Welcome to Corbet's Inlet, North Carolina, where the teenagers act like adults and the adults act like teenagers. It's Griffin Connolly's favorite place in the world. And while she may not be good at making decisions when it comes to her own life, s...
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It stormed until after midnight.
Lauren had decided to stay over at the Connollys' house after dinner and had fallen asleep by the time it stopped raining. Griffin couldn't get settled and felt bad about how much she was tossing and turning. She finally got up to find the new Moleskine she'd bought for the summer, then tiptoed over to the three windows on the opposite wall of her room.
Her parents would throw an absolute shit fit if they knew how many times she'd snuck out onto the roof during the summer. They'd caught her once when she was fifteen and threatened to seal the windows shut if she did it again. The roof was designed for unpredictable coastal weather, though, so it slanted enough for water runoff, but was flat enough to make sure the second floor didn't blow off during a hurricane.
Griffin quietly unhatched the middle pane and gritted her teeth as it squeaked open.
The night air was thick with warmth and salt.
The tide was all the way out, and the ocean felt miles away. No moon, either. Griffin double-checked the traction under her flip-flops before reaching back to close the window behind her. She sat down against the sill and clipped her reading light to her new journal.
She wasn't a good writer by any stretch of the imagination. Writing things out just calmed her down. There was validation in being able to say whatever she wanted without repercussions or judgment. She liked being able to look back on exactly how she was feeling at any point in her life and compare it in hindsight.
She spent the next twenty minutes chronicling everything that had happened since she'd gotten Corbet's. What her friends were up to this summer. How much she was dreading the workout schedule from the Washington and Lee tennis coach. How she was supposed to start her job at the CICC tennis pro shop tomorrow...
She wrote out everything she could possibly think of to put off acknowledging the one thing she knew she had the most to say about.
When she finally got to dinner earlier, she went back and forth for a minute on whether or not she should even get into what happened with Charlie. Her pride didn't want to give him the satisfaction of taking up page real estate, but her temper could already picture how smug he'd be if he knew she was in a debate with herself about Dear Diary-ing him...
She started writing, and her hand cramped by the time she'd finished the first page of her rant. She didn't push down as hard with her pen on pages two and three.
The more she wrote, the more she had to say. How arrogant he was, how different he looked. And just when she was getting to the part about how condescending he'd been calling her out, distant laughter floated up from somewhere down below and scared her half to death.
Her house had a private boardwalk connected to their back deck. It arched up over the dunes just before the beach access, and Griffin could just make out three silhouettes trying to navigate the wooden stairs. They laughed and shoved each other playfully toward the bottom. Two of them were clearly Matty and Evan. Griffin's stomach jumped nervously at the third.
