The afternoon rolls on like a conversation with an old friend. My stomach is full with the fish which was surprisingly good, despite my doubts. Sand cakes my feet as if claiming them as their own and the sun in my eyes is enough to lull me to sleep.

After a while, Don says, "What's your story, Sally?"

For the first time today, I feel truly uncomfortable. My life isn't something I like to talk about, not because I am ashamed of it, but because people never quite treat me the same way after I have told them. Some look at me pityingly and I can see that in their eyes, I am an unfortunate and lonely child. Others purse their lips and frown and ask me about my future. What will I do without a high school degree? I know to them, I will never amount to much more than the girl with a weekend job flipping burgers. Well, that's not true; they must eventually expect me to flip burgers all the other days of the week too.

An unwanted memory surfaces and I can't push it away. A scene replays itself in my head from two years ago. It was in my sophomore year and it was a few weeks before my sixteenth birthday. The month before, Uncle Rich's cancer had come back full force. Before, he could manage by himself at home while I was in school but lately, he'd needed help to do simple things, like pouring milk into his cereal because his hands shook so bad.

I had been at my friend Angela Darling's house. Her parents were very rich: her dad was a lawyer and her mother had a boutique on Fifth Avenue. They lived in the penthouse of their apartment building, all those rooms just for three people and a few yapping dogs. Angela herself had declared herself my friend on account of how she'd liked the way I did my hair. Other than our tastes in hairstyles, we hadn't had much in common. Uncle Rich had paid for me to go to a good school but most of the kids there wore designer labels and had their shoes polished by maids of whom they spoke with disdain. I was used to rummaging the sales racks at J C Penney's for my fanciest clothes and my shoes had never been polished because I didn't like riding the subway dolled up like a princess while the homeless looked on. Still, I wasn't going to say no when a popular girl like Angela wanted me to be her friend.

We'd been sitting in her pastel pink bedroom and Angela had been showing me some new dresses she'd bought. In the middle of modelling a floral yellow number, her mother had walked in. Mrs Darling looked like a supermodel and dressed like one. She wore a lot of red lipstick and always smelt of Chanel No. 5. She wore a gold filigree cross around her neck, a twin of the one she had bought Angela on her sixteenth birthday. Angela looked at her like she was a goddess and, to be honest, I think I did too.

She'd sat herself down on Angela's bed and asked me outright, "So, Sal, what's eating you?"

I had thought, then, how magical it was that she'd detected right off that something was wrong. Angela hadn't noticed and she was my best friend. In my naivety and sweet trust in that woman, I told her everything. I told her of how bad Uncle Rich had gotten and how he wouldn't go to sick homes where they nurse you because he was too proud. I told her how I had to wait outside the door when he went to the bathroom in case he slipped and fell, how I wouldn't be allowed to go out with my friends on the weekends any more. They were the complaints of a shallow girl and I would take them all back if I could. Uncle Rich had raised me and given me everything I had ever needed. The thought of ever saying such things about him makes me cringe.

But the worst thing I said, looking back on it, was not the secrets I'd spilled about Uncle Rich's health to a high society woman. It was six words – six words that reduced me from being her daughter's best friend, a girl to invite over for lunch and to call "Sal" in an affectionate way, to worthless city girl. "I am thinking of leaving school," I had said.

I had seen every good thing she'd ever thought about me crumble in her eyes at that moment. She'd clutched her filigree cross like she did when Mr Darling said a bad word at the dinner table. Except it was much worse. "W-what about your future, Sally?" she'd spluttered. She rattled off a list of jobs high school dropouts had: waitresses, maids, cleaners, nannies and – she'd whispered the last, fanning her face – prostitutes. She told me I was making the wrong decision, that good girls do not on any account leave their paid-for private education. She said, "You are being stupid."

I had felt my heart grow heavy in my chest. Nothing I said would make that woman see me the same way again. I told her I'd been thinking about it for a while now and that Uncle Rich was the most important person to me in the world. "In fact," I'd said while trying to clutch at my composure, "I think I should return to him right now."

She had not stopped me. Angela hadn't either. I hadn't even looked at her as I walked out of her house for the last time. The last image I have of my ex-best friend is her twirling in a yellow rose-patterned dress.

