I took off my glow stick and placed it around his neck, his forehead leaning into mine as a firecracker burst over the ocean, the red, green, and blue dancing and sizzling against the black.
“Now that is a beautiful sight!” a voice said.
We pulled apart as Father Toby approached, a pizza slice in one hand, his guitar case in the other, his priest’s collar and a glow stick hanging loose above a Springsteen concert Tee and a pair of orange board shorts.
“The radical priest is here to get you released,” he said, smiling. “Where are the cops, anyway? You promised me cops, Marcino.”
“Don’t worry, they’ll be here,” Uncle Dan said. “I’m sure there’s a night stick with your fat skull’s name on it.”
“Power to the People,” he said, looking at all the millennials scrambling around the beach. “Good Lord—do any of these kids even know that song?”
“They will once you play it for them,” I said, and Toby finished his slice and snapped open his guitar case. Out came a Martin acoustic, and as he slipped the strap over his shoulder and began to strum, I started thinking about Kelly, who should have been there with me even if her presence would have complicated, well…just about everything.
I thought about calling her, but suddenly my phone buzzed—good old “Lithium.” I fumbled with the phone, dropped it in the sand, answering just in time to hear Amy’s harried voice, hammers pounding in the background.
“Where are you?” she said. “One second we’re walking together and then you’re gone.”
“Sorry. I stopped to talk. I shouldn’t have, but then Uncle Dan showed up…”
“Whatever. Get your ass over here. Jill’s giving me all kinds of crap, but she’ll listen to you. Tell her you’ll cast her in your stupid play if she comes home now,” she said, the line going dead.
I started hurrying down the beach toward the makeshift stage near the shoreline, my feet dodging the rhythmic surges of the late-night tide. But suddenly my fingers began to tingle, and when I looked back at the lifeguard chair, the realization hit: twenty years earlier I’d fallen asleep at the exact spot where I now stood. I’d fallen asleep when I shouldn’t have, and Sarah Carpenter had drowned.
I shook my hands, hoping for a false alarm, but my eyelids began twitching, became lead-plated shades, and I felt my legs growing heavy, as if the sand had risen to my waist, every step becoming harder than the last. Still—I’m okay, I thought, taking a deep breath.
I tried to recall what I’d been thinking when I’d gone down that terrible morning: the warm sun; Sara’s vanilla ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles and a maraschino cherry; the taste of Amy’s lips.
I won’t fall asleep, I thought.
But it couldn’t hurt to sit for a minute, could it? Again, the phone rang, good old dead Cobain. I’m so happy because today I found my friends, they’re in my head, and I closed my eyes, just for a moment …
. . . . .
“I said, disperse!”
A boot smashes into my shin, and I wake up to a blazing Klieg light shining into my eyes. Voices through bullhorns…disperse, disperse.
“Vacate the beach immediately. Failure to comply…”
My eyes burn under the light, still half-asleep, but I awaken fast, the adrenaline dump flooding my veins; my heart is a nervous fist against my chest as the boot kicks me again, harder this time, and I look up into the mouth end of a pepper spray can pointed at my face.
More voices through bullhorns …disperse, disperse…and wait, is that a horse moving along the shoreline, a cop in a helmet waving his nightstick as the horse gallops through the sand?
The Klieg light doesn’t blink; my pupils collapse into pinholes.
“Local ordinance 57:29 prohibits sleeping on the beach after 10:00 PM,” the cop says.
I shield my face with my forearm. “I’m not sleeping on the beach. I fell asleep—I can’t control it. I’m narcoleptic.”
He pulls back the pepper spray, clipping it to his belt, but kicks me again just for the hell of it. “You need to disperse, or we’ll charge you…”
“Terry, I’ve got this one. They need you up on the boardwalk,” a voice says, and suddenly Clyde looms above me. The other cop, Terry, heads up the beach without a word as Clyde offers his hand, pulling me up.
“I should have known,” he says. “How the hell can anyone sleep through this?”
“What’s happening?” I ask, but then it all snaps clear: the beach, the occupation, the cops, Jill.
“You were supposed to be out of here before we arrived. What the hell happened?”
“You know what happened,” I say, brushing sand from my face. “Maybe Amy got her out…”
“Wrong. She flipped off one of the troopers and they’re holding her on the boardwalk.”
Two cops rush past us, dragging a dreadlocked kid by his shirt, the front cop pulling, the second one whacking the kid’s legs with a nightstick to keep him from resisting.
“Jesus. When did this become a police state?”
“It’s always been one. You just never paid attention,” Clyde says. “Look, just find Jill and get her home, okay? Some of these assholes are too loose with the pepper spray. My daughter cannot be here, understand?”
He runs off, shouting toward his partner as he raises his nightstick and chases three kids toward the dunes.
At the center of the beach there’s a scrum of orange glow sticks, twenty or thirty people, and though it’s dark and hard to see, I spot Jill in the middle of the pack, holding hands with Maddie and some dude with a shaved head, the bearded climate-change guy, Jeremy,
