June, 2008

    Beneath the boardwalk of Ellingston Beach, where the bonfire gave off a glow as orange as the setting sun, and where the waves lapped against the rocks like cerulean paint on an infinite canvas, seven bodies breathed and laughed and lived as if all of the constituents of who they were were intertwined. As if they were spiderwebbed into this magnificent being embodying all it meant to be alive. They were beautiful people. But not only Ever Eberhardt's kind of beauty — eyes so hazel and multifaceted that one was predisposed to believing her every thought, sandy hair as free-forming as the waves, legs as long as interstates, and curves as important as river bends. They all possessed such promise, such inherent potential to be great. Ever believed that everyone, even if it was just a fleeting moment in a lifetime, held the possibility of greatness, but being great boiled down to the realization of one's existence. She thought it unbearably sad that most people never fathomed their state of being. Ever was so obsessed with the nature of existence and what people did in those existences that it made up most of what she thought and talked about. Usually, when she did discuss the possibilities of life, she would claim to have premonitions of what would become of people's lives. Especially her friends.

    When Milo Witwer, the quietest and the youngest of the group, leaned against Ever's shoulder, she pulled herself from her head in one of those coveted moments of presence. In that moment, she sat there in the brunt of the fire's warmth and she admired every moment of life surrounding her. Like the single layer between she and Milo — the shoulder of his T-shirt against the bareness of her arm. And the way the sand strained through her fingers when she cupped her hands. And the salty wetness in the breeze beside the sea. And the beauty in every face she saw around the fire.

    From the other side of the bonfire, Ever admired the way the light of the flames washed Jay Hewitt's face in a fiery glow as he sipped from a red plastic cup. The radiance seeped across his masculine features, reaching up to tousle his short, brunette hair. Jay had an elegance in every motion of his body, a humility imbibed deep in his bones. Ever would never forget the time that she went to his first football game in their freshman year of high school. Jay scored the winning touchdown, but even the praise from his teammates couldn't stop him from apologizing to each member of the opposing team that he tackled during the game. Ever adored him for that.

    Gliding her eyes across the reposed form with a joint dangling from his lips and an attitude that was the effigy of lax, Ever smiled at the perpetually sleepy-eyed Tiberius Martin. He insisted, since the day he met Ever and Jay in kindergarten, to be called Marty. Ever thought he bared an uncanny resembled to Shaggy of Scooby Doo. Marty loved the comparison. Then again, he loved almost everything she said. She was the first friend he made in his entire life, and he decided on the third day of kindergarten that she would always be his person. His person to confide in. His person to ensure that he would never be alone. And his person to always give him a place to go when the stresses of living in a small house with such a large family began to take their toll. Out of all the professions and all of the titles in the world, just being known as Marty's Person was enough for Ever to be satisfied.

    Sitting nearest to the ocean, Iggy Lane spoke with such liveliness that one had to stare at her red-painted lips to capture every word. Iggy sat on her toffee legs in a position that would have been uncomfortable if she had not been so petite. The breeze blew her dark hair dangerously close to the fire. Ever parted her lips to warn her, but Iggy absentmindedly flipped her hair to her other shoulder during a short pause between rhapsodies. Ever and Iggy met in middle school. Ever thought she would not like the overly-chatty new girl who imposed on her town, but the two of them shared an affinity for eighties hairbands and stealing their mothers' red lipsticks, and so a friendship was inevitable. Neither of them would complain.

    Valerie Howser, coined as Doogie because of her aspiration to have "M.D." follow her name, watched with wide almond eyes as Iggy's lips moved a mile a minute. She always found it fascinating how Iggy could talk without end, like she had borrowed snippets from every conversation in the world. As Doogie's eyes widened to their extremity and the sheer momentum behind Iggy's words, Ever was looking at Doogie with the same admiration. Doogie was a person of quiet beauty, the type of appeal one would have to get to know, not the overt beauty that Ever or Iggy possessed. Although Doogie would be the first to tell you that she was nothing of interest, Ever would beg to differ so passionately that Doogie would take on a shade of vibrant embarrassment. Ever claimed that Doogie was the smartest person on the western seaboard. Smart enough to get the mathematically declined Ever a ninety-eight percent on her eleventh-grade algebra exam. Ever would keep the brainiac in her back pocket from that day forth.

    Just as Iggy began to talk about the "exigence of compatible signs in romantic relationships," Todd Winters appeared like a streak of blonde as he ran into a leap over the bonfire like a Ringling Brothers circus act. Iggy and Doogie shrieked as if they had just witnessed someone jump from a bridge. Todd smiled brightly, his freckle-peppered nose scrunching. He was the type of person that fed on attention, though, not to be confused with conceit. Having been an only child, he was just used to capturing the concern of those around him. That was what drew Ever to him. He was so spirited and alive that she could not ignore his presence the night of her first high school house party. She had just began her sophomore year when a senior from the basketball team invited her. It was there, in the midst of rhythmic bodies and pulsing stereos, that she met the then-eighth grader, Todd, who sneaked into the party through a basement window. Ever and Todd, both with a passion for competition, spent the night taunting each other during multiple rounds of beer pong. By the end of the night, they were so drunk that they had to use each other as crutches. They wobbled to the nearby park, and fell asleep beneath the bridge. Since the morning after, where they shared hangovers and turns vomiting out their intestines, they were inseparable.

