My childhood summers were carefree and idyllic. Three months of gingerly skipping across scorching sand, buying popsicles with found change, napping afternoons away on a hammock and huddling together for bootlegged horror movie night with family did the mind and body good. I would return to school tanned so darkly it was hard to recognize me, and itching with new stories to tell.

I was the kid who told you that his house was haunted or that the school principal was in a cult. Tall tales were my specialty, and though by then most of my friends knew better than to believe me, my stories were entertaining if nothing else, told under candlelight and with the occasional cold breeze, sitting cross-legged in circles at night, the sea howling in and the waves crashing ominously. We spent many nights simply daring each other to tell a spookier story than the last. Our minds were mostly constrained to the clichés of slasher films and folk tales passed down by our superstitious grandparents. There were also the stories that the fishermen told us.