Picture Perfect

You might have thought that was me talking, as I headed into the town of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, my destination for a two-week summer stay on the Outer Banks.

But no. It was my dad, of all people.

And it’s not what you might be thinking
now
, either. He was talking about seeing his best friends from college.

We meet up every few years on a big reunion trip with “the guys,” their wives, their kids, and other assorted members of their families—dogs, parents, random cousins, nannies, you name it. I think it’s Dad’s favorite vacation, because he and his buddies play golf, sit around
reminiscing, and stay up late talking every night.

Even though that occasionally gets a little boring, I like going on these trips, because I’ve gotten to be friends with “the guys’” offspring, who have sprung off like me: Heather Olsen, Adam Thompson, and Spencer Flanagan. I couldn’t wait to see all of them. It had been two years since the last vacation reunion for the four of us, which was
almost
, but not quite, long enough to make me forget what an idiot I’d made of myself the last time, when I was fifteen, Spencer was sixteen, and I’d told him that I thought he was really cool and that we really clicked and that I wished we lived closer because then we could…well, you get the gist.
Embarrassing
. With a capital
E
. Maybe three of them, in fact. EEEmbarrassing. Like an extra-wide foot that I’d stuck in my mouth.

But enough about me and my slipup. I basically love these trips because we end up in cool locations like this, a place I’d never seen, or even gotten close to seeing, before now.

Living in the Midwest, we don’t get to the
coast much. And this was even beyond the coast—if that’s possible—on a strip of land that was as far as you could get without becoming an island. Or maybe it was an island. What do I know? We live in “fly-over land.” On the plus side, we don’t have earthquakes, hurricanes, or tropical storms. On the minus side, we have the occasional nearby tornado and no ocean access.

“This is just
beautiful
,” Mom said as we turned off the main four-lane road, and onto a smaller road with giant three-and four-story beach houses on each side of it. “Isn’t it, Emily?”

“Those houses are gigantic. Is that where we’re staying? In one of those?” I asked.

“Yup. Remember the pictures we checked out online?” Dad asked from the front seat of our rental car. We’d flown into Norfolk, Virginia, and driven south from there.

“Not really,” I said. I hadn’t paid all that much attention, to be honest. I was too busy finishing up my senior year, getting my college plans set, figuring out how to squeeze a two-week vacation into a summer in which I needed to make as much money as possible.

In July and August, I’d be back home working at Constant Camera full-time, saving money for textbooks and anything else I might need when I got to college. Fortunately, I’d received a few gifts for my graduation that would help out a lot—gift cards, as well as supplies for my hopefully budding career in photography. I planned to take lots of pictures while on this vacation, and turn them into something I could give everyone at the end of the two weeks—a calendar. I’d left my new Mac at home because of the hassle of traveling with it—Mom was afraid it would get I-Jacked—and I’d brought my inexpensive camera instead of my digital SLR, so I wasn’t working with my usual stuff. But I was still confident I could get plenty of good pictures—after all, it’s not necessarily always the equipment, it’s whether you have an eye for it or not.

We were getting close to the house number we were looking for when Dad stopped the car as two college-age-looking guys stepped out to cross the street. They had beach towels slung around their necks and bare chests with nice
abs, and wore low-riding surf shorts. One of them carried a Frisbee, while another had a volleyball tucked under his arm.

I sat up in the backseat, wondering if that was Adam and Spencer. But no, upon closer inspection, one of them had short, nearly platinum-blond hair, and the other’s was brown, shoulder-length—not at all like Spencer and Adam.

Which wasn’t a bad thing, because I was looking forward to seeing what guys might be around, too. And I
didn’t
mean Dad’s college buddies or their sons.

While we were stopped, the guy carrying the volleyball leaned down and peered into the car—I guess he’d caught me staring at him. He smiled at me, then waved with a casual salute.

I smiled and waved back to him. I wanted to take a lot of pictures, so why not start now? I buzzed the window down. “Hold on a second, okay?” I asked. I grabbed my slim, shiny green camera from my bag, and took some quick shots as they played along, grinning and flexing their muscles, showing off a couple of tattoos.

“Emily.” My mother peered back at me over the front seat. “What are you doing?”

“Capturing the local flavor,” I said as a car behind us honked its horn, and the guys hustled across the street so we could get moving again. “Just trying to blend in with that whole Southern hospitality thing.”

“Hmph,” my mother said, while my dad laughed.

I turned around and looked out the back window at the guys, wondering if we’d be staying anywhere close by, when Mom shrieked, “Look! There’s the house!”

My dad slammed on the brakes, which screeched like the sound of a hundred wailing—and possibly ill—seals. Dad has this awful habit of calling Rent-a-Rustbucket in order to save money. Consequently, we end up driving broken-down automobiles whenever we go on vacation.

Dad backed up and turned into a small parking lot behind the tall, skinny house. I immediately recognized all the
L
bumper stickers and Linden College window-clings on
the cars in the lot.

“Look!” Mom pointed at a Linden College banner that was hanging off the third-floor balcony, flapping in the breeze. There was a giant green, leafy linden tree on the dark blue banner background, and in the center, a heart-shaped leaf with a giant
L
in the middle.

