The sand was damp and chilly. There were more rocks under the sand than there were on top of it, and the sand got coarser the deeper it was. But there she lay, and there her friends piled sand on her. It felt clammy on her body, and the burying part seemed to take forever. How many handfuls of sand did they have to put on her, anyway? It felt like a thousand. She felt the weight of the sand increase with each scoop they added, and felt increasingly claustrophobic lying there. She reminded herself to breathe deeply. But even that was hard, with the weight of the sand on her chest. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, the way her mom did when she did yoga. She even counted her breaths slowly, as her mom had taught her when she was little and needed to calm herself down. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. It didn’t help much. “Isn’t it fun, Sandy Lady?” Lissa asked Bethany. Bethany couldn’t answer. “Do you want us to decorate you in shells?”
