Getting Over Cameron Grey

9 | Beach Daze

The best thing about California is the sunshine. Even when your day is absolutely terrible, you always have the sun. I spent that morning convincing my mother to lend me her car and trying to escape a conversation that she seemed to really want to have about Hannah (again), and Amara and I spent quite a bit of time trying to remember how to get back to the club since both of our phones felt like lying to us. But we finished everything we needed to do, and since it was Saturday, that was all that we needed to do. We decided to spend the rest of the day on the beach, which was basically right across the street from the shop. 

Amara pulled the top down on her convertible and stayed in the car so she could interrogate Marlon while I kicked my feet in the water. Even though she was only a few feet away, her hushed voice sounded even farther. "So do you have a girlfriend or do you not have a girlfriend?"

I wanted to appreciate the day. The sky was a bright blue, and the sun was warm without being abusively hot. There was a light breeze that evened out the temperature. The waves were especially gentle. I could crouch by the shoreline without worrying about getting slapped by a mean wave. I picked out seashells, rinsed them off and kept the prettiest ones near my flip flops, which were a few feet away. I remembered Cameron again. When we went to the beach, which was about every other Saturday, he used to swim and collect seashells to bring back to me. I always sat in the sand, since I'm not a huge fan of getting wet in general. But there was one point in our relationship, an earlier point, where I would run after him and splash him. I still hated getting wet but I loved being with him so much that it didn't even matter.

I wondered when it started to matter again. 

A car door slammed. I knelt into the water and tried to see how close I could bring my palm to its surface without touching it. "Zoey."

I touched it out of surprise and whipped my head around. "How'd it go?"

"It's a long story. But the short story is that he doesn't have a girlfriend." Amara crouched down by my shoes and growing seashell collection. She looked especially glamorous and unreadable with her hangover-friendly sunglasses. "I think I hate men. As a group. One-on-one, they're kind of okay."

I smiled and looked back into the water. Even though it was a weekend, there weren't too many people out. There was one family quite a while away from us to our right, a family that included a cute baby in a pink one-piece swimsuit and a bucket hat. "Amara, can I ask you a question?"

"That's a question."

"Don't be annoying."

"Fine, shoot." Without looking, I could tell that she was inspecting the conch shell that I found.

"Do you think that you changed a lot since college? Since high school?" I was immediately embarrassed by the question as soon as it left my mouth. "I mean, of course you changed, but do you think it was a dramatic one?"

"I don't really think I have changed, and I think that's a part of my problem."

I adjusted myself a bit so that I could face her better. "What do you mean?"

"I mean... I don't really know. I just don't care. I don't care about a lot of things. And the little things that I do care about, I care too much. You know what I mean? It was okay to be that way in high school. That's how adults expect you to be in high school. You're supposed to be kind of lost and in search of yourself. But with every year that passes, you're supposed to get it together a little bit more and figure it all out. And now I've graduated and I'm out in the real world or whatever, and I still don't care and I still don't have it figured it out. And none of it matters to me." Her words were vulnerable, but she didn't seem that way. She rotated the shell between her fingers and seemed as cool as always. "I'm trying to care now because that's what I'm supposed to do."