I Left Long Before You Looked novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Turtle
Brody calls Wyatt Turtle at the marina cookout and Sadie laughs; she skips their pier night, and he blocks her and boards the train. His mother calls: Sadie is in the lake, screaming his name.
At the marina cookout, forty people called me Turtle, and the girl I loved filmed it.
Brody Landry, the new guy on the bluff, had just handed me a cold soda I hadn't asked for.
"Race you to the end of the dock?" he said. "Loser buys the beer. I'm told I'll lose."
I had a paper plate of corn in one hand, and I looked at the dock.
It was sixty yards of wet boards, and my left leg had never done sixty yards fast in its life.
"I'll pass," I said.
"Fair enough," Brody said, and he smiled like he meant it. "Next time, then."
"Call the harbor patrol if Turtle's not back by Labor Day!" a man yelled from the grill.
Everybody laughed.
My next-door neighbor was standing beside me with her phone up, filming.
I waited for her to say something.
She was my best friend since we were four, and she had promised me on a hundred nights that she would always wait for me.
She was laughing too, with her whole face.
"Come on, Wyatt, say Turtle for the camera," she said. "It's funny, you have to admit it's a little funny."
I put the plate down.
She took my wrist, the way she always did, two fingers on the inside, and counted under her breath.
She had done that since we were eleven, whenever I climbed stairs too fast.
"You're fine," she said. "Don't be mad. He's just new, he doesn't know you yet."
"I'm not mad."
"Good." She kissed my cheek and let go. "Tonight, nine o'clock, the pier. I wouldn't miss it."
Her name was Sadie, and every June 9th for eleven years she had sat with me on the end of the pier until midnight.
It was the anniversary of the day I was pulled out of the lake.
I had been the boy who went into the water for her.
The town called me slow ever since, because that boy came out of the lake with a limp.
Brody ran the dock alone for the crowd, and everyone cheered him.
Sadie cheered loudest.
At nine I was on the pier with the thermos and two cups.
It was a clear night.
The boards were still wet from the afternoon, and I sat at the edge where the light from the marina stopped.
Sadie always took the dry bench behind me.
She hadn't put a foot in the lake since we were eleven, and she said it was because the water was too cold.
At nine thirty I poured her cup so the coffee would cool.
At ten I poured it out and filled it again.
She had never once been late for this.
At ten forty my phone buzzed.
Sadie: Wyatt I'm SO sorry!! Brody's taking everyone out on the boat, his dad's friends are on it and Mom wants me to be nice. Tomorrow? I'd never leave you behind, you know that. xx
I read it twice.
Then she posted a video.
I watched it standing at the end of the pier with my cold coffee.
It was the cookout. It was me, holding a paper plate, with a smile I didn't remember making.
The caption said: Our little turtle!! Love him!!
It already had two hundred likes, and the first comment was from a girl in my high school class.
"Can he even swim anymore lol"
The next comment said: "Sadie you're an angel for putting up with that."
I thought about all the Junes.
I thought about every time a boy at school had said slow, and she had laughed so it would stop being a fight.
Every time she had said, "It's just a joke, Wyatt."
I counted them standing there, and I lost the number.
There was an envelope in my duffel bag at home, the one with the acceptance letter in it, from a university in Seattle.
It was two thousand miles from the lake.
I had applied in secret in January.
I had been accepted in April, and I had told nobody, because I was waiting for her to look at me once and ask what was wrong.
She had not looked.
So I opened her contact on my phone.
I stood there a long moment with my thumb over the word BLOCK.
Then I pressed it.
Then I poured her coffee into the lake, and the cups into the thermos, and walked home on my slow leg.
My mother drove me to the depot at five.
She said only, "Call me when you land."
The six o'clock train to Chicago had one duffel of mine on the rack, and the long train west was waiting there.
We were forty minutes out when my phone rang.
It was my mother.
"Wyatt." She was running. I could hear her boots on the gravel. "Sadie came to the house at six. I told her you're on a train."
"Good."
"She said you'd never leave without telling her, so you must be in the lake. Wyatt, she's on the pier. She's in the water up to her chest, in her pajamas, and she's screaming your name."
The train picked up speed along the shore.
Out my window the lake was flat and gray and perfectly calm.
I didn't pull the cord.
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