Sam Macintosh Quotes

Oh my God, look!” I stand and hold out my hand for Sam to inspect. “Wow,” he says, taking the glass and holding it up to the sun. “Red is, like, the rarest color there is. You’re totally lucky you even saw it.” I take the deep red, half-dollar-sized piece from him and smile, looking out across the ocean. I told Matt in my letter before we left that I’d find a piece just for him, but now that it’s actually here, sparkling in my hand, I know he’d want me to do something else with it. I raise it above my head and throw it as hard and as far as I can into the sea. Let someone else have a lucky day, Anna. Sam laughs. “Hey, crazy, what’d you do that for? You’ll probably never see something like that again in your entire life.” “Right. But I did see it. And now someone else can, too.

I follow the path we’ve taken so many times this summer – across the front, down the street, cut back through a neighbor’s yard, down the stairs to the beach, past the pier, through the campfire labyrinth, up to the deck of the Shack, and straight into Sam’s arms. Without speaking, he kisses me hard on the mouth and I kiss him back, sobbing and crumpling into his chest like a broken puppet.

So just over a year ago, there was this guy. I really liked him. I mean really – since I was a kid.” “Did Frankie know him?” “The three of us were best friends. We basically grew up together.” “Complicated.” “Very. So anyway, last year on my birthday, he finally kissed me.” Sam stays quiet, focused on his feet taking off and landing against the sand. It feels strange to tell him about this for so many reasons, but the words are coming too fast for me to stop, even if I want to. “We started hanging out all the time – even more than before. Every night. Only we didn’t know how to tell Frankie, because we didn’t want her to freak or feel left out or whatever.” “Makes sense,” Sam says. “He thought it would be better if he told her himself, so I promised him that I wouldn’t say anything. But before he could talk to her about it, he–” I almost choke on the word, holding my hand against Sam’s arm to stop our forward motion along the shore. “What did he do?” Sam asks. “He just – he – I’m sorry. Wait.” The words of this story have passed a thousand times from my hand to the pages of my journal, but never from my lips to the ears of another living soul. I take a few deep breaths before I’m able to meet Sam’s eyes and say it. “He died, Sam.