Glass Dances

3 Creepy Coastal Critters

3 Creepy Coastal Critters

     ‘Never am I having children,’ I promised myself, for the hundredth time in the last few weeks. Lately, my two small cousins seemed to fight more than they played, and each competed nonstop for attention from their babysitter—me.

     “If you don’t stay still and quiet and watch the movie, I’m going to turn it off, and you’ll have to take a nap,” I threatened as I straightened the pallet in front of the television yet again.

     “But we’re hungry,” the youngest, by barely one minute, little darling whined.

     “You just ate.” I was exhausted and extremely irritated. All I wanted was to close my eyes for twenty minutes.

     “We’re hungry again.”

     Stretched out on the couch, I could no longer hold my heavy lids open. “That’s because you barely touched your food.”

     The moment I dozed, the phone jarred me conscious with steady shrill peals. Muttering a curse, I came up off the couch and went in search of the cordless, which was never the convenience it was supposed to be.

     If it was Jared, I would murder him. He was half the reason I needed this nap I couldn’t seem to get. Last night after driving me home, Jared had called, and we had talked on the phone until well after two a.m. Phone calls until well in the night were normal when there was no school the next day. But beginning this morning, I was required to run a mile at the football field at seven a.m. with Ms. Hall and the other girls on the dance team. Jared had to be at work each morning at daylight, and I had no idea how he had been doing it all summer after staying up so late.

     “Hi girl, it’s Erin!” The response to my halfhearted hello was bright, chirpy.

     “Erin, hey! What’ve you been up to?” Any traces of fatigue vanished when I heard my friend’s voice. We talked at length, catching up on the last few weeks and sharing remembrances of camp.

     Erin invited me to the beach for the weekend. Ashleigh’s parents had rented a beach house for the month, and they were letting Ashleigh throw a party. “Bring your boyfriend, okay?”

     After hanging up the phone, I leaped up, invigorated. First, I prepared two peanut butter sandwiches for the girls. Next, as they happily smacked on their snack, I texted Jared.

     It was no small feat convincing my mother to let me make the trip to the coast. Her determination that I not grow up too fast had resulted in strict curfews and a close eye on my friends. Often, when I stayed the night at Dani’s, my mother called midway into the evening on some pretext. It had been sheer luck that my first introduction into dating last year had quickly produced Jared whom she loved. I didn’t even want to think about having a conflicting boyfriend and the hell that brought on, like between Dani, Cole, and Dani’s parents.

     Dani’s parents did not deem Cole suitable for their daughter because his brothers had both been in trouble with the law. Dani had phoned me in tears more than a couple of times over a situation involving Cole, which had gone down between her and her parents. She would be grounded from seeing him for a month or so, and then her parents would relent and reinstate her dating privileges with him. Regardless, sometimes Dani would sneak out to see Cole.

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     Sneaking. I pondered the word as I waited for Erin to pick me up. Was that what I was doing now? I had led my mom to believe that I would be riding down to the coast with Erin—alone. The small detail about Jared meeting us at Erin’s house had been omitted. My mother didn’t even know Jared was going on the trip.