MY FAMILY USED TO RENT a cottage at Sauble Beach every summer. It was a shack really, with uneven floors, drafty windows, and plumbing that sputtered, farted, and screeched every time the water was turned on. But to me it was paradise. I’d wake up every day to the smell of water and sand, with gritty beach particles still caked to my skin and wedged between my toes. Breakfast was always something easy and sugary, and then I was outside, running to the shore, my flip-flops clacking loudly, barely holding together, as I raced down Chesley Lane.

All the kids in the neighbourhood would meet at a nearby dune, where there was driftwood to sit on and brambles to shield us from the road. On the days when the temperatures soared, we stuck close to the water, sculpted sand figures, and dipped and waded as needed for relief. Other days we biked up to the falls and wandered along the trails and skipped stones in the fast-moving current. We’d find washed-up fish carcasses in various states of decay along the river and make up elaborate stories of how they met their demise.

Sometimes we’d hang out on the main street, burning through our allowances in the arcade. We’d gorge on vanilla soft serve and fries, and then, once we were out of money, we’d loiter in the shops, trying on oversized sunglasses and ugly plastic toy jewellery and laughing about it until they kicked us out. Most nights ended with a bonfire and we’d fall asleep with the scent of the smoke still on us.

What I remember most about these summers is their continuity, how the days and years seemed to blend together in one long, unchanging stream. But then eventually things did start to change. When I was twelve, Steven Prine, who once burned himself with a roman candle, grinned at the hot red pain, and then continued on with his fireworks show, who could run the fastest and swim the longest, suddenly disappeared. The rumour was that his family had moved to Vancouver. Nobody knew for sure, but we never saw him again.

Later that same summer, Robyn Newham, queen of Kinloss Lane, who always kept her arms covered in bracelets and bangles, who tried, unsuccessfully, to pierce her ears with a dull sewing pin, announced that she and her family would be spending the following summer in Spain. When she left that year, I never thought to say goodbye because in my mind we were still in a cycle that had no end, but she never returned either.

There were a few new families who moved into their old cottages, but they would never mesh the same way. That marked the beginning of a shift in my summers.

The summer I turned thirteen, my friend Marina’s cousin came to stay with her and her family. His name was Nico. It was never clear whether he was actually her blood relative – there was very little physical resemblance – or just the son of close family friends. It was also insinuated, in the hushed conversations that the adults had at bonfires, that there was some trouble associated with his presence, that he’d joined them there to either avoid some calamity happening at home or because he’d caused one.

He was fifteen, only two years older than the rest of us, but in that small, otherwise insignificant gap was an enormous gulf, filled with worldly indifference, smoked cigarettes, body hair, and broken boundaries. I first saw him sitting on Marina’s porch, dressed in loose-fitting black sweats. His face, small but stern, already sunburnt and peeling, with a hint of stubble, peered out from a tightly pulled hood. There was a chill in the evening air that felt premature, not quite right and threatening of an early autumn, and he had his arms wrapped around himself.

I’d come by to go with Marina for a bike ride before it got too dark.

“Who’s that?” I asked her when she came outside.

“That’s my cousin Nico,” she said. “He’s staying with us for a while.”

“Does he want to come too?”

She looked over at him. He made no attempt to notice us. He was watching the sky and the long fiery lines forming between the clouds. “Does it look like he wants to come?”

“I guess not,” I responded. I looked back as we biked out of the yard and thought I saw a slight pivot of his head in our direction.

In the weeks that followed Nico became a provocative enigma who all the kids observed with increasing fascination. Through chance encounters along the main street, reported sightings by the Dairy Queen, fleeting glimpses between the Valu-Mart aisles, and fervent discussions about what he was buying, he became a bit of a celebrity. We were too young to define it then. Maybe it was charisma, or his unknowable-ness, or maybe it was just that, in the static of our little summer lives, he represented the possibility of change, of intrusions, and a hint of something else, somewhere else. Whatever it was that made him so appealing, we all agreed he had it – except for Marina, who’d roll her eyes when pressed for details about him.

“You guys are so weird,” she’d responded in her usual stern, unchildlike tone. “He’s just a guy. Trust me. There’s nothing that special about him.” But we weren’t deterred.

I can only recall two or three encounters over the course of that summer. Each time I felt like I’d almost permeated his orbit, caught his attention somehow, in reality he was still a stranger who didn’t know I existed. I left that summer assuming that I would not see Nico again, and that, like many of our other fickle seasonal preoccupations, something new would take his place the following year.