I had stormed out of the building, holding back the sobs I knew would come. I had raced down the hallways and, finally, curled up in the elevator and cried.

I had never gone back to Angela's house again.

I taste the bitter humiliation in my mouth as I shift next to Don. I have been silent for far too long and he's looking at me quizzically.

"We don't have to talk about if you don't want to," he says, a little too late. Not talking about it would make it seem worse than it is. I figured that if he was going to judge me, I may as well tell him now before I fall any further.

"No, it's ok," I say. I look out to the ocean, avoiding his face, as I speak. "When I was five years old, my parents took me on my first plane ride. They were taking me to Canada for my summer vacation because I'd wanted to see the Niagara Falls. On the way there, something went wrong and the plane crashed. I don't remember much, actually. I remember fear but that's it. I remember landing in the ocean and then being put on a boat. That night, my Uncle Rich came to pick me up from the hospital and he'd told me that my mom and dad had died. It's funny, I have a picture of me with my parents and in it, there is a woman with blonde hair and a man with blue eyes but I don't remember them at all.

"Uncle Rich took me to live with him in New York. He brought me up. He was a great man and I loved him, I really did. He could be so difficult at times but on the weekends, he'd always take me to Central Park and then to the library. He taught me to love words, you know. He'd give me a word like tsundoku or psiturism and I would look them up in this huge dictionary that he had in his study. 'Nothing tastes as good as a new word on your tongue,' he'd say.

"Then, when I was ten, he sat me down and made me hot chocolate. Hot chocolate meant that the library was going to be shut this weekend or that my goldfish had died. Hot chocolate never meant anything good. That day, he told me the doctor's thought he had cancer. That night, I heard him cry in his bedroom and I didn't sleep for a week. I waited outside his bedroom door every morning to make sure he came out.

"He had chemotherapy for a year and the cancer went away. He was fit again and everything was back to normal. Then, one day a few years later, I got called to the principal's office in school and he told me there was someone on the phone for me. It was my uncle's doctor telling me Uncle Rich had relapsed. Uncle Rich became so weak. It killed me to see him that way, with his sunken cheeks and shaking hands. I know it killed him to see himself like that.

"A month later, in my sophomore year of high school, he fell in the kitchen. He hit his head on the table and, normally, he would have gotten up and gone back to making his tea. Maybe he would have taken some Advil. But that time, he didn't get up and he ended up spending the next week in Intensive Care. When he came home, I knew I had to leave school. I couldn't imagine anything worse than coming home and finding Uncle Rich dead because I hadn't been there to call an ambulance or help him get back up. So I did. I quit school. I spent my time looking after Uncle Rich.

"He died a year ago and I've been working odd jobs wherever I can to get by. That's my story."

I can't bring myself to look at Don. I wouldn't be able to stand it if I turned to look at him and saw pity, or worse disgust, in his eyes. I feel my eyes prick with tears; I haven't spoken about this to anyone so openly. I blink them away and force myself to look at Don.

And what I see throws me. Because the look in his eyes is understanding. His expression is heavy with it. I want to kick myself for not thinking, even for a second, that Don might actually get what I was going through, the confident boy with the flirtatious smile might have problems too. The past few years have trained me to expect the worst. And I don't know how to handle the best.

"I understand," Don says softly, "My family...Well, my family isn't perfect. It seems like we can never get together without one of us wanting to kill another and the relationships get so complicated that if I started to tell you about them, the stories would go on for thousands of years."

I feel grateful that he hasn't tried to console me or tell me things are alright. Sometimes they're not. Every family has its problems. Some families can patch things up with trips to the library and a book of words. Sometimes families are broken, terrible and unfixable. It doesn't have to be okay. Families are allowed to be messy and loud and erratic. You're allowed to love them and hate them or feel so many things all at once at the thought of them that you don't even know how you feel. No family is perfect but it's knowing where you stand with them, how you stand in them, that is the most important part. It has always been that way to me. I'm glad someone finally understands.

"Maybe you will tell me about them someday," I say to Don, leaning against his shoulder. "Maybe we will live for a thousand years."

I feel his words against my scalp when he says, "Sally, I hope so."

The red sun bleeds out across the horizon, dipping behind the sea to rest for the night. Don rises to stand and offers me a hand. I take it and we head back home.