Walking past bushes of beach grass that made a grab for her bare legs, Pinky pulled her wayward hair into a multicolored bun and walked up to join him, little prickles of curiosity getting through her stoic exterior. “Really? Weird. Wonder how you move a lighthouse.”
Samir glanced at her, his cheeks flushed from the heat. If she didn’t get him inside soon, he might just expire of heat exhaustion. And her parents would find a way to blame his demise on her. “I thought you’d been here before.”
Pinky gave him a look. “Many times. I just never read the sign.”
They stared at each other for a long moment, the silence punctuated only by the sound of ocean waves and a flock of seagulls arguing with each other in the distance. “But… but you have to walk right by the sign to get to the entrance.” Samir gestured to the entrance in front of them as if she couldn’t see it.
“I know that,” Pinky said slowly, feeling her short fuse getting shorter. “So what? Not everyone wants to stand around reading signs, Samir. Some of us want to actually get to the good stuff.”
“The sign is part of the good stuff!” Samir said, throwing his hands up in the air.
Pinky scowled. “Do you want to see the stupid lighthouse or not?” Before he could respond, she turned and headed past the lighthouse keeper’s neat green cottage to the entrance of the lighthouse proper.
Samir
Man, she was… flammable. It was like all her emotions were gasoline, and he just happened to have a match. Although, to be completely honest, she was making Samir grumpy too. There was just something about her scowly, flippant, irreverent way of being that got to him. Who didn’t read the signs outside historical monuments?
Huffing a frustrated breath, he clomped after Pinky into the lighthouse. But his annoyance dissipated the moment he was inside.
It was cooler in here; they were sheltered from the sun by thick, protective, ancient brick. Directly in front of them was a narrow, winding wrought-iron staircase painted a dark brown. “Look at the detailing,” Samir whispered, running his hand along the scrollwork. “That’s gorgeous.”
Pinky, who was already four stairs up, glanced down at him. “Um, yup. Super cool. But the view is the best part.” And then she kept going.
Sighing and shaking his head, Samir followed her, his footsteps clanging on the metal.
The near-vertical climb almost fifty feet up was kind of tough, and he and Pinky were both winded by the time they got to the top. The upside was, they didn’t speak much the entire time they were climbing, and less speaking meant less fighting.
“Ta… da!” Pinky flung her arm out at the view before them, panting slightly.
“Whoa.” Samir stepped forward, toward the big, curving windows of the observation deck. There wasn’t much room to move around—he and Pinky could stand side by side, but adding even two or three more people would’ve been a squeeze. None of that mattered, though, because the view… the view was incredible.
Samir could see for miles and miles; the ocean lay bright and blue as a piece of silk ribbon in the distance, dotted with a couple of fishing boats. He could see the trail he and Pinky had walked up, and swaths of marsh and grass and low, clumpy trees. It looked like a postcard for Cape Cod, almost too perfect to be real.
“Pretty incredible, right?” Pinky stood beside him, her hands on her hips, her face awash in sunlight. “I love that one quote by Thoreau; he actually said it about another Cape Cod lighthouse, but it applies here, too: ‘A man may stand there and put all America behind him.’ You’re looking out toward Nova Scotia right now.”
Samir darted a surprised look at her and she cocked her head, brown eyes flashing. “What?” she asked. “You don’t think someone like me could quote Thoreau?”
“I didn’t say that,” Samir said, turning around, though obviously, that’s exactly what he’d been thinking. There was a beacon behind him that he’d missed somehow, probably blindsided by the view. As he looked, it flashed a bright blue light for just a moment before going dark again. A placard beside it said it had been flashing the same pattern since the lighthouse had been built in 1857. Samir set one hand on the beacon’s clear casing, feeling its heft, its age, its purpose. “It makes you feel like everything’s going to be okay, doesn’t it? I mean, this place has been here for a hundred and sixty-three years. They saved it from being swallowed by the sea so it could continue to protect people.” He turned to look out the windows at the sea again, expecting Pinky to come back with some snarky remark.
“Yeah, actually,” she said softly, looking out at the sea too. “That’s what I really love about this place. It feels like… I don’t know, a protector of the island. It’s pretty cool.”
They stood in silence, breathing in tandem, letting the lighthouse cradle them.
Pinky
Weird. Pinky had never thought for a second that she and Samir could agree on anything, let alone something so… deep. She glanced sidelong at him. Maybe, in some tiny, small, minute way, he wasn’t quite as bad as she thought—
He was unsnapping his messenger bag and pulling out a small notebook and a marker. Setting the notebook against his thigh, he checked something off.
Pinky squinted. “What are you doing?” She couldn’t make out the tiny writing, but it looked like a list of some kind.
He put the notebook and marker neatly back into his bag (in their appropriate pockets) and snapped the bag shut before answering. “Checking ‘see Ellingsworth Point Lighthouse’ off my to-do list for the day.”
Pinky stared at him, waiting for more of an explanation that would help all of this make sense, but it didn’t seem like there was any coming. “You… made a to-do list for today?”
“Uh-huh. I make one for every day.”
Pinky chuckled and leaned against the railing of the observation deck. “No, come on. Not every single day.”
Samir arched an eyebrow. “Yes.”
There was no way. No way. “Even… your birthday?”
He nodded.
“Diwali.” Another nod. “Christmas.” A nod again. “The first day of summer break?” Yet another nod. “What do you even put on a day like that?” Pinky couldn’t help but ask. “I mean, it’s the first day of summer break! The whole point of it is to do nothing! Or anything!”
“ ‘Only through focus can you do world-class things, no matter how capable you are’—Bill Gates.” Samir shrugged. “Since you like quotes so much.”
Pinky scoffed. “Seriously. Don’t you think the whole planner thing is a little on the control-freak side?”
Samir leveled a gaze at her. “Sometimes, being in control is the only thing you have going for you.”
Something in his tone had her swallowing back her sarcastic retort. Pinky rested her hip against the handrail, digesting his words. “Oh,” she said quietly, feeling a little bad. “Did you learn that when… when your mom got sick?”
He looked away, back out at the marsh and the sea in the distance. “Something like that.”
Pinky wondered whether she should say what was on her mind and then realized she couldn’t not say it. She and Ash had already helped Samir with his mom once. Maybe this would help him too. “But she’s not sick anymore.”