Page 12 of What August Heard
“Can I join?” I asked.
“The east wing needs you,” Poppy confirmed, and handed me a plastic shovel.
I started on the base. We worked for a while without saying much, the three of us, just the sound of the ocean and Poppy occasionally issuing corrections. Callie came back from the water and sat cross-legged on August’s other side and started on the moat.
Then I saw August’s wrist.
She was smoothing out a wall with the back of her hand and I saw it. A bruise, yellowish-green at the edges, the kind that was a few days old. It ran from the base of her thumb halfway up toward her wrist.
“What happened there?” I said.
She looked at her wrist. “Oh.” She turned it over, looked at it like she’d forgotten it was there. “Market accident. One of the big bucket stands tipped and I grabbed it wrong.”
“Did you have it looked at?”
“It’s a bruise, Fletcher.”
“Did you have it looked at?”
“It stopped hurting two days ago, so no.” She went back to smoothing the wall. “It’s fine.”
It was not fine. Or rather, the bruise was probably fine, but I had a very specific feeling in my chest that was not fine at all, which was the feeling of wanting to take her wrist in both my hands and look at it myself, and press my thumb very gently along the edge of it to check if anything hurt, and then probably not let go.
I went back to the east wing.
Margaux appeared ten minutes later.
She came down from the chairs carrying a small garden kneeling mat — the foam kind, rectangular, the color of a lime. She set it on the sand, and then lowered herself onto it, both knees together, careful and exact.
Poppy watched the kneeling mat.
Callie watched the kneeling mat.
Neither of them said anything. They looked at each other.
“I don’t want to ruin my dress,” Margaux said, to no one and everyone. “It’s Zimmermann. It was not cheap.”
Nobody responded.
She looked at August. Her eyes went to August’s shorts, her top, her sandy elbows. She smiled.
“You’re so lucky,” she said to August. “You don’t have to worry about any of that. Thrifted things are so freeing, I imagine. Nothing to ruin.”
She said it like it was a compliment.
August looked at Margaux. Then she looked down at her own outfit. Then she looked back at the sandcastle.
“Completely freeing,” August said. “I once spilled an entire bucket of tulip water on myself at six in the morning and I genuinely did not care. It was great.” She patted the side of the sandcastle. “Poppy, the east wing is looking really solid.”
I looked at Margaux.
“She doesn’t have to make any effort,” I said.
Margaux looked at me.
“August.” I kept my eyes on the castle. “She doesn’t have to try. She looks beautiful in anything she wears.”
Oh no.
