Quinn's family takes a trip to Hilton Head every year from the time Quinn is five until the summer after her freshman year of high school. It's the same each time: her dad takes the last week in August off from work, and the family piles into the minivan for the drive down to South Carolina. Judy sings "Remember (Walking in the Sand)" by the Shangri-Las in the car and that is the song that Quinn will always associate with her family and the beach.
Once at the resort, Russell, Judy, and the girls go their separate ways. Russell goes to the golf course. Judy goes to the pool (and the pool bar). The girls go to the beach. Avery — Quinn's sister, older by five years, impossibly beautiful and an impossible example to live up to — swims some and enjoys the sun. Quinn builds sandcastles.
Quinn has a thing about sandcastles. Avery says she's obsessed, but that's not it, really, she just has a thing. They don't have to be big or flashy — she prefers them without excessive turrets and hardly ever digs a moat — but she wants them to last. As far back as she can remember, Quinn's goal has always been to have a sandcastle last overnight. She practices all week for the last night of the trip. The sandcastle she builds on the last night, always finishing just as the sun dips below the horizon, bathing her in its last red rays, is the trip's final exam.
The next morning, as her parents pack the minivan for the trip back to Lima, Quinn creeps out of the hotel and onto the beach, the sand almost impossibly cold below her feet. Quinn always thinks that this will be the year that she finally defeats nature and wind and tides and builds a sandcastle that will survive the night. Without fail, the castle has been washed away, leaving only a bare stretch of sand. Quinn cries as she shivers, looking at where she thinks her sandcastle once stood. She gives herself exactly two minutes to cry for what she has lost before she steels her shoulders, wipes her face, and returns to her family.
Quinn never lets anyone help her build. When she was younger, before Avery started high school, Avery used to offer, but Quinn always turned her down. Fiercely independent, even as a kindergartner, Quinn would wipe her hair, gritty with sand, out of her eyes and guard her bucket and spade against intruders. It was most important that the castle last, but it was almost as important that Quinn build it alone.
As Quinn gets older, she begins to notice that she's the only kid her age who still builds sandcastles, without the urging of a persistent younger sibling. She thinks maybe this should stop her, or at least bother her, but she actually derives an almost-perverse pleasure from it: less competition. Somehow, sandcastles have become something to win. She thinks this happened sometime around fifth grade, when she discovered that you can win school and win friendships and you can even win lunchtime in the cafeteria. More importantly, she discovered that you can lose school and friendships and lunchtime. She knows instinctively that, while she may not feel like a winner all the time, she absolutely cannot let herself lose.
The first time she hears the Jimi Hendrix song "Castles Made of Sand," it is the spring of her eighth grade year and Noah Puckerman plays it for her in his basement as he tries to kiss her. She pushes him away, but gently, and more because she really wants to hear the rest of the song than because she's opposed to kissing Noah Puckerman. She will regret this lack of opposition less than two years later. She finds the song disturbing and beautiful, and she gets the sense that those two things often go together, but she can't quite figure that out at age fourteen.
The summer after freshman year, Quinn suspects, but does not know for sure, that she will not return to Hilton Head for a very long time. Her parents don't say anything, but she hears it in their silence in the car. Judy does not sing, and Quinn puts her headphones in to escape the oppressive quiet. Quinn spends the week like she always does — working on her technique in preparation for the last night. This year, since she thinks the family vacations are coming to an end, The Last Night takes on special significance. She can hear the capital letters in her head.
Quinn's calculations, in which she determines that she is at least a bit gay, had taken place only the week before. Her head's still swimming with possible outcomes, consequences, and plans of action. She builds the perfect castle — it is far enough from the water that it isn't a lost cause, but close enough that there is some risk, it is tall and (she thinks) majestic, but not ostentatious. Quinn thinks she has finally won at sandcastles.
She spends The Last Night sitting on the sand, keeping watch. She must fall asleep at some point, because the next thing she feels the freezing sand is against her cheek. The sun is beginning to climb above the ocean. Her sandcastle is gone and her heart sinks. She could not later describe it, and would, eventually, not even remember it, but she briefly feels a sense of all-consuming dread. She throws up on the sand and cries, for exactly two minutes. She decides that the feeling meant nothing, corrects her posture, and walks towards the hotel. She is intent on winning sophomore year.
Quinn watches from a beach chair as a brunette toddler in a pink-and-blue-polka-dot bathing suit builds a sandcastle. The girl's mother is helping her, piling sand and laughing as her daughter struggles to turn over the heavy bucket. Quinn sees the woman's teeth flash white in the hot sun. It has been almost exactly twenty years since Quinn was last at Hilton Head, and she loses herself in memories of previous trips. She laughs when she remembers being concerned about "winning" sandcastles. Now she has bigger concerns. She feels a tug on her arm and looks up to see the toddler staring at her expectantly.
"Come on, Mama!" the little girl says. "Help!"
"Yeah," calls Rachel from her seat on the sand. "Come on, Mama!"
Quinn smiles and picks up her daughter, carrying her, giggling, down the beach and towards the half-built sandcastle. She knows that this one, too, will most likely melt into the sea, but she can always try. She holds her daughter a little closer and kisses her wife before getting to work.