Treasure Beach: Chapter Six, Part Two

Summer isn't "over" for us, thank goodness, but it's nearly over for Olivia and the women of Happiness Key, whose lives will be forever changed in Sunset Bridge , available now at your favorite bookstore.  Meantime, Treasure Beach (the free prequel to Sunset Bridge) ends this month.  If you haven't been reading along, visit this page for enlightenment and instructions.  It's not too late to catch up.  And don't worry, you don't have to finish Treasure Beach to enjoy Sunset Bridge .  The stories aren't directly related, even though the characters are the same.

Finally, please don't forget to visit quilter Pat Sloan's website to sew along on the charming Happiness Key quilt that goes along with the series. 

Treasure Beach: Chapter Six, Part Two

Olivia stared at the other girl, who hadn't yet noticed her. She couldn't believe it. She wondered if she walked over to Jessie now and took the pen to examine it, if she would find that it was a purple felt-tip marker with a fine point.

Jessie looked up and discovered Olivia standing there. She nodded, but she didn't smile. "Aren't your friends that way?" She inclined her head in the direction from which Olivia had just come.

"Some of them."

Jessie turned away and went back to whatever she had been doing. Olivia walked over to her, then she put her bag down and got out her mat and spread it beside Jessie's towel.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

Jessie looked just a trace annoyed. "Writing a friend in Mexico City."

From here Olivia could see that Jessie's pen, while not purple, was a fine point felt tip, like the kind she'd seen in packages of multicolored markers at the drugstore. This one was a bright green, and Jessie was writing on yellow paper. Her script was easy to read with lots of familiar flourishes.

"How long did you live there?" Olivia asked, looking up again.

"Two years. Before that we lived in Italy, and before that, Peru."

She'd said this as if she was hoping it would forestall more questions, but Olivia ignored her tone. "Why do you move so much?"

Jessie put down her pen and sighed. "Because my father works for a big manufacturer and his job is to streamline production at all their facilities. When he's done he moves on and so do we."

"Oh. That means you'll be leaving Palmetto Grove?"

"I wish."

Olivia was surprised. "You don't like it here?"

"I don't belong here." Jessie turned. "Maybe you've noticed?"

Olivia made a face and didn't say anything.

"My mother was raised two blocks from this beach, so she wanted to come back and give us exactly what she'd had. She told my father until my brother and I are out of high school, we're going to stay here so we can have a normal American adolescence." Jessie said the last three words like they were a particularly loathsome disease.

"But you don't like it?"

"The other places we lived? I went to private school with a lot of different kinds of kids from all over the world. It wasn't like here. Here you have to be like everybody else, or you don't make friends."

Olivia considered that. "I'm not like everybody else. My dad's in prison and my mother drowned in a storm. I live with my grandmother in a little house over there." She pointed across the water toward the key. "I don't have two parents and a swimming pool, but most of the time nobody says anything mean."

"Really? That's true about your mother and father?"

"I wish it weren't."

"Boy, talk about a bummer."

"My grandmother's great, and we live in this funny little neighborhood. All the women are super. Really awesome. It's like having a big family, only nobody's related."

"My dad still travels a lot. My mother's working at a doctor's office now, and my brother? He's fifteen and all of a sudden he thinks I'm a creep."

"You're alone a lot then."

Jessie shrugged as if to say, who cares?

Olivia debated, then she spoke her mind. "Sometimes it seems like you try to be different, just to show everybody else you're better than they are."

"What?"

Olivia glanced at her. "I don't think it's true. Maybe you're just trying to be the person you were in those other countries, but kids here just don't get it yet. They will. There'll be a lot of new people in middle school, more to choose friends from. I think you're nice, now that I know you a little. You'll be okay there."

"What's it matter to you?"

Olivia reached over and took the SunDrop bottle out of Jessie's hand. She held it up, then peered inside. "Because somebody does care, after all. And maybe being held captive in Palmetto Grove isn't such a bad thing. Maybe you don't need any help. Maybe you just need a friend."

Jessie looked startled. "How do you know about that?" She grabbed for the bottle and held it against her chest.

"Tides and . . ." Olivia lowered her voice. "A really cool place called Treasure Beach. I'll show it to you when you come to my house to hang out. Lizzie and I named it. She'd want you to know about it, too, because she liked you, but it will have to be our secret."