Sweet Romance13 min read
The Koi by the Sea — Secrets, Snow, and the Birthday Pages
ButterPicks11 views
I never thought a campfire game would pull a ribbon from a buried present and unspool my life for everyone to see.
"We've all played 'Never Have I Ever' before," Ricardo Farrell said, bottle in hand, grinning like he owned a dozen summer nights. "Whoever hasn't, drinks."
Someone pointed at Joanna Sherman and snickered. "She'll never lose face," Ricardo teased, because he'd known Joanna since diapers. Laughter bounced around the beach, and the fire threw our shadows long and hungry over the sand.
"Okay, I never have kissed anyone present," the next voice declared. Fingers went in, cheeks warmed.
Then Ricardo tilted his head like he had just remembered something. "Wait—Christoph, you still holding up a finger?"
Every head turned. The tall silhouette at the far edge of the fire—the one who always folded himself into a neat, unreadable shape—kept three fingers up, casual as if asking for the salt.
"Christoph, come on," someone teased.
He drank, measuring the moment. "I've kissed someone here," he said, and when the flame lit his face, it looked like a coin with the shine on one side.
My stomach dropped because the whole fire turned toward me.
"Christoph," Joanna said slowly, and then she yelped, "Leona—what's going on?"
I wanted the sand to open and swallow me.
"You two—" Ricardo laughed and then choked on a laugh as he realized he was staring at us like he was watching someone else's soap opera.
"Leona, are you his girlfriend?" Joanna squeezed my shoulder so hard I forgot to breathe.
"Don't play games," Christoph said, voice flat, and then he smiled a little crooked smile only I could read as a surrender and a dare both. "We dated. It was months ago."
"Months?" I wanted to dig a hole in the sand. "It was—"
"It was when you kissed me first," I said, because the truth owned me already. "I kissed him."
At the fire, a dozen people inhaled the detail like a single body. Some hooted. Someone threw an empty can at the blaze. Joanna's face went from delight to a grin that could have been a knife.
Christoph watched the way everyone eyed me. "You think I'm playing?" he asked. "Leona, don't pretend you didn't."
"I—" My mouth felt dry as driftwood.
He shrugged. "Penalty's a drink," he said and, without breaking eye contact, lifted the can to his lips in a move that said he could own whatever this was and make it sometimes look like a game.
Later that night, under tents and the low tide's hush, Ricardo and Joanna and the rest filtered back into easy joking and gentle cruelty. I curled my toes into the sand and listened to the sea breathe and planned, in a small cold place inside me, how I could make everyone forget.
*
Childhood has the absurd luxury of making coincidences into prophecies. Christoph and I were born in the same hospital, same year, almost the same day; the families joked about fate and inscribed those schoolwords on a stone in the campus quad. We split the words—"rigor" and "courtesy"—and lived our lives carrying those odd little signposts.
"Leona, marry Christoph when we grow up," people teased when we were ten. "You two are written in stone."
"Not written," Christoph had snapped once when I asked, swallowing sun. "I don't want to."
That was the first wedge.
We fought, we made up, we squabbled like children. When puberty arrived, Christoph withdrew like glass—transparent, separate. I watched him from windows and during lunch, and sometimes in the quiet of the library I'd touch the spine of a book and imagine his hand there.
Then came a new girl—Melissa Figueroa—daughter of Karin David, my mother's former friend. Melissa came into our lives like a bright seeded fruit; she smelled of flowers and pity. Her mother came later, needing favors, needing to get her daughter placed at the right school, needing help. The favors turned into dinners. The dinners turned into an arrangement between my father and Karin that looked less like kindness and more like a slow barter.
"You must be Leona," Melissa said on the first night she came to our house. Her smile bent like ribbon. "Mother says thank you to your parents for letting Hannah in on the program."
"She's Melissa," I corrected, but she already sat at the head of the table and disarmed my father with that practiced half-smile only someone who'd learned to be sweet as a tool could carry.
My mother, Lourdes James, smiled and said what a small world it was. I watched my father, Bryant Zimmerman, until something in the air shifted. His laugh went softer when Karin and Melissa were around. I saw phone messages vanish too quickly in his hand. I tasted the acid sensation of betrayal before a word was spoken.
"Leona," my mother told me one night, anxious and half-ashamed. "They are sweet. They need help. Your father—he wants to be helpful."
"Helpful how?" I asked. I wanted to hide the way my stomach clenched.
"Just—let them use me as a reference," she said. "We listened to their story and helped."
