Lost in the Dunes

The sandboarding trip starts well. The rental hut sits at the edge of the dunes, and the guide hands out boards and a short warning. "Stay inside the orange flags," she says. "Be back by four. And remember, the wind blows off the sea all day long."

Antonia nods and forgets about it at once. She is far more interested in the biggest dune she has ever seen.

By half past two, she, her cousin, the tall boy and the girl with the braid have slid down it three times. Each time, the climb back up feels longer, so they keep moving to the next ridge, and then the next. Nobody notices that the last orange flag has been out of sight for an hour.

At the top of a high ridge, the girl with the braid turns in a slow circle. "Which way is the hut?" she asks.

Every direction shows the same pale waves of sand. The tall boy holds his phone above his head like a trophy. "No signal," he announces. "None."

"Our footprints," her cousin says. "We just follow our footprints back."

They try it, but the wind has been smoothing the sand all afternoon, and the prints fade after ten steps. Twenty minutes later, they reach a spot where the tall boy stops short. In front of him lies a long scratch left by a board, and beside it, a trail of footprints that all four of them recognize.

"We walked in a circle," the girl with the braid says quietly. Their water bottle is half empty.

Antonia sits down and makes herself think. The guide's words come back to her, slowly, like a song she had been trying to remember. The wind blows off the sea. Wind ripples are gentle on the side that faces the wind and steep on the other side.

She runs a hand over the sand beside her. The gentle slopes face one way, and the steep ones face the other.

"The gentle side points toward the sea," she says. "And the hut is by the sea."

"Unless you have it backward," the tall boy says.

"Then check it." She opens the compass on her phone. It does not need a signal, only a sensor, and the needle swings steadily toward west. The sun is already sinking in that direction. The ripples, the compass and the sun all agree.

She leads. Every hundred steps, they push a board upright into a ridge, so that they can keep walking in a straight line toward it.

An hour later, a flash of orange appears between two dunes. Then a second flag, and then the roof of the hut, with the guide standing in front of it, shading her eyes.

In Antonia's pocket, the phone buzzes once, twice, and then, without stopping, thirty more times.