Sometimes my dad’s Linden school pride got a little ridiculous—for instance, he couldn’t possibly get dressed in the morning (at least on weekends and vacations) without donning some piece of Linden College apparel, and he owns about fourteen different ball caps, some faded and tattered and some brand-new—but since I’d actually be going off to school there in the fall, it was kind of a nice feeling to see the banner.

Dad parked the car with a screech of the brakes and we started to climb out. I closed the door, and I swear a piece of the car fell off onto the pavement.

There was a second or two where I was dreading the inevitable hugging and screaming that went along with greeting everyone. Then
the back door opened, I saw Adam’s dad, and the feeling was over.

“Jay, you could have at least rented a decent car for once in your life,” Mr. Thompson said.

“Why change now?” my dad replied as he clapped him on the back.

“Once a cheapskate, always a cheapskate, huh, Emily?” Mr. Thompson gave me a little shoulder hug.

“Don’t get me started,” I mumbled, looking up at him with a smile.

“Adam just took off on a run down the beach,” Mr. Thompson said. “Heather and her mom are off shopping somewhere. I know Adam is psyched to see you.”

“Cool.” I grinned. Although I hadn’t seen Adam for two years, we’d always gotten along pretty well—I figured we still would. Even if we didn’t stay in touch very often, we’d known each other so long that it was kind of like being cousins.

Just then the door opened again and Adam’s stepmom and his two younger half
brothers charged outside. In another minute, it was total chaos, with everyone yelling, hugging, and talking all at once.

Of course, they were talking about how middle-aged and out of shape they’d all gotten, and how many vacation days they got, and whether there was enough beer for the night. What was next? Medicare? Retirement plans?

I had to figure out where the people my actual age had hidden themselves.

As they say on
Grey’s Anatomy
:
“Stat.”

Ten minutes later, after dumping my suitcase in my room, I stood on the giant back deck, overlooking the ocean. There were houses up and down the beach, all looking pretty similar. On one side of us there seemed to be a large, extended family, complete with lots of young kids, grandparents, and about a dozen beach balls and other water toys floating in their pool.

The house on the other side of us had beach towels lined up on the deck railing, flapping in the warm breeze, and a couple of lacrosse sticks, a random collection of Frisbees, and badminton
racquets strewn on the deck, along with a cooler and some empty cans of Red Bull and bottles of sports drink. Something about it screamed “young guys” to me, which seemed promising, but maybe I was just being overly hopeful—or naive. Maybe it was actually screaming “old guys who don’t recycle.”

Down by the ocean, some kids were playing in the sand, building sand castles and moats, while others swam and tried to ride waves on boogie boards.

“I’ve made a list of top ten Outer Banks destinations. I read eight different guidebooks and compiled my own list,” my mom was explaining to Mrs. Thompson when I walked over to them. “We’ll need to go food shopping tonight, of course, and make a schedule for who cooks which night.”

“Oh, relax, you can do the shopping tomorrow. Things are very casual around here,” Mrs. Thompson said to her. “Dinner’s already on the grill, put your feet up.” She turned to me. “You should go say hi to Adam. He’s down there, in the water.”

“He is?”

She gestured for me to join her at the edge of the deck. “He’s right there. Don’t you see him?”

All I could see except for young kids was a man with large shoulders doing the crawl, his arms powerfully slicing through the water. “That?” I coughed. “That person is Adam?”

His stepmom nodded. “Of course.”

Wow. Really?
I wanted to say. When I focused on him again, as he strode out of the surf, I nearly dropped my camera over the railing and into the sand. “You know what? I think I
will
go say hi.”
Hi, and who are you, and what have you done with my formerly semi-wimpy friend?

I walked down the steps to the beach in disbelief. Last time I’d seen Adam, his voice was squeaking, and he was on the scrawny side—a wrestler at one of the lower weights, like 145. Not anymore. He had muscular arms and shoulders, and he looked about a foot taller than he had two years ago. His curly brown hair was cut short.

You look different
, I wanted to say, but that
would be dumb.
You look different and I sound like an idiot, so really, nothing’s changed.

Why was it that whenever I tried to talk to a guy, I started speaking a completely different language? Stupidese?

“Emily?” he asked.

I nodded, noticing that his voice was slightly deeper than I remembered it. It was sort of like he’d gone into a time machine and come out in the future, whereas I felt exactly the same. “Hi.”

He leaned back into the surf to wet his hair. “You look different,” he said when he stood up.

“Oh, yeah? I do?”
Different how?
I wanted to ask, but that was potentially embarrassing. Different in the way he did? Like…sexy? I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. “Well, uh, you do, too,” I said.

“Right.” He smiled, then picked up his towel and dried his hair. As he had the towel over his head, I took the opportunity to check him out again. Man. What a difference a couple years could make. He used to wear wire-rim
glasses, but now, apparently, he had contacts, like me.

There was always this really uncomfortable moment when we first tried to talk after not having seen each other for so long.

“So, how are you?” I asked, patting his shoulder, and then we sort of hugged, very awkwardly, the way you hug someone without actually touching them. Sort of like the Hollywood fake-kiss.

“All right, knock it off, you two!” a voice said.

Funny—that didn’t
sound
like my mother, but who else would care if I hugged a suddenly semi-hot Adam?

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