“Are you waiting for the ferry, too?”

The boy nods.

“It comes at 9:15, right?” she asks timidly.

“Yeah, I just double checked. Looks like we’re pretty early, then,” he replies while digging for nothing in his pockets.

“Yeah.”

They’re silent for a short while. It starts to feel like forever.

“This is pretty awkward. Sorry. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” he mutters while trying to avoid eye contact.

The girl hums in agreement.

“You look a little ill.”

She crosses her arms over her chest and looks away from him, out at the early morning fog on the bay. He’s still looking at her, his hands folded in his lap, his left leg bouncing up and down anxiously. It begins to shake the bench, and she glances at it.

“I remember that habit. You used to do that all the time. Am I making you nervous?”

“The fog is pretty thick today,” the boy says. Now he feels ill, too.

“Am I making you nervous?” she repeats with more conviction. She knows she has the power now. She faces him head-on, determined to get an answer.

“Uh, yeah, I guess so. You used to, too.”

The white bench with silver blots stops shaking as he slows his leg. A gust of wind blows the sand on the pier into her flip flops and she shakes it out. A seagull flies overhead and is soon consumed by the fog. The boy bends over and picks up a small shell from between the worn wooden planks.

“Why?” Her tone seems a bit monotone, as she is trying to occupy the awkward silence in the best way as possible.

The boy flips the purple and white snail shell in his hand, leaving her question unanswered, and watches some of the sand fall out. He shakes it off of his hand. He thinks about the creature that used to live where there is now only sand. He thinks about putting the shell up to his ear, to see if it has the same effect as a conch, but decides it might make him look silly. And besides, he doesn’t want sand in his ear.

“That time we went to the beach at one in the morning?”

He turns to face her. She looks down at her hands in her lap and takes a deep breath.

“How I fell asleep and you carried me home…”

She drifts off.

“Yeah, I remember,” he says encouragingly.

“I never thanked you for that.”

The boy shrugs, trying to look nonchalant. He tries to figure out which summer, out of the many they spent together, that had happened in.

The ferry emerges through the fog.