For my mom, Elizabeth Morrison, with so much love and gratitude
The loudest kind of quiet filled the classroom. Pens scratched paper, erasers