Alex wore her half of our heart necklace long after high school, but when they found her across the bay, she wasn’t wearing jewelry. Just her long hair around her neck like a noose of wet string. 

She finally moved to New York from Tampa two years after I had. She lived in Queens and I lived in Brooklyn, but we made Beach Day an official weekly holiday, no matter the weather, to remind us of home, and I got her a job at the bar where I worked.

She found me in the walk-in refrigerator during the shifts we shared. I’d mix cheap vodka with cranberry juice and slices of lemon, our seventeen-dollar happy-hour cocktail, and she’d talk about her new friends, her roommates, her artsy kind of sadness. The refrigerator’s vacuum seal suctioned us in behind her, as if to preserve us. 

*

We’d walk down the beach warp-powered by the Adderall she brought. I thought of our purse of shells and treasures, our iPhones and keys left behind, thinly veiled by faded bath towels. But she’d say, Let’s never go back, smiling. 

Days would slip by without a whisper from Alex. “Sometimes friends drift apart,” Mom said when I called her instead. Then Alex would be back again, our teeth hard-set against the cold of the walk-in. Her voice sounding more and more like the silent void of her voicemail.

Want an adderall, a xanax, anything else? The sand-stained coin purse started to fill with chalky blue-and-white pills – nothing like sea glass. 

*

Still on for Beach Day?

Is it going to rain?

Meet at DD, right?

Im Here

?

I waited outside of Dunkin Donuts flipping between my doppler app and messages and back again. A green mass crept across the screen pixel by pixel.

When the smell of rain had washed over the roasted nuts cart and the car exhaust, Alex appeared with her hands shoved into the pockets of her leather jacket. I was getting worried. She wasn’t wearing her necklace. Where’s your bag?

After the intersection, she threw a laugh over her shoulder then ran across the boardwalk and down to the beach. I chased after her, rain needling my skin.

She dropped her clothes in the sand. The metallic reflection of the waves striped her skin, her hair melted out across the water’s surface as she waded deeper. 

Alone on the beach, time expanded as she pushed out and out. 

I remembered bike races to the beach back home and how you could eat the heavy evening heat right out of the air. 

I remembered her theory about being adopted, even with her mother’s round, clamshell eyes, those straight eyelashes, the scattered sand freckles across her nose. 

I remembered the first day she showed up to work drunk, when she breezed past the walk-in window.

The storm faded as fast as it arrived, and then so did she. I could see her. I could see her, until I couldn’t. Like a star stared at too long in the night sky, she flickered out as the lifeguard’s whistle blared. 

* * *

Sammi LaBue is a Brooklyn-based writer and educator. She founded Fledgling Writing Workshops (Best Workshop in NYC, Timeout 2019) and is the author of Words in Progress (DK 2020), a creative writer’s guided journal. Her writing can be found in Literary Hub, Glamour, The Offing, Mutha Magazine, Hobart, and Sonora Review, among others. She received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, is The Penn Review’s 2024 Poetry Prize winner, and has recently finished a dual memoir written in collaboration with her mom.