When we returned the next summer, something immediately felt off. When Sauble came into view over the county road horizon everything looked exactly the same, but there was a strange haze over the town, like the ice had never thawed, like a severe winter had scarred the shore.

A wave of cold, rainy weather had delayed a lot of the usual arrivals and we were one of the first families to get there. I couldn’t remember the town ever being so quiet. The beach was empty and the water was cold and hostile, with violent waves that crept too far up along the shore. For the first time I wandered around by myself, visiting spots I knew well – the surf shop, the beach burger shack, the mini-golf course – and they were all there, perfectly preserved, in the same bright pastel colours. This time though, their unchanged quality felt eerie, like they’d been abandoned suddenly.

I stayed out until dusk searching for others, for signs of life, but didn’t find much of anything. I headed back to the cottage and, while cutting through Woodland Park, I spotted someone familiar standing in a group, hovering near a blazing fire pit, under the glow of nearby string lights. It was dark, but it was unmistakably Nico. A portable speaker was propped up on a picnic table, blasting a song I sort of knew. The melody, the off-kilter synth sound, the addictive chorus, the smooth, lulling voice of the lead, would end up being everywhere I went that summer.

Nico was dressed differently. He was no longer wearing the multiple layers and the dark, heavy hoodie that had previously defined his fashion. Instead, he had on a simple navy tank top and black shorts. This layerless new aspect, the form that had emerged, the possibility of nuance, that he was more than our one-dimensional idol, made him seem even more provocative. I saw him moving, his limbs darting, gyrating, shifting suddenly under the orange-hued light. It was some kind of dance, deliberately out of step with the beat. The others laughed. As he turned, the gleam of a lantern reflected against his necklace – a single lustrous white fang. Maybe he’d always been wearing it, tucked behind a thick, high, cotton collar, but it was new to me. With that small but notable incitement, the summer fascination began again.

“I saw your cousin the other night,” I told Marina when we met at the beach a few days later.

“Yeah.” Marina seemed more serious and older than me now. She’d cut her hair short, gotten glasses that gave her a more adult visage, and now seemed impatient with our casual drifting along the same old strips. “He’s back.”

“Don’t you like him?” I asked.

“He’s okay. He’s just, like, I don’t know, very American or something. I mean, he’s not actually. But he pretty much is because he lives there.”

“I didn’t know that.” That was the most information she’d ever divulged about Nico.

“Yeah, he lives on Long Island in New York.”

“Oh.” I thought carefully about what to ask while she seemed to be in the mood for giving up information. “Why is he up here with you guys then?”

“I don’t know. It’s quieter, safer, not as easy to get in trouble I guess. That’s what my mom says.” I could tell that her attention was already drifting. She was bored and irritated with this continued obsession, but this was the thing we were most curious about – Nico’s origins, and the reason for him being there. It wasn’t much, but this tease was enough to keep the curiosity going.

Summer started properly a short time later and was as hot and lush as any I could remember, but that initial haze, that eerie feeling that I would learn to name, that I would eventually call stagnation, remained thick in Sauble’s atmosphere. The days passed slowly in a sweltering, sticky atrophy, and our boredom, a common and tolerated ailment that had always passed quickly, now felt heavy, like a chunk of concrete tied to each and every scorching hour. The only thing that continued to feel fresh for us, that expedited time and gave us a reason to exist, was Nico.

Then on July 1st, at the fireworks show, it happened – he spoke to me. Everyone was gathered on the main beach to watch the display, but I’d wandered off further down the shore. I found a quiet spot and sat down in the sand, awed by the sudden flashes of red confetti bursting above the water. I caught him out of the corner of my eye, standing only a few feet away, staring up, with a flare in his eye, the sulphur hues reflected on his face and the ash of his cigarette glowing. He turned my way.

“Hey,” he said to me.

I struggled to think of something to say, something that would impress him. “Hey,” I responded.

“Marina’s friend, right?” He stepped closer to me.

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Where’s your little crew?” he asked. It might have been intended to be patronising, with the way he emphasised little as he tossed his cigarette into the sand and stomped it out, but I didn’t care.

I shrugged. “Don’t know. Back at the beach I guess.” A single, solitary golden streamer fizzled up into the sky, faded in the darkness, and then burst with a violent, thunderous clap. Nico turned his head towards the noise. “I kind of just wanted to be alone for a bit,” I said. In my head I thought maybe it would make me sound edgier, more independent. We all pretended to be older than we were, with sixteen being the most aspirational age, but I never felt younger than in that moment, and more conscious of all my littleness.