A few months later, my whole house smelled wrong, like someone had left perfume on an empty chair. Karin David began to wear a confidence that bordered on entitlement. Melissa, her daughter, began to wear it louder: the right position in class, the right laugh, the way she sat with Christoph at his basketball games—always a little too near.
I tried to be kind at the start. "Help her with math," I told myself, curling up with Melissa for late-night algebra. She would lean close to Christoph when he walked by, and he would not move.
"You should practice geometry," Christoph would mutter on the basketball court, so low it was only for me to hear. "You always leave the proofs half-done."
"Well maybe you'd be nicer if I solved them while you dribbled," I would retort, and he would only smile in a way that didn't belong to me.
Life divided: school, homework, the small rituals that defined us, and the widening gap of grown-up choices that neither of us could stop.
*
Winter came with exams. I had become stubbornly work-obsessed because the thought of a future apart from Christoph made me ache. He announced one evening by my desk, "You need to aim for the top. No excuses."
"I am," I lied.
At the same time, my father started delivering rides and favors for Karin and Melissa. He brought them to our house under the guise of help. "It's nothing," he said once, and I watched his hands tremble while he filled the kettle.
"Don't," I said once, "Don't pretend you didn't choose this."
"I didn't choose to hurt you," he answered. "I just—" he stopped, and the sentence died like an old bird.
The night when my mother discovered the messages between Karn and my father—when she saw the receipts and the call logs and the string of untruths—household glass exploded into sharp syllables. The fight was like a storm, uncontainable, and afterwards my parents' marriage collapsed under the weight of the things they hadn't bothered to check for years.
They divorced in a matter of weeks. The house was split like a deck of cards. My mother took me and moved into a smaller unit closer to my new school. My father paid out in cash what could not be kept in the same room as the past. The town whispered, and a neighbor's curiosity burst through every keyhole.
Karin and Melissa? They moved in across the lane as if the air had been paid for, as if their steps were entitled. My hometown did not forgive easily.
*
"Leona, you need to come." Joanna's voice was a tug on my sleeve. "They're having the New Year's gathering at the square."
I went because Joanna went, and because family had shrunk to a small circle where Joanna and Ricardo and Christoph were still, oddly, the constants I could count on. The square—our old pain and our small triumphs—was lit by strings and the smell of fry and sugar. There were speeches and polite clinking. Karin David, upright and ruddy, stood in a corner like she had never broken anything. My chest tightened like a fist.
Then my phone buzzed and buzzed and a single dumb image rolled into view: a photo of my father and Karin and Melissa entering our block once more. The sender was an unknown number. My phone felt like an ember in my palm.
"What is it?" Ricardo asked.
"Nothing," I said, and my voice convinced no one.
That evening, something that had been only a slow burn became flame.
People began to talk. "You didn't see that?" someone said. "He was always in deep with her," another muttered. Small gatherings split into conspiracies.
And then a public moment arrived on its own.
Karin David chose, by accident or design, to attend the town assembly that week. The square swelled; there were neighbors and shopkeepers and a line of old school friends leaning on folding chairs. A woman from my childhood—herself with brittle memories—stood and read from a scrap of paper. "We've all known each other a long time," she said. "There's something we need to clear to protect the children of this town."
People shifted. I clutched Joanna's hand so tightly my knuckles hurt.
Karin laughed first—too loud, too confident. "What a spectacle," she said. "This isn't the place for gossip."
"Then it's a good place for truth," the speaker said. "We deserve it."
At that moment, whispered conversations pooled like rain around Karin. Someone produced receipts. Someone else produced a photograph. The square, a place for festivals, turned into a courtroom without the law. Voices rose like flares.
"Bryant Zimmerman—" the speaker said. "Leona's father—spent nights driving Karin around, gave money, got them rooms. He used his position to do favors. And he did it for a woman who used our children as an excuse to leech."
Karin's face changed. The first twitch was subtle: the smile that had been stuck like pinboard paper fluttered. She stepped back involuntarily. The crowd leaned in like a force.
"You all heard that," Karin said initially with a thin, practiced calm. "That is—untrue. Malicious." Her voice was small when she had to use it to fight, and in a public place it did not have the tone of someone who had been feeding herself power.
"Malicious?" someone shouted. "We have receipts. We have witnesses. We have messages." A young man in the crowd threw a thin sheaf of printed messages toward the makeshift stage.
Karin's face burned a color I couldn't have named—a chemical red. She opened her mouth and closed it. "I gave advice," she managed. "I asked favors once."
