Colby's boardwalk is one of the central routes through Auden’s summer in Colby, linking her evening work and the town’s gathering places with the beach. It is where routine gives way to possibility: Auden watches Eli ride at night, seeks him out at the bike shop, falls into a pattern of meeting him after work, and later watches a beach game from a distance. By the time she is riding alone beneath the streetlights, the route has become more than a setting. It holds the memory of earlier nights while opening onto a future Auden can enter under her own power.

Setting and Routes

The boardwalk belongs to a coastal business district whose character changes with the hour. In one late-night passage, Auden moves through town past a slowly driven police car and two girls, one stumbling as the other supports her. Bars are still open, with music and people spilling through their doors, while farther into the district the stores have gone dark. The contrast makes the boardwalk feel neither wholly abandoned nor fully awake: its public life is winding down, but the night still leaves room for movement and chance.

The route also connects the business district to the beach. At the boardwalk’s main entrance, people gather before moving together onto the sand. The beach is not separate from town life but one of its nearby destinations, reached on foot from the shops and places where people meet. Later, Auden takes the road from her neighborhood toward the beach, passing beneath streetlights and reaching the single stoplight where the road ends. The boardwalk and its approaches thus form a sequence of linked spaces: commercial streets, meeting points, beach entrance, and the open road beyond.

Night Work and Social Life

For Auden, the boardwalk becomes part of a regular evening schedule. She works at Clementine’s, gives passing attention to customers—including a rush on flip-flops—and joins the shop’s nine o’clock dance. At ten, she locks the safe and closes the door as Maggie, Leah, and Esther continue their debate about whether to attend a hot-dog party. The shop’s closing routine places Auden among a group, but does not determine where she will spend the rest of the night. Making an excuse and going to find Eli has become part of the pattern too.

That pattern develops into a settled arrangement over the following weeks. Auden’s mornings are for sleeping, her evenings for work, and her nights for Eli. After her shift, they meet at Gas/Gro, where they get coffee and decide what to do. Their outings may involve errands, pie with Clyde, or work on Auden’s quest. The boardwalk is therefore not only a passage between destinations; it is part of the ordinary geography that allows their companionship to recur. What began as Auden seeking Eli becomes an understood nightly meeting, embedded in the hours and places of her working life.

The route also leads to Tallyho, a club Leah favors. One night, around one o’clock, Auden stands outside with Eli beneath a neon sign advertising margaritas. A bored man sits by the door checking his phone, and a girl in a red dress passes them, puffy-eyed and stumbling. Eli argues that entering a club is a rite of passage, especially if the club is bad; Auden points out that she has no identification. The scene makes the boardwalk’s nightlife a setting for Auden’s gradual encounter with experiences she has largely missed, rather than a backdrop she already knows how to navigate.

Encounters and Gathering Places

The boardwalk also becomes a place where Auden tests whether her new experiences have changed her. After a night among girls, she reflects that Maggie had come looking for her instead of taking the easy option of leaving her alone. Auden then decides to look for Eli. At the bike shop, a light remains on in the back although the surrounding stores are dark. She hesitates at the door, questions whether anything has really changed, then knocks when she sees someone move inside. Eli opens the door, wary rather than relieved or surprised. The encounter makes the boardwalk’s late-night quiet a threshold between private doubt and renewed connection.

Auden has already seen Eli riding at night on the boardwalk. When Maggie explains that he gave up his sponsorships and competitive riding, deferred his place at the U, and took a job managing the bike shop, Auden adds that she saw him riding there once, late at night—or early in the morning. That sight complicates the story others tell about his stopping. It does not establish what the ride means, but Maggie recognizes that it means something. The boardwalk serves as the place where Auden’s observation provides a small, concrete challenge to the assumption that Eli has entirely left riding behind.

Later, the main beach entrance becomes the meeting point for a larger group. Maggie sits with Adam, Esther sits beside him, and Wallace and other people from the bike shop mill around, joking with Leah when she arrives. More people join, and the gathering draws closer together when Eli appears in the blue hoodie Auden remembers from their first long night, carrying a red ball. Teams form, Adam ends up on the losing side, and everyone heads onto the beach. Eli takes the ball to the center to pitch while Adam stands near the surf with his trouser legs rolled up. The boardwalk funnels a loose group into a shared game, even as Auden watches from inside Clementine’s rather than joining them.

An hour later, she circles back to the boardwalk by way of a parking lot and two alleys, although she had intended to go home because Heidi might need company. From a bench in front of the still-busy Last Chance, she watches the game at a distance. Leah kicks the ball far into the water, and a player dives in after it. Jason Talbot, Auden’s former almost-prom date, approaches and talks with her; when he leaves, he hugs her awkwardly. Eli is standing nearby with the ball under his arm. Their brief exchange about the game, which Eli says his team won, carries the weight of the earlier nights in the same vicinity. The location gathers separate strands of Auden’s social life into one scene without resolving them for her.

Memory and Movement

The boardwalk’s significance accumulates through recurrence rather than a single dramatic event. It is associated with Eli’s solitary riding, Auden’s decision to seek him out, their after-work routine, and the beach gathering she first observes from behind the shop window. In each instance, the same town geography allows a different degree of participation: watching from a distance, approaching someone directly, meeting by agreement, or standing among a crowd. Its familiar routes register Auden’s movement from being an uncertain observer toward making deliberate choices about where to go and whom to find.

The final ride extends that geography into an image of independence. Auden bumps over a curb and onto the street, recalling Maggie’s hand on the back of her bicycle seat and the last push that sent her onward alone. She rides beneath streetlights and past mailboxes, with the road clear to the stoplight by the beach. The ocean beyond it appears in her mind as an open expanse, but her immediate attention must return to the road and the curb ahead. The remembered boardwalk and beach are part of the world she is moving toward, while the ride itself marks a change: Auden is no longer only revisiting places where other people’s actions shaped her nights. She is traveling through them under her own momentum.