[COMPLETE]
When Hanna Haddad embarks on what's supposed to be another uneventful summer as a lifeguard on Cape Cod, a trip to the past comes as an unnerving surprise. The discovery of her estranged mother's journal opens up the world of tragedy and...
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"Did you it's illegal in Rhode Island to sell alcohol in grocery stores?" Colin put down his empty bottle of beer on the glass table between our chairs, tilting his head to the left. "That's why you'll always find a liquor store right near a supermarket."
"What is it down there, the twenties?" I downed another sip of my Corona, hand wet from the sweat on the bottle. I set it on my lap, on top of my mom's journal I'd been reading before Colin had stopped by and interrupted an entry of an epic summer road trip.
We always gravitated to each other, even if one of us came home in a bad mood. It didn't feel right to smile and say hi and not spend our lonely evenings together venting about our days or sharing random tidbits of useless information. Today we sat on his patio drinking slowly, more akin to middle-aged men watching a droning baseball game than young college students unwinding after a long week.
"Apparently," he said, popping open his second bottle. He took a sip and mumbled, "God, I needed this."
"Any reason for the drinking today?" I asked. I'd barely gotten through a third of my bottle, more nauseous than I usually was having consumed that amount of alcohol. "Like...the ex-girlfriend?"
He snorted and half-choked on his last sip. "Margaret is a bitch. She broke up with me because I'm a square? Well now she's posting pics on social media with this premed from Tufts named Kevin who buttons all his shirts up to the last button. Look at this hideous fuckin' green polo, Hanna. The dude is one wrong move from strangling himself with his own collar."
I took one look at Kevin's fashion sense and handed his phone back to him, letting Colin grumble and groan away as he scrolled through Facebook picture after Facebook picture. Chuckling to myself, I leaned over to set my drink on the table on the table between us, feeling something slip out between my legs and onto the concrete. Before I could grab it, Colin had extended his arm and taken the small photograph between his fingertips.
He studied it for a few moments before smirking. "Damn, if I was gay, I'd definitely be into that guy right there." He turned the photo around and tapped the figure in the right corner-the guy I could now confirm was Benjamin. When he noticed me tense up, he handed it back to me. "Sorry. Just joking around."
"No, it's fine." I smiled and toyed with it between my fingers, happy I finally understood the context of this tattered snapshot. "It's just a photo of my parents from the nineties."
Colin froze. "Don't tell me I just called your dad hot."
I threw my head back in laughter at his growing horror. "No, no. That guy was my mom's best friend's boyfriend." A random stranger had taken this photo on a pit stop in South Carolina, the last leg of their end-of-junior-year road trip. "These are my parents."
He looked between the photo and my face, once and then twice. "You really look like your mom. If this photo wasn't so grainy, you could have fooled me into thinking she was you."