    Milo shifted, leaning his head on Ever's shoulder. She smiled down at him. He timidly smiled back with a blush as red as a fire hydrant in the middle of August. He had such a childlike face, giving one the urge to pinch his cheeks. That urge was nearly irrefutable when Ever first laid eyes on him almost six months ago. She was wandering through the local library for battered book spines that caught her eye — she had always had an inexplicable attraction to neglected books — and happened upon Milo, a sophomore, sitting in the corner of the library hunched over a notebook with an arc in his brow and a scrunch in his nose. She liked what she described as his "aura." Milo had never talked to a girl as attractive as Ever, and was at a loss for words when he looked up to find her sitting across from him with her chin propped on her fist and the gracious hint of a grin tugging at the corners of her red lips. With a voice that Milo later described to Jay as "as melodic as a symphony," she asked him what he was doing. He stammered that he had a creative writing project for school. Her lips pulled into a full smile, and she said, "Write about me." When Milo asked her why, though, he could hardly speak with her fierce eyes staring right through him, she laughed and said, "Because you'll make me amazing." After that, in just a month of spending time with Ever, Milo decided that he was absolutely in love with her. Despite her only looking at him as something like a brother, Milo was content with just being able to lean his head against her shoulder.

    The sunset had become a thin-moon night by the time Iggy finished her one-sided discussion of compatible signs. The bonfire still burned with a wild passion, as did the reflections of the flames in all of their eyes.

    "Guys," Ever said. It was the first time she spoke in awhile, and her words were lined with a smile. "I have new premonitions."

    Everyone sat up a little straighter with amusement greedily anticipated. They always thought Ever's predictions were ridiculous. Especially when she claimed that one of them would be attacked by a alligator in the near future, but the only reptile-related incident to occur was Marty being nipped by his younger brother's pet turtle.

    "Lay it on us," Marty chuckled.

    Ever cleared her throat, and held up seven fingers whose nails had been painted electric blue. "One of us—" she paused, her voice becoming more like one fit for a campfire horror story, "—will drop out of high school."

    Jay inconspicuously pointed a finger at Todd, to which Todd gasped in shock.

    "Another one of us will get pregnant—"

    Todd, Jay and Marty rubbed their bellies.

    Ever sighed, labored with technicalities, "—or get someone pregnant before high school graduation... and it's inevitable that one of us will be a drug addict."

    Every eye seemed to wander to Marty. He did not notice.

    "Another will serve a prolonged sentence in incarceration, one will suffer an unspecified traumatic event, someone will get into an abusive relationship, and the last of us will die before their twenty-fifth birthday," Ever finished with a smile.

    Jay raised a brow. "Those were a lot more dramatic than usual."

    "And morbid," Iggy cringed.

    Milo shifted again. Even when he raised his voice over the hub-bub of his surrounding companions, he still spoke with the frailty of a whisper. "How do you come up with this stuff, Ev?"

    A smile spread across her face like a burning fuse.  "I did some research over the weekend, and according to adolescent statistics, we'll all basically become degenerates, crackheads, or dead."

    Marty had brought his guitar, of which he unearthed from the sand behind him. "Well, since I'm pretty sure I'm the one who's gonna die first, we might as well celebrate my life while I still can."

    He began to strum a tune no one had heard before. It was loud and fast and vivacious, and the group of friends began to add their own lyrics. Soon, it became a shouting match of popular songs from the radio, and they would often start singing different songs at once. To Ever, it was like falling asleep to the soundtrack of rain; oh, was it magnificent. In all actuality, none of them were exceptional singers, and Jay was convinced that Doogie was tone deaf, but Ever would chose their voices over the lifeless crap on the radio any day.

    As Marty's strumming began to slow and theirs voices faded into the star-drunk sky, Ever found herself deep in a sea of melancholy looking at the faces of the people she loved the most. Ever was eighteen, on the cusp of adulthood beside Jay and Marty. She and Jay had decided on different colleges because of his football scholarship, and Marty believed in living like the breeze, taken wherever the wind blew. She was heartsick knowing that she would not see either one of them as often, and that Iggy, Doogie, Todd and Milo would still be stuck in the perennially stagnant Seabrook High School.

    It was this night on Ellingston beach beneath the boardwalk where Ever found herself falling in love with these six people all over again. It was also then that she decided she would try her best not to think about the nature of existence or her premonitions as much, and to be as present as she could for as long as she had left with those around her. And for the two months before the fall semester, that was exactly what she did.

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