A woman near the front who had been friends with my mother for decades stepped up, hood still hung about her shoulders. She began to narrate small details—meals that had been too frequent, trips that were too close to midnight, the way money changed hands for reasons that didn't feel like charity. The testimony was not all menacing; it was small observations, a long accumulation of facts.
"She used your empathy," cried another neighbor. "She used what pull she could get to wedge herself in! Do you know what it's like to watch your child's father bring home that smile and then walk out again?"
Karin's posture broke. Her mouth trembled and she groped for words that were no longer slick from practice. "I—" she began, then something in her eyes shuttered. "I loved—" she tried, "I never meant—"
"Spare us," someone spat.
The crowd moved. There were gasps and murmurs; some people took out phones; some recorded. The air became thick with the rustle of paper and the click of cameras.
"No," Karin said, the single syllable becoming an eddy of panic. "No—this is not—"
She had been composed for months of rehearsed layers. Now she had to face a room full of people who had been quietly putting the pieces together. Her expression thinned. The cycle that dragged her from smugness to implosion was public and precise.
First, proud: she'd always believed the town would grant her discretion. Her jaw cut new angles. She lilted a small laugh and said, "You all are ridiculous."
Then, when the receipts and the names stacked like blocks, shock. Her smile fell away. She stood, the light catching in eyes that had not yet become wet.
"That's not—" she whispered. Denial clicked on and off like a badly wired lamp: "Not true. Not my money. He offered—" The words deflated.
She tried bargaining next, the way a cornered animal does. "Look, look, I can—" she started, pressing palms to the tables like a supplicant, "I can explain—this was good for my daughter—"
"No bargains," a woman shouted. "You used our kindness. You feigned need. You were not the only one she helped—"
Her voice shifted from bargaining to bargaining and then to a brittle shame. She began to weep, not dramatically, but overwhelmed, small sobs that shook her shoulders. "Please," she said, turning to the crowd with a face suddenly raw and strewn with a harsh light. "Please. I'm sorry."
But the Town Hall was not a bedroom where apologies would be mopped up gently. The people who had sympathized and let the matter slide were now made witnesses. They had their sons and daughters, their small reputations and their grudges.
"Look at her now," someone near the front said loudly. "The woman who pretended to be gentle is exposed. She took the money that could have helped real neighbors."
Karin's crying broke into a form of frantic pleading. "I'll leave," she offered. "I will leave. I'll move. I will—"
"Mend your ways first," someone called. "Make restitution."
At that point, the mood crystallized. A board member—an older man who ran the local co-op—walked up with a white piece of paper and a pen. "Sign a statement so the town can be assured you won't come back and use the same tricks," he said. "Pay back what you took."
Karin's reaction shifted again. Where once she had flurried in denial and bargaining, she now looked cornered, frightened. Her voice broke. "I don't have enough," she said. "I can pay back in time."
"But you used the favor of a man and the charity of our people," the board member said, not unkindly. "This is public. This is the only kind of accountability we get."
The punishment evolved: not a law court—there was no trial that night—but public exposure, a forced accounting, social condemnation. For many of us, this was actually the most meaningful reckoning. People had been hurt. People wanted the assurances that this would not be repeated.
Karin's pleas for mercy turned into an offered settlement. She wrote names—amounts—insisted on putting her name to a ledger that would be kept on file with the co-op, with the church, with the town's elders. She agreed to a public apology to my mother if my mother wanted one. The crowd began to thin as the decisions were made, the ledger signed, the phones kept.
The witnesses' reactions were a mosaic—some were satisfied, some said it wasn't enough, some whispered that the humiliation had been necessary, and others felt the regret of seeing someone broken. A few thought the mother of a child should be protected more gently.
"I thought she'd never crumble like that," Joanna said after it was over. "She was always too clever."
Ricardo squeezed my hand. "Sometimes people who use others to climb get brought down by the very structure that let them climb. It's ugly," he said. "But it's also how communities protect themselves."
I watched Karin leave the square holding her daughter's hand. Melissa's face had gone pale; she pressed close to her mother like a shield. On the cobblestones behind them, a woman walked up and spat the word "shameless." Another slapped a paper into the hands of the man who had run the ledger and said, "Make sure her name is there."
Karin folded and refolded, like a moth. She had been arrogant, then baffled, then bargaining, then broken—publicly, painfully. That was the required evolution: smugness, then shock, then denial, then a grinding collapse into apology and bargain. The crowd's voice—sometimes merciless, sometimes laconic—kept the rhythm.
