Chapter 5: Dinner
The dusk had stained the dining room a deep, liquid gold. Salt coated the windows, blurring the view of the dunes into a soft, blue-grey abstraction. Jess traced a finger through the fine grit on the mahogany table, following the whorls in the wood. The remains of a chaotic, thrown-together pasta dinner littered the surface: an empty garlic bread basket, a bottle of olive oil with a sprig of rosemary stuck in it, three plates smeared with remnants of red sauce.
Lily was talking, her hands conducting an invisible orchestra as she recounted a story from their senior skip day. “—and then Mr. Hendricks actually saw us, but he just waved and kept walking! I swear, he was happier we were out than we were.”
Jess smiled, a reflex. She’d been there. She remembered the sun that day, the giddy fear, the taste of cheap lemonade. But the memory felt thin, borrowed. Her awareness was siphoned away, pulled to the other end of the table like iron to a magnet.
Soren sat there, a silhouette against the sliding glass door, the dying light carving her into sharp relief. She’d been quiet throughout the meal, methodically twirling spaghetti, her movements precise and economical. She wasn’t listening to Lily’s story. Her attention was a physical weight, and it rested on Jess.
“You know,” Soren said, her voice cutting through Lily’s laughter. It was calm, conversational, but it landed in the room like a stone. She wasn’t looking at Jess. She was addressing her sister, her gaze flicking to Lily with a semblance of interest. “It’s fascinating what passes for a core memory at that age. A teacher not scolding you. A day of stolen mediocrity.” She took a sip of water. “You cling to these little triumphs because you haven’t built anything real yet. No architecture to your life. Just… sandcastles.”
The words weren’t vicious, but they were cold, analytical. A dissection. They were aimed at Lily’s anecdote, at her nostalgia. But the trajectory passed straight through Jess. You haven’t built anything real yet. Jess felt her own skip day memory, that fragile bubble of happiness, pop silently inside her. She looked down at her hands.
Lily snorted, unbothered. “Oh, excuse us for not drafting blueprints for our existential dread at eighteen, Soren. Some of us like sandcastles. They’re fun.”
“They wash away,” Soren replied, her tone flat. Finally, she moved her head. Just slightly. Her eyes, those pale, assessing instruments, locked onto Jess. It wasn’t a glance. It was an occupation. She studied Jess’s face, the downward tilt of her head, the way her fork was held loosely in her hand. Her expression wasn’t mocking. It was intensely, furiously curious. A scientist observing a reaction that wasn’t proceeding according to hypothesis.
Jess felt a heat bloom up her neck. It was the pool look again, but indoors, under electric light and the scent of basil, it was infinitely more intimate. More violating. She wanted to shrink, to disappear into the chair. She wanted to meet the stare and demand what it meant. She did neither. She froze, a rabbit in a terrarium.
“Anyway,” Lily bulldozed on, reaching for the last piece of bread, “the festival is still on for Saturday. Sandcastles and all. Jess, you’re driving, right? Your car has the better stereo.”
Jess tried to speak. Her throat was tight. “Yeah,” she managed, a dry crackle. “I can drive.”
Soren’s gaze didn’t waver. Her head was cocked, as if Jess’s two words were a code she was struggling to decipher. A faint line appeared between her eyebrows. Her lips, usually a firm, neutral line, were parted just slightly. She wasn’t seeing the eighteen-year-old girl who’d been eating pasta at her family’s table for years. She was seeing something else. A problem. A variable. An unexpected smudge on a clean blueprint.
The stare went on too long. Five seconds. Ten. The hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen grated against the silence. The ocean’s roar seemed to swell, filling the room.
“Soren,” Lily said, her voice dipping into a rare note of irritation. “You’re doing the creepy staring thing again. Pass the salt.”
The spell broke. Soren blinked, a slow, deliberate motion. The intense curiosity shut off, replaced by a familiar, cool opacity. She didn’t look at Lily. She kept her eyes on Jess for one more heartbeat—a look that now seemed to hold a flicker of frustration, of something not found—before she mechanically reached for the salt shaker and slid it down the table toward her sister.
“I wasn’t staring,” Soren said, her voice devoid of inflection. “I was thinking.”
“Well, think quieter,” Lily mumbled, sprinkling salt on her plate for no apparent reason.
Jess pushed her chair back, the legs scraping against the floorboards with a sound that made her teeth ache. “I’ll… start the dishes.”
She didn’t wait for a response. She gathered her plate and glass, stacking Lily’s on top with clumsy hands, and carried the clattering tower toward the kitchen doorway. Her skin prickled all the way between her shoulder blades. She could feel it, the exact spot where Soren’s stare had burned. A target.