He nodded. The confident but subtle gesture, while I knew it was nothing more than a simple shift of his head, made me feel like I’d been accepted and had his permission to stay.

“This place is pretty boring, isn’t it?” he said as he shuffled a foot in the sand.

I shrugged. “It’s okay.” I hoped I sounded ambivalent.

“I don’t know. You stay out here too long in the middle of nowhere you start to forget that there’s anywhere else.” I knew what he meant, but in my naive fourteen-year-old mind I couldn’t grasp what anywhere else might look like.

“Yo Nico,” Someone yelled at him from beyond the treeline. I saw shadows moving in between the pines. “Let’s go.”

He kicked the sand again, hiding the last ashy embers of his cigarette. The show was still going. The pyrotechnic tension was building. The flares, bursts, and bangs became more intermittent, more subdued, as the finale approached. “See ya,” he said as he shuffled away across the sand. A large, bright brocade exploded and against the black expanse, for a moment, while I was distracted, it looked just like a textbook visualisation of the big bang, like a universe being born, and propelled by tremendous concussive force, expanding outward, enveloping the nothing that was there.

As Nico passed me, I noticed the necklace again, dangling down across his chest. The sharp white fang, a tiny, pointed dagger, shimmered in the night. I was awed by its potential significance.

I thought that this interaction was the beginning of something. I imagined us continually running into each other from then on, and that, now that there was a precedent, more conversations would happen. Each time the conversations would get easier, longer, more detailed, until the gap between us, the divisive space between our ages, would close and I would be able to call him a friend. I held on to that hope for the rest of the summer, even after it was clear that was not how it would play out.

“What’s the deal with Nico’s necklace? You know the fang thing he’s always wearing,” I asked Marina one day, as we lay on our beach towels watching shapes form in the cloud cover. It was late July. Our summer vacation would soon be coming to an end for another year and there was an accelerated laziness to our days. We couldn’t be bothered to do much of anything, other than lounging. Before we knew it August would also be gone. We would be back to our old regimens, confined to stuffy classrooms, under someone else’s rule, with our rich summer agency gone.

“I have no idea. Seems like the kind of cheap stupid junk jewellery all teenage boys wear.” Her towel had bunched up underneath her. She flipped on her side with a sigh and straightened out the towel. “Why are you guys so obsessed with him anyway?” she said as she flopped back down onto her back.

“I don’t know. He just seems . . . different, I guess. Different from everyone else, and that makes him really interesting.”

“Maybe you’re just bored,” she said as she pushed her sunglasses down off her forehead.

I wriggled my toes deeper into the sand and felt the dampened grit scraping against my skin. It was such a familiar sensation. These persistent little granules embedded themselves in our lives so thoroughly we’d come to take their presence as something sacrosanct. They became glued like freckles to our sun-kissed complexions. I’d even discover them months after leaving the beach, when, well into autumn, a tiny stream of sand would come trickling out of a pocket. The familiarity of the sensation was not the comfort it once was though. The sand and all its associations now felt like a weight, growing in mass, hooking my limbs, binding them in place.

Maybe Marina was right. Maybe I was bored.

My last summer at Sauble was the year I turned fifteen. Our little ramshackle castle was being sold off along with a bunch of the smaller adjoining cottages to make way for bigger and more luxurious dwellings. While I wasn’t as thrilled to return as I had been in previous years, I knew enough to appreciate what little time we had left.

It rained perpetually and turned out to be one of the wettest seasons on record. We spent a lot of time indoors. Confined to our soon-to-be-bulldozed refuge, I tried to create for myself a mental archive of all the nuances I thought I might forget, that might get lost in the rubble. I paid extra attention to the rough texture of the wood table we played board games on, to its splinters and grooves. I listened carefully to the noises of the cabin, where and how the floorboards dipped and creaked, and the way the windowpanes chattered in the breeze.

One evening I spotted a break in the daily storm and decided to run to the store to restock our snacks. The sky was full of ominous dark shades and heavy clouds. Thunder clapped in the distance. I knew this break would be brief. The main strip was eerily vacant and only a few people were in the grocery store, stocking up on supplies. They all smiled and nodded in passing, as though they were relieved and comforted to see another human in their vicinity. I raided the chip aisles, grabbed some candy and an obligatory loaf of bread, hurried to the checkout, and then ran back outside.