The next morning, the town talked about restitution. The co-op met. A plan formed: Karin would be responsible for reimbursing the most obvious sums, and her reputation would be severely damaged for a scheme that had used small kindnesses like currency. People recorded everything. Someone took a long video. It traveled.
For me, watching Karin's fall felt like watching a lamp put out: there was a quiet, and then a new view of the town where you could see the wounds and the stitches. My father—Bryant—left town for a while. The divorce made no one look good. He looked small, humiliated in ways only a public market could make him. He apologized to my mother in a letter, in sentences that were rationed and dry.
I didn't rejoice at anyone's punishment, but I didn't deny the relief that unfurled like a sail. The person who had used our family and others as a stepping stone had been exposed. The town had acted, if imperfectly. We had a ledger and a story and a line through the calendar we'd all agree not to forget.
*
Christoph stayed close during all of this—present like the coast after a storm.
"You'll be all right?" he asked one evening when the apartment was small and the winter harsh. He had brought a packet of photocopied sheets, stamped "A - internal notes for higher-level teens."
"Do you even care about these?" I asked, because he had always been the sort to go for the perfect trajectory—faces of test scores and a future itinerary.
"I care about you," he said. "If you make it, then that's something that can't be taken away."
We both worked. I tried, really, to vault onto the list of those whom the city would lift. The nightly grind for the full-time student was exacting. Some nights, when I was tired and went numb with the math and the proofs and the history dates, Christoph would sit on the floor with his back against the bookcase and look at me like I was the axis about to spin the world.
"Promise me," he teased one night, and my heart thudded. "Promise that you'll send me one postcard from wherever you end up."
"I promise," I said, and the promise felt like a wedge.
He leaned forward and pressed a folded scrap into my hand. "Open it later," he said. "Happy birthday, from an idiot who thinks little pieces of the past should stay where they are."
I opened it later and found a small drawing of a koi—childish, mine. He had kept the little painting I'd given him when we were small, framed behind glass on his shelf. The inscription read, "Sixteen, and still mine to annoy. —C."
I wanted to tell him how harmful small things can be—how a secret kiss on a beach could translate into a rumor that swallowed half the summer—but instead I took his hand and let the heat of his palm send warm currents through my wrist.
"Christoph," I said that winter night. "If things go wrong—"
"They won't," he interrupted. "But if they do, I'll be there. Not as a savior—just as someone. That's the deal."
"Okay," I said. "Deal."
*
The town would change slower than I wanted. My mother would rebuild. My father would live elsewhere for a time, watching the empty rooms. Karin David would be paid back—humbled—and some neighbors would shake their heads and say that justice had been done. Melissa would try to recover a name once tarnished.
As for Christoph and me, we kept enrolling in the future in separate ways. We studied, we fought, we made up. We kept the old koi painting between us like a talisman.
On the last evening before the city exams, it snowed—the second heavy snow of the season. We stood on the school steps, breathing in little clouds, watching other kids throw snow up like they were trying to rebel against the iron discipline of adult outcomes.
"High school is the war," Christoph said quietly. "After that, it's different."
"No abbreviations," I said. "Just whole fights."
He tucked his hands in his pockets, the casual posture that hid so much thought. "There are things I'm sure of," he said. "One is you. One is that I'll keep annoying you. Another is this: you study hard."
"And if I fail?" I asked.
"Then we'll have different plans." He smiled. The night showed its teeth like a grin and then warmed into something that felt like home.
The seasons turned. The story stayed with us—the campfire, the sea, the kiss, the family fracture, the public punishment of the small-town interloper, the winter exams, the koi in a frame. It all insisted we grow.
When my result came, I clenched the paper so hard it blurred at the edges. In the end, the town's ledger had been set right. The score we keep in schoolbooks had been tallied. I made the list I wanted, but whether I go farther or not, the proof remained that we are all, in our small ways, capable of revealing truth and doing harm. The town had given me a strange gift: a reckoning that I would not have chosen but that made some future lighter.
On the last page of my notebook before college letters and bus tickets and the rest, I wrote a single sentence I had once seen in one of Christoph's family notebooks: "Certain things, one or two, are enough to fight off all the rest." I underlined it.
When the spring came, we met again at the pond where I used to paint the koi. Christoph took the little framed drawing from his pocket and said, very simply, "Happy sixteen and all the years after."
I laughed and kissed him, this time in front of the pond and not in front of a campfire game, and the koi in the reflection swam like our secrets, visible and bright.
The End
— Thank you for reading —