She talked about starfish again, and about anemones, and about the hermit crab that had made its way into her mural because it had made its way into her attention one afternoon when she was supposed to be doing something else. She held up a shell and passed it around, and the audience turned it over in their hands, feeling its weight and its smooth, worn edge. A boy in the second row asked why the anemone closed up when you touched it, and Tess explained, carefully, about protection and sensitivity, about how closing was not weakness but a way of surviving until the water returned. Mara thought about that sentence for a long time afterwards. She thought about how many ways there were to be strong, and how she had once believed strength only looked like stepping in front of someone. Tess's talk was not loud, and it did not need to be. It was steady, like water finding its level.
When the talk ended, there was applause, and then people came up to ask more questions, and Tess answered them one by one, sometimes pausing to think, sometimes laughing at her own forgetfulness about a Latin name. Mara waited. She did not answer for her. She stood near the door with her hands in her pockets, and when Tess finally caught her eye across the room, Mara raised her eyebrows in a silent question, are you ready, and Tess nodded, and they left together. The walk home along the shore road was one of those walks Tess would remember later without quite knowing why. The evening was clear, and the sky was still light in the west, a band of pale gold above the darkening sea. Their footsteps fell in and out of rhythm on the pavement, and once, without planning it, their shoulders bumped, a small, familiar collision that made them both laugh. Mara did not apologise for the bump, and Tess did not move away. They walked on, shoulder to shoulder when the road allowed it, apart when a car passed, and together again afterwards, as naturally as the tide coming in and going out.
Tess talked about the talk, in fragments, the way people do when they are still sorting out how something felt. She said she had been nervous at the start, and then less nervous, and then not nervous at all, which surprised her. Mara said she had noticed, and that she had liked the part about the anemone best, because it had sounded like Tess and not like a speech. Tess said she had almost forgotten the part about the hermit crab, and Mara said she had not noticed, and that nobody else would have either. They stopped for a moment where the road curved and the harbour came into view, and they looked at the water without speaking. It was the kind of silence that did not need filling, and both sisters had learned to trust it.
The end of the school year arrived in a rush of warm days and half-empty classrooms, of textbooks handed back and lockers cleaned out, of teachers wishing their students a good summer in voices that were already a little tired and a little fond. Greyhaven High loosened its grip day by day. The hallways, which had felt so crowded in September, echoed now, and the art room, where Tess had spent so many afternoons, was tidied and closed up for the summer, its tables washed and its paints put away. Ms. Alvarez gave Tess a small sketchbook on the last day, blank pages, and said she hoped Tess would fill it with whatever she noticed over the summer, without worrying about whether it was good enough to show anyone. Tess took it home and put it on her desk, where it waited, clean and expectant, like a new tide pool.
For Mara, the end of the school year also meant the end of the hockey season, and that ending carried its own mixture of relief and ache. The last game had been played the week before the festival, and the team had lost narrowly in the final minutes, a goal slipping past them when they were already tired. Coach Delgado had gathered them afterwards and talked not about the score but about how they had played for each other, about the passes that had found their mark and the running that had not stopped even when the game was slipping away. Mara had listened with her stick resting against her leg, and she had felt the loss settle in her chest alongside a quieter pride. She had played well, and she had played as part of something larger than herself, and that mattered more than she had expected it to when the season began.