The rain had resumed but it was only sprinkling. I thought I still had a chance to get back to the cottage without getting drenched. I came up on the tip of the Main Street slope and could see the bright red arch of the sign that marked the beach. Beyond it, the water was a stark, black abyss. The docile and constant summer companion, the source of much of our entertainment, our relief from the heat, was seething. Just as I locked eyes with the waves, a loud crack of thunder ripped through the sky. Moments later the downpour began.

I ran for about a block until I was so soaked that I had to take shelter under the awning of the hardware store. The curbside puddles quickly turned into rivers. Against the heavy rain, the streetlights, the electric store signs, the garish, flickering fluorescents of the laundromat, had an extra neon glare. I noticed a lone pair of headlights moving swiftly over the horizon. I recognized the type of car, a Toyota Camry, just like the one my grandparents had had, of the same vintage, with the same light brown hue. It slowed as it came closer, ripping through the streams and scattering the puddles.

When the car pulled closer to the sidewalk and stopped right next to me, I began to think that I was about to get kidnapped. The window rolled down and out of the shadowy interior a familiar face emerged.

“Hey, what are you doing out in this mess?” Nico had aged in the year since I’d last seen him. There was more angularity to his face. His cheeks had thinned out and his jaw, underneath a layer of stubble, had a sharper, more defined cut. His hair was longer than I’d ever known it to be and fell in thick layered curls around his neck. Most transformative of all were the black-rimmed glasses he wore.

I lifted up the dripping bag of food. “Just grabbing some groceries.”

He nodded. “Hop in. I’ll give you a ride.”

It was a surreal moment, and in retrospect I think I may have stood there, mouth agape, for an awkward amount of time before I responded.

“Okay. Sure. Thanks.” I opened the passenger door and climbed inside. The seat squeaked under me as I slid across it. The leather was unsoftened, like new, even though the car was definitely not. I thought if I stayed still, kept all my air lodged up in my lungs, and breathed shallowly, the rain wouldn’t drip from me onto the upholstery. I pulled the seat belt across my torso with a slow, gentle tug, but still felt the moisture accumulating beneath me.

“Shit. You’re soaked.” I felt the pressure of his stare. This was the closest I’d ever been to him. I noticed how much of our distant idolization had missed or gotten wrong. “Maybe the groceries could have waited.” He was not aloof, nor an enigma. All his mysterious fibres, the rare, tough, and untouchable materials that we’d believed he was made of, turned out to be something softer, a flawed texture akin to my own.

“I thought I could get back before it started raining again.” My excuse sounded pitiful, like the unsophisticated and irritating whine of a child. He turned on his blinker and then pulled back onto the street. I was in awe that he was allowed to captain such a vehicle, and that he seemed to be able to control it with such precision and mastery. Driving still felt very far away for me. I hadn’t put much value in getting my licence until that moment.

Once we were in motion, with the rain pelting the roof and the engine whirring, the tiny interior, crowded with CDs and greasy fast-food litter, seemed enormous, like the largest space that had ever existed. I thought of returning to the cottage, of being crammed back into its plain, unchanging rooms, trapped there by the rain. When I was there, following the same routines and patterns, it felt fine. It felt safe. I would worry about it all ending, that someday soon this long, constant, and carefree phase would be over, but then something would change, the leash would lengthen or tear, and I’d get a taste of the other side. Sitting in that car next to Nico, breaching the mythological divide and entering into his exotic realm, I was never more aware of the boredom of our little summer escapades.

“I also just kind of wanted to get out of the house,” I said. The rain, pelting the steel and glass surface with increasing aggression, nearly drowned out my voice.

“Yeah, me too. It’s been a pretty shitty summer so far.” He reached up and adjusted the rear-view mirror. As he turned it, I noticed his necklace strung over the joint. “We could do a lap around town, put in some time, if you want.”

“Sure.” The glinting fang swayed as he turned right onto Bruce Road. I imagined that we were on the lam, runaways fleeing on a whim all the way to Tobermory where the land ended. We’d park by a dramatic chasm, teasing the dark lake below, and plot our next destination. “That’s cool,” I said, pointing to the necklace.

“You think so? It’s a tiger tooth.”

“Yeah, it’s nice.” Nico accelerated a bit as we cruised along the outskirts. The lights of the passing cottages poked out of the darkness. “I mean maybe not so nice for the tiger.” The patter of the rain was amplified in the silence. I felt the need to create some kind of noise, even if it was the sound of my own nattering.

