Chapter Text
Isabel
There are friendships that grow slowly, the way ivy climbs a wall. And then there are the other kind.
The ones that feel less like something that has a beginning and more like something you simply notice when it’s already there. Already woven into everything.
Ours was the second kind. Neither of us could say when the threads first tangled.
The adults tried, of course. The way adults like to assign beginnings to things that were never neat enough to have one. My mom insisted it started at a birthday party where we apparently disappeared for two hours and were eventually found under the dining room table, whispering like conspirators. Susannah claimed it was way earlier, the summer we were two, because we kept sucking on each other’s toes and refused to eat when the other one wasn’t in sight!
Jeremiah never bothered with the math. “It’s just us,” he’d say, shrugging as if that explained everything.
Maybe it did. Because when I try to think of my childhood without him, the picture refuses to form. It’s like trying to imagine the ocean without salt. Or summer without heat. Technically possible. But not really.
The house in Cousins had a way of rearranging time. During the rest of the year we lived in different places, went to different schools, had separate lives that ran parallel without touching. But summer erased all of that. Summer meant sharing a bedroom wall, and the same bathroom. The same beach path worn smooth by years of bare feet, the same long evenings where the air smelled like sunscreen and salt and whatever Susannah was grilling on the deck. And somewhere inside all of that : Jeremiah and I. Always in orbit around each other.
Not in the dramatic way people imagine when they hear stories like this. There were no promises carved into wood. Just a quiet, consistent gravity.
If he ran down to the beach, I followed. If I sat on the porch steps reading, he ended up beside me eventually, stealing the chips from my bowl and asking questions about whatever book I was holding.
We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t have to.
At some point our lives had simply folded together.
—
The summer I’m thinking of now, the one that always comes back to me first, began the way most of them did.
With noise.
Suitcases thumping onto hardwood floors. Steven complaining about the drive. My mom reminding him for the hundredth time that complaining wouldn’t make the trip shorter.
The front door swung open and the house greeted us with that familiar smell of old wood and ocean air. And somewhere upstairs, a door slammed.
A moment later footsteps thundered down the staircase.
“BELLY!”
Only Jeremiah could turn my name into something that sounded like an announcement.
He took the stairs two at a time and nearly collided with my mom in the hallway before spotting me behind her.
His entire face lit up. Not the polite kind of smile people use when greeting someone they haven’t seen in a while. The other kind. The kind that shapes before the person even remembers to be cool about it.
“You’re here!” he said, like it had been a question all along.
“Hi Jere,” I said.
He grabbed my wrist without asking and tugged me toward the back door. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“The beach.”
“We just got here.”
“So?”
I looked back at my mom, who just hugged Susannah and was already staring to unpack groceries onto the kitchen counter. She waved a hand without even turning around. “Go,” she said.
Susannah added with laughter, “Before he explodes.”
Jeremiah grinned triumphantly and pulled me outside.
The path to the beach hadn’t changed. It never did. The same uneven wooden steps. The same patch of tall grass where you had to push branches aside. The same sudden opening where the ocean appeared all at once, wide and bright and impossible to ignore.
Jeremiah reached the sand first and spun around, walking backwards. “You took forever,”
“I arrived five minutes ago.”
“Still.” He shrugged. “You wanna race?”
I kicked off my shoes. “What else would we do?”