In the bright, clinical fluorescence of the kitchen, she set the dishes in the sink with a thud. She gripped the cool edge of the countertop, head bowed, and let out a breath she felt she’d been holding since the pool that afternoon. Her reflection in the dark window above the sink was a pale, wide-eyed ghost.
From the dining room, she heard the low murmur of sisters talking. Then the distinct sound of a single chair pushing back. Footsteps. Not Lily’s bouncing tread, but the measured, quiet steps of someone who moved with purpose.
They stopped just outside the kitchen doorway, in the shadow of the hall.
Jess didn’t turn. She stared at the ghost in the window, and the ghost stared back, terrified. She watched as a figure slowly resolved in the reflection behind her, leaning a shoulder against the doorframe, a tall, dark shape filling the space.
No words came. No explanation. Just a presence, observing her disarray from the shadows. Waiting.
Then, a soft, metallic click. The sound of a coin—a quarter, perhaps—being spun on a hard surface. Once. Twice. A familiar, absent-minded habit Soren had when she was turning something over in her mind. Calculating.
The spinning stopped. The silence gathered, heavier than before.
The figure in the doorway didn’t move. Then, without a word, it melted back into the shadows of the hall. The absence of sound was somehow louder than the footsteps had been. Jess released the counter, her fingers stiff. She ran the faucet, the water’s roar drowning out everything, even the pounding of her own heart.
Later, the beach was a vast, dark mercy. The sun had vanished, leaving a bruise-colored sky streaked with fading orange. Cool air lifted the hair from Jess’s neck. She and Lily walked in silence, the hard-packed sand cold and firm under their feet, until they reached the water’s glittering edge.
They stood, letting the icy foam rush over their ankles and retreat, sucking the sand from beneath their heels. The rhythmic pull was a primal comfort.
“Sorry about Soren,” Lily said, her voice softer than the waves. She tossed a shell fragment into the gloom. “At dinner. The sandcastle thing. She gets like this after being away. She thinks she’s philosophizing, but it just comes out… pointy.”
Jess watched the dark water. “Did I do something?”
“What? No. Of course not.”
“Then does she… not like me?” The question felt childish hanging in the salt air. She immediately wished she could claw it back.
Lily turned her head, her profile a pale curve in the dusk. “What makes you ask that?”
The intensity of the look in the dining room, the poolside inventory, the suffocating presence in the kitchen doorway—they grouped together in Jess’s throat, forming a truth she couldn’t articulate. It was too strange, too specific. Saying it aloud would cement its reality.
“Nothing,” Jess muttered, shaking her head. “Never mind. It’s probably me. I’m just… reading into things. Or she’s right. We’re just kids building sandcastles. And she’s moved on to whatever comes after.”
Lily bumped her shoulder against Jess’s. “She’s just older and being weird. We haven’t grown apart. You’re stuck with me.” Her tone was light, dismissive. It should have been comforting.
But the cold had climbed Jess’s shins, settling deep. They turned from the water and started the trudge back up toward the house, a silent silhouette against the dune grass. The path from the beach was a narrow gully of sand and crushed shells, flanked by scrubby pines that whispered in the rising wind.
Halfway up, a figure detached from the deeper shadows near the deck stairs. Soren. She stood on the path, her back to them, facing the sea she couldn’t see. The orange tip of a cigarette glowed in her cupped hand. She raised her other hand, a small flame flaring from a sleek silver lighter.
They were ten feet away when Lily, without slowing her easy, rolling gait, reached out. It wasn’t a dramatic swing. It was a casual, almost dismissive flick of the wrist, like shooing a fly. Her fingers connected with the filter end of the cigarette. It spun from Soren’s grip, a tiny orange comet extinguished in the dark sand.
Lily didn’t break stride. She didn’t look at her sister. She walked right past her, up the path, as if she’d merely cleared a cobweb.
Jess followed, eyes locked straight ahead, her blood a static buzz in her ears. She passed within a foot of Soren. In her peripheral vision, she saw the frozen tableau. Soren, utterly still. Her empty hand still raised near her lips, the lighter’s flame still burning a small, foolish sun in the other. Her whole body was a question mark carved from shock.
The lighter’s flame went out. A soft click. Jess felt the weight of a gaze, hot and seismic, drill into her back as she climbed the steps behind Lily. Neither of them spoke. The screen door sighed open, then slapped shut.
On the path below, Soren remained motionless. She slowly lowered her hands to her sides, her fingers curling into tight, empty fists. She stared at the spot where her sister had been, then down at the lost cigarette in the sand. Her sharp features were unreadable in the dark, but her posture was that of a general who had just, for the first time, felt the ground shift treacherously underfoot.