Page 58 of Lost
“It’s good to meet you,” a brunette called Stacey said to him. “Any friend of Marina’s is an instant friend of ours!”
He didn’t doubt her for a moment after she pulled him into a rib-crushing hug and ruffled his already messy hair, grinning the whole time. The rest of her gang were less forward, but no less inviting, and Lysander found himself accepted within minutes. He smiled at each of them in turn as they introduced themselves, shaking a couple of hands along the way, before finally settling into the sand beside the one girl aside from Marina that he had recognised. She, at least, seemed to know who he was already.
“Hey,” she greeted him lightly. “We go to the same school, right? I think I’ve seen you in the halls between classes.”
School. Of course that was where he knew her from. Lysander nodded, holding out his hand to her. With a tiny smile she shook it. Her eyes were a deep, dark green that he previously wouldn’t have thought possible and her hair, slightly curled towards the end, was only a couple of shades darker than his own, though it lent more towards brown than blonde.
“Lysander,” he told her, though she must have heard his name a million times already. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know yours.”
“It’s Loralie.”
Now that he’d heard it, he didn’t know how he could ever have forgotten it in the first place.
“So how do you know Marina?”
“My sister’s in her band,” Loralie replied, nodding in the direction of a girl who shared her hair colour. Gretchen, her name was. “And they’ve been friends since middle school, so I’ve known Marina for a while. How ‘bout you?”
“Family friend. I’ve only known her a couple of weeks, though.”
“Right,” she said. “I almost forgot. You only just moved here. Ohio, right? Somebody said you were from Columbus.”
“Wisconsin,” he corrected her. “I’m from Columbus, Wisconsin.”
“Oh, no way. I have family in Beaver Dam. I spent a lot of summers up there.”
This took Lysander by surprise. In all his time in California, he had never known anybody who had actually been in the areas around his home town — not counting Zack’s band, who had passed through in order to play shows.
“I guess I should have realised you were from Cheeseville,” she went on with a grin. “Even people in Ohio would know how to dress for the beach better than you do.”
Lysander looked down at himself. Girls were fine, he thought — when it came to the beach, they either opted for bikinis or a full-piece suit. He had assumed that guys were just as easy — a pair of shorts that could go into the water, and a shirt to be discarded easily, but it seemed he was wrong. While the shorts that he wore could be worn for almost any occasion, the boys in this group were wearing those specifically designed for the beach; he had opted to wear a plain white t-shirt that he could easily peel off and leave in the sand, but the other guys hadn’t bothered bringing shirts at all.
There was also the matter of every person around him — even those not a part of the immediate group — wearing flip-flops. Lysander hated the things. They were uncomfortable, and he had never had use for them in Columbus. But now that he was sitting on the beach in a pair of sneakers, feeling more and more sand seep in, he was starting to wonder if maybe they wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all.
“Guess I should have asked somebody for some fashion advice this morning,” he said sheepishly. “Ah well. Better luck next time, I guess.”
“Next time you can just give me a call and I’ll sort you out. Fashion’s my forte.”
Loralie certainly did look like the sort of girl you might find between the pages of a magazine, with her sun-kissed skin and her perfectly smooth legs. If he’d had a camera, he might have been able to take a shot of her in her bikini and the huge sunglasses that sat atop her head and pass it off as an advertisement of some sort.
He stopped examining her body the moment he became conscious of the fact that he was doing it. Eliza Beth wouldnothave approved.
She offered him a drink from the cooler that sat half buried in the sand, and he took it gratefully. Not even midday and it was already shaping up to be a particularly warm day — but then, every day in California seemed warm to him, and with summer coming he knew there would be no relief in sight. Snowy winters were not the only thing that he was going to be missing, that was for sure.
“So are you a musician, too?” Loralie asked, raising an eyebrow. “Everybody in this gang is, except me. So tell me I’m not the only loser.”
“You’re not,” Lysander assured her. “Music and I don’t really get along. My sister tried to teach me to play the piano once, but it didn’t go so well.”
“I hear ya. My sister wanted me to learn the guitar when we were younger, so she’d have somebody to jam with. But my fingers were never able to hold the chords properly.”
“You could have if you’d practised more!” her sister called her way.
“Whatever.” Loralie brushed the comment off with a wave of her hand. “I have more important things to do with my time. Like get a killer tan.”
The matter was pushed no further, though it did set Marina and her band to the task of discussing their next show. It was like spending a day in the studio withNeedless Desiresall over again — with talk of music involving terms that everybody except Lysander seemed to understand. Only this time, he wasn’t the only outsider. Loralie looked towards the group with the same sort of confusion before simply shrugging them off and lying back on her towel.
“Are they always like this?”
“Always,” she said with a grimace. “It’s like being the third wheel on a date.”
