When he saw her coming he balked and almost turned around. But too late. There she was with her tidy hat and jacket, sensible shoes, white ankles exposed below faded purple leggings that inched up as she moved. Her hair…was flyaway in the salty breeze, longer, a surprising ivory hue. She always looked tattered to him; he likely looked flawless to her, as ever. But the truth was their looks were secondary, always were.

He adjusted his face. Better a bit surprised than too nonchalant. She knew he tried to hide but if he didn’t look at her long…it was locked eyes he’d regretted after they’d first met. Her faint grey irises and bottomless pupils got to him. If she wasn’t psychic she was plain spooky, he’d thought then. But she was an artist, for one thing. And also knew how to reach in and find him.

Two summers ago they’d stumbled into each other at Kyra’s Killer Coffee on Beach Road. Literally–he pulled out his chair and she caught her bare toes on a leg, fell onto the table top, clipped his expresso and forearm. He caught his coffee in time to save it. Hers flew up, landed splat on the weathered pine floor, made a rivulet. Then, with apologies, she sat down. He did the same. But really–as if he’d invited her when his buddy was seated across from her.

“You another spoiled boy or a new sort of… summerling?” she’d asked.

He’d looked at his friend, who gave him a bad look. “Summerling?” he’d repeated, and she just threw her head back–with its bad teal blue hair–and laughed.

“That’s one bold, very strange girl,” they’d agreed as they left.

But his head tingling. “Huh,” he said. Her eyes, rapid-fire dry wit, that nerve.

So they got together; he felt he’d hit the jackpot, despite her odd blue-gone-muddy-hair, her stinging sarcasm at the ready, her pronounced lisp when excited. Altogether, the wrong girl. But that underplay of wrongness, the friction and foreignness: too good. For the summer, anyway. She lived at the beach with her wheelchair-bound mother. He visited a couple months at his grandparents’ weekend house.

When he left at end of his summer stay, she was calmer than expected. But in his case, he’d been ambushed by her intelligence, super-x-ray mind vision, velvety lips, clear eyes. Nobody had ever had the right to get to him; he didn’t allow it. He’d let his guard way down. But away from her, he drifted.

The next summer he visited cousins in Germany. When in winter he went to the beach it was to space out at a window, watch the stormy foaming surf, sit by the fire, sleep. He missed her sharp laugh, a hand holding his loosely, how they’d walked in sync since she was also tall. But he never sought her out. He’d been seeing a girl who entering university next year, pre-med, just as was he.

This summer was different. His parents had split up; he’d totaled his car in spring. He planned to enter university despite the head injury, a slow healing femur. He felt this was a last time to loaf, play chess and rummy with his grandparents, explore tidepools, be pampered some.

So when he saw her, he was both anxious and relieved. At last, they met again.

She came around the bend, arms swinging, chin tilted up, eyes forward. The gap between them closed fast, too late to turn back. He felt suddenly unsure, kept eyes to the path as they moved forward, then when they were two feet apart he slowed.

But she smacked his arm with a soft fist, thrust an envelope at him, and kept right on. He stared after her. She was not turning back. He bent to retrieve and open the envelope. Pulled out the stiff watercolor paper card.

It was a little painting she had made, a radiant miniature seascape with two tiny people. A man–was that him? yes–was moving out to sea, afloat on whitecaps, and she–yes, it was her– was standing on the bluff, waving, waving with a poppy colored handkerchief, all that pale hair free like a kite in bright wind, and the sky was so, so blue it hurt to look at it. But he kept looking until he was able to smile.