Nico shrugged. “I’m sure he’s not too bothered about it. He probably had a good long life and just died of old age.” He turned to me. The glow of the passing streetlamps shimmied across his serious face.

I was worried I’d offended him, that he thought I was accusing him of killing a wild animal and plucking out a raw tooth from its still bloody maw. But then his stare cracked and he smiled. Up close, the details of his expression, the slight flaws in his teeth, the rose pigment of his lips, were much more beguiling than the fantasy. “I’m just joking,” he said. “It’s not actually real. I think it’s probably some kind of plastic.”

“Where did you get it from?”

“Me and my friends all bought one at this place in Brooklyn. Between us we got like a full set of teeth.” He smiled again and it wiped away the thoughts of my sopping clothes and face.

“Cool. So it reminds you of your friends?”

“Sort of I guess. We’re a bit scattered all over now. I think of them, I think of all the places where they are, and, I don’t know, it reminds me that the world’s a big place. It makes me feel less trapped.”

The fang might not have been the magical amulet I’d thought it was, but I stared at it, focused on its shape and surface, and tried to sense the tethers and conduits it provided to him. “Is that how you feel here? Trapped?”

“Don’t you?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. I used to like that nothing changed here, maybe I still do, but now . . . yeah, I guess it does feel a bit like being trapped.”

“Even if everything around us stays the same we’re still going to change. We always have to be evolving, you know. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

We entered the country and the last signs of the town faded. The surrounding darkness grew thicker, more impenetrable. I knew somewhere to our south, beyond the ridge of trees, the bay was still there, lashing the shore, flooding the beach, but I wanted us to turn away from it, to put it at our back. He turned north onto a side road and I recognized the route he was taking. The forest grew patchy and eventually the landscape opened up. The boreal line became intertwined with long, sloped fields and dilapidated barns.

“Are you okay with a bit more speed?” he asked as we hit a straightaway. His foot was already leaning into the gas. The car lurched forward, hurling through the storm, unbothered by the constant pelting.

“Sure,” I said, noticing again – with his arms held at such precise angles, his steady hands gripping and moving the wheel like it was second nature – what control he seemed to have over the complex and powerful machine.

He sped up some more. The murmur of the engine muffled the storm. The size of the interior grew, our expansive capsule pushing outwards, cutting the darkness, and creating space for us. Nico didn’t say anything, but his expression loosened, became lighter than I’d ever seen it, as if his standard mug, the enigmatic one that we’d peeped at from behind store shelves, was just a mask. His true face, unburdened and free, emerged as we split and hewed the barren country world. The tiger tooth rattled, trembling more as we sped, like a makeshift speedometer, warning of our velocity and transgressions.

When we finally curved back towards the shore, when we were forced to slow down, and could see pockets of light re-emerging on the horizon, something stiffened in my stomach, in my limbs. I wanted the drive to go on, to keep in motion perpetually, always uncovering new terrain. I was returning to the Sauble cage, to its reinforced steel ribs that, for a time, had made me feel safe. I knew then that as I grew and aged it would not be enough for me.

Nico knew where my cottage was – a detail that thrilled me at the time, but in retrospect, considering how tiny and insular the strip of homes was, was not at all a surprise. He pulled up along the gravel driveway, the wheels crunching on the surface as they crawled through.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said, as I opened the door. The rain had stopped again and the resulting air felt cooler, relieved of its hot atmospheric tension.

“No problem.”

If I knew that would be the last time I’d see him, I would have tried to prolong the conversation somehow, but just like after the first encounter on the beach, I was convinced that I was on the other side now, planted in his space, fixed in his periphery, as a friend, or at least not a stranger anymore. I stepped out of the car thinking our future would happen with ease.

“Hey,” he said as I was about to close the door. He reached up and pulled the necklace off the mirror and placed it in my hand. “Take it. Maybe it will make you feel less trapped too. Or you can find your own meaning for it.”

I held it in my palm and rubbed my thumb along the tiny veins of the faux enamel. The surface felt heated and a bit warped. I closed my hand tightly. “Thanks,” I said as I closed the door. I watched him drive off and stayed locked to the same spot long after the car disappeared. My family was inside. I could see them in the windows, moving through the rooms. The crickets were shrieking their steady, ubiquitous call. I’d never much been bothered by the darkness, by how thorough it could be in the rural nights. I felt it then after Nico drove away, the crushing scope of it.

