“I mean,” he said softly, “I’m only 18. I haven’t done jack, so it’s not like it would be a waste. On the other hand...I haven’t done jack yet. That’s worth living for.”

“But you could have forever to do it.” I recognized the woman who spoke. Her name was Nancy and she had been 33 since before my parents were born. She liked to demo her immortality by letting visitors shoot her in the head. In lean years, she charged ten dollars each for the opportunity.

I hated her.

Gabe raised his finger.

I couldn’t reach him, but I couldn’t cry out, either – my throat was frozen, clenched tight. I hated the tide, I hated Nancy, I hated myself.

Fresh screams broke out just a few feet away. I jumped. The flashlights swept off Gabe and cast a white circle on a gray-haired woman cradling the body of a younger woman. The daughter’s eyes were brown. They stared up at the moonlit sky, her face a death mask of desperate hope.

Safe in the shadows, Gabe flicked the black from his finger.

“Let’s get out of here.” Angela touched his shoulder and drew him away from the force of the hissing circle. “Grab Kate. We’re going.”

I felt a fresh churn of panic. “I don’t see her.”

Fresh cheers erupted, closer to the waves. Angela led us toward the sound, and sure enough, there was Kate. Somehow she’d gotten a flashlight and now she stood in the front lines of a crowd which surrounded eight people, each lit by flashlights like performers on a stage. Each pinched a sliver of black between their fingers. The crowd – Kate, too – was chanting, faster and faster, a single syllable: Eat! Eat! Eat!

The hands went up, the heads whipped back, throats convulsed, and five people dropped to the sand. The crowd rippled as individuals broke loose to weep over the dead, while the three victors turned, fists raised to roars of triumph. Their relieved loved ones embraced them; awestruck onlookers unwilling to take the risk themselves reached out to touch the newly immortal.

I expected Kate to be one of them, but I couldn’t see her in the crazed paths of the flashlights. I saw Nancy, though, laughing and kissing the cheeks of the survivors. Her neck and chest gleamed red, and I remembered how Dad said some years she let people slit her throat instead of shooting her.

The crowd shifted, seeking the next attempt. I knew there would be many more tonight; I remembered how few of my classmates still had both parents, their grandparents, their teachers. As we got older, we lost each other, too: the high school lost three in one year when I was a sophomore.

I also remembered how many spouses outlived not only their partners, but their children. I remembered Mallory Watkins, who waited until she turned 18 to try the tide and was rewarded with eternal youth.

Somehow, I could still see Nancy. She seemed to be everywhere, like a good hostess, but no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find Kate.

I turned back to tell the others. Only Gabe was there. I opened my mouth to scream for Angela, but she emerged from the crowd, her face set.

“We’re going back to the car.”

“What about Kate?”

“She says she’ll meet us there.”

“We can’t leave her here! She could—”

“Any of us could,” Angela snapped. “Gabe almost did. You might; I might. I’m not sticking around. Back to the car. I’m leaving in fifteen minutes, with or without you.”

She shoved back through the crowds up the dunes. I took Gabe’s arm.

“Let’s go.”

“We’re not seriously leaving Kate?”

“The longer we stay here, the more danger we’re in. We have to go now, or we never will.”

Gabe was pale in the moonlight. He looked around one more time; whether for Kate or for another shot at the black tide, I couldn’t tell. At last, he sighed and let me lead him up the beach. I kept my eyes on my feet, trying to avoid stepping in the slimy patches of black and the occasional splash of the immortals’ blood. The laughter and screaming made my ears ring.

Eventually clumps of dune grass replaced the black tide, and the slope led us up to safety. Angela stood at the top, arms folded like a general surveying the aftermath of battle.

“How the hell did you grow up here?” she asked.

I couldn’t answer.

The crowds weren’t diminishing; the force of them pressing towards the beach was like a second tide. We wove through it. I felt lighter and yet more anxious with every step. We were almost safe. We might make it out.

We might – but Kate might not. The twist in my stomach returned. I didn’t want to leave her, but I didn’t ever want to see the bloody, black-smeared beach again.

At last, the Jeep appeared. We each clambered in, locked our door, and sat in the darkness, waiting. My ears still rang.

Angela’s eyes were dull, her ochre skin made wan and grim by the yellow streetlamps. “Nine minutes.”

Gabe shook his head. “We should go back down.”

“Don’t,” I whispered. “Don’t go back out there.”

Someone pounded on my window and we shrieked. It was a young man, our age, flexing his arms and sticking his tongue out in a grotesque victory dance. His friends pounded his back in celebration. One hung back, quiet

“They lost someone,” I said softly.

The boys moved on. I wondered what school they went to.

“Eight minutes,” Angela murmured.

“I snuck down once,” I said. The confession burst out of me – I’d never told anyone before. I didn’t even want to tell my friends, not really, but even this was better than the silence. “I was thirteen. The black tide was common knowledge in our town, but my parents refused to talk about it. I guess they thought if they never brought it up, I’d forget about it.”

Angela scoffed. “How could anyone forget this?”

“I’d heard screams every fall since I was a baby. I guess I hoped it was fake, or exaggerated, so I went to see for myself. I planned to just touch one, just to see what it felt like, but then I saw...”

Nancy smiling, 33 forever, with a gun to her head; a flash, and the loudest noise. Blind, frozen panic while the eyes readjust, then Nancy again, holding the bullet, still smiling through the shining blood that coated her face.

“You saw what we saw,” Angela filled in.

“I was so afraid, I never even touched it. I refused to go to the beach at all for months. I thought the slime must stick to the sand, and I was afraid of the sand getting in my mouth and killing me.”

“Or making you live forever?”

“Gabe, Jesus, let it go.” Angela glared in the rearview mirror.

“You guys never touched it,” he said. “Once it’s in your hand, you just think, why not?”

I considered telling him, challenging him to continue to think that way after hearing how, as an eighth-grader, I’d seen a woman shoot herself in the head and then laugh about it. Angela was right, though: they’d all seen more or less the same thing tonight. If Gabe was still tempted, another gruesome anecdote wouldn’t reach him.

I would never forget, but maybe they still could.