Page 4 of The Starfish Sisters

“Phoebe. What’s yours?”

“Suzanne. I’m twelve.”

“Me too.” Her eyes were a pretty color, green and gold, like the tide pool itself. “Where do you live?”

Reluctantly, I glanced toward the bluff that hid the town from us. “Behind the First Pentecostal Church.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t tell if that meant she knew my dad was the preacher. “I’m here visiting my grandma,” she said. “I come every summer.”

“Does she live in a house with a purple door?”

She grinned. “You know her?”

“We met at the grocery store. She was really nice to me.”

Phoebe nodded.

I peered into the water. “Whatcha looking at?”

“All kinds of things—anemones and sea stars and mussels. Oooh”—she pointed—“see the periwinkle?”

I hadn’t lived by the ocean before, and all I saw were a bunch of things stuck to the rocks, but I didn’t want to look stupid. “Cool.” Something caught my eye in the water, a rippling movement. “Hey, what’s that?”

“Wait!” She bent in close. “Holy cow! It’s an octopus! Maybe it got stuck.”

“Will it be okay?”

“I don’t know.” She looked toward the edge of the water, swirling against flat sand. “The tide is going out.”

“But it comes back, right?”

She bit her lip. “Yeah, but maybe not for hours.”

“My dad always says it’s better to leave nature alone, let it do what it’s supposed to do.”

Phoebe straightened. “That’s right.” She reached a finger into the water and stroked the tiny octopus as if it were a cat. It moved, swayed, swirled, but didn’t seem particularly alarmed. “Do you want to try?”

A primal shudder moved along my shoulders. I didn’t like the idea of sticking my bare hand in the water at all. Who knew what lurked in there? “No, thanks.”

She didn’t seem to need me to talk, which was a relief. She pointed and squatted and peered, and I hung with her, trying to not look like a complete idiot.

After a while, she straightened and seemed to really see me. “You have the longest hair I’ve ever seen.”

My braids nearly reached my knees. “I’m not allowed to cut it.”

“Why?”

“If a woman have long hair,” I quoted, “it is a glory to her, for her hair is given her for a covering.” At her blank look, I added, “The Bible. My dad’s a preacher.”

“Oh. My grandma goes to the Methodist church. She makes me go to Sunday school sometimes. Is your dad Methodist?”

I shook my head. “Pentecostal.”

She blinked. “You know, you could be Rapunzel.”

“I like that.”

She brushed her hands together, shedding dark sand. “You want to come to my grandma’s house for lunch? Bologna, probably.”