For the rest of the summer, I tried to resuscitate the light and easy climate of the past. In a way, wandering the town streets, the strip of shore I knew so intimately, it was easy to return to that bubbled history. Much of it still had not changed. The rhythms and culture remained the same. It was still a beach town, a seasonal destination, a soft escape, and always would be, but the people shifted. They aged out or moved on, but there was always a new crop taking their place. One day I passed one of our regular beach spots and saw a group of kids gathered under the edge of a large dune, in an unpopular alcove, patchy with weeds and rocks. It had been at least a couple of summers since we’d hung out there together regularly, but I still felt displaced. I’d become an observer of my own past. That was my first full taste of nostalgia and it had a bittersweet tang.

I wanted the end to be more eventful, but the summer petered out without any serious commemoration. I asked Marina where Nico had gone – he hadn’t been spotted since he’d driven me home.

“He’s around,” she responded nonchalantly. “He’s got a car now so he can go wherever he wants, whenever he wants.”

“Does he ever take you anywhere?” I asked.

“Sometimes.” She sipped some of the canned cold brew she’d grown fond of. It was rare to see her without some sort of coffee in her hand. “Quite a bit actually.” She didn’t elaborate and I didn’t say anything about our excursion. I didn’t mention it to anyone, nor did I show off the necklace that he’d gifted me. Maybe it would have still given me some clout among our diminished group, but I preferred it to be a secret, something for me alone. It was too precious to wear, so once I got home I tucked it away in a drawer for safekeeping, and it stayed there until I moved away to university. I never did end up wearing it, but in my many moves, between dorms and apartments, and then as I settled into a house of my own, I’ve always made sure that it had a secure place.

Many years later, on a rainy summer night, I’d made another foolish dash to a convenience store near my office. I was working late and had forgotten to eat dinner. As I dug around in the back of the fridge for the coldest bottle of diet coke, I caught a glimpse of a familiar face rummaging through the selection of energy drinks. The face was, like my own, substantially older, beaten by worry, fringed with early mid-life decay, but I still knew it was Marina.

“Hey. Marina?” I called out from the end of the aisle.

She looked up, startled and slightly confused, but then her eyes widened. “Oh my god.” The fridge door slipped from her hand. “I don’t believe it.”

“Wow, it’s been forever,” I said as I moved down the aisle towards her. Our mutual recognition and shared bit of history didn’t change the feeling that I was approaching a stranger.

“Seems like a lifetime.” It had been a lifetime, and I didn’t know what to say to start to bridge that gap. “Do you live around here?” she asked.

“No, no I just work up the street.”

“Right. Something to do with finance?”

“Financial analyst. How’s the law game?” Our professions were a cursory detail we both were able to scrape from our rarely updated social media profiles.

“Okay.” She held up the oversized energy drink that she’d grabbed. “Kind of exhausting actually. But there’s some good days too.”

We chatted for a bit about the basics of our lives, listing off the superficial and un-profound details about our careers, families, where we’d been, and how we’d gotten along with things. We paid for our goods and left the store together. The rain wasn’t letting up. We stood under the awning while working up the nerve to head out into the storm.

“Do you ever go up to Sauble anymore?” Marina asked.

“No, I haven’t been up there for years. You?”

“I brought my kids there once. They hated it. I kept trying to sell them on it. They could play outside without having to worry about traffic and enjoy some peace and quiet for once, but they were bored out of their minds.”

I smiled. “I guess things are different for kids today.”

“I guess so.”

We both paused for a beat. A gross, bitter flavour washed across my palette and I remembered how awful wistfulness tasted.

I worked up the courage to ask about Nico. “Hey, whatever happened to your cousin Nico?”

“Right. You guys were obsessed with him, weren’t you?” The store’s neon signage, the stark cast of its fluorescents, illuminated Marina’s face. Some piece of her guard, the facade kept up around strangers, chipped away. For a moment she allowed a sadness to show.

“He died actually, a few years ago. Cancer.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say. I thought of young Nico, the only Nico I knew, our evocative and mysterious infatuation, who at a distance had seemed immortal.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

She nodded and forced a smile. “Thanks. He was a really nice guy.”

“Yeah, it seemed like it.”

“We miss him.” I could see the gulf between us grow again. She had a separate life, with its own tales and tragedies, her own history, and I had no right to mourn someone I barely knew.

“Well, I guess I should try and make a run for it,” she said, as she pulled her jacket hood over her head. “It was good to see you.”

“You too Marina. Take care.” We both pivoted at the same time, turning in opposite directions. We walked away from each other, returning to our respective orbits, and fading into the infinite anonymity of the city and the comfort of its bright lights.

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