB was fun. I loved sitting in my lifeguard chair, twirling my whistle, ordering people to stop building pyramids and telling little kids not to run. Like the summer before, Greg and Laci came by almost every day, and we usually played pool or swam during my breaks.
One day Sam showed up as the guest of a member. She spotted me in my chair and came over.
“Hey
, David!” she said. “I didn’t know you were a lifeguard!”
“Yeah,” I said. “How are you doing?”
“Good,” she said. “Are you having a good summer?”
“It’s been great. How ’bout you?”
“Pretty good,” she said. “Have you had to save anybody yet?”
“Not really,” I answered, deciding that getting a bag of ice for the kid who’d cracked his lip open on the diving board didn’t really count.
“You ready for school to start?”
“Not really,” I said again.
“Are you taking statistics this fall?”
“No.” I shook my head, quickly trying to figure out if I could fit that into my schedule somehow. “Pre-calc.”
“Oh,” she answered, sounding disappointed. “Well, maybe we’ll get to take something else together this year.”
“That would be good,” I nodded.
“Well,” she said. “My friends are waiting, I’d better go. See ya around!”
“Yeah,” I said, “see ya.”
I turned my attention back to the pool and glanced around quickly, relieved not to find anybody floating face down in the water.
I wound up having one class with Sam during our junior year – American History.
When I’d signed up for my fall classes, in addition to American History and Pre-Calculus and Physics, I had decided to take a class called Life Skills. It was designed to help us do things like set goals, organize our time, and develop better study skills. When I walked into the room on the first day of school I noticed that the wall was covered with motivational posters like: IF YOU FAIL TO PLAN, PLAN TO FAIL, and IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING, YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO GET THERE. I figured it would be an easy A.
The first thing our teacher had us do was to envision ourselves at some point in the future. She said it didn’t matter if it was ten months from now or ten years from now, just to picture ourselves in the future doing something that we hoped to be doing. She turned off the lights and made us put our heads down on our desks so that we could concentrate.
I imagined myself nine months from now at the Junior/Senior Prom with Sam. We were slow dancing and she was definitely my girlfriend. It was a great daydream and I was sorely disappointed when the teacher turned the lights back on.
“Now,” she said, passing out composition notebooks to each of us, “I want you to write down what you envisioned – what it is that you want to be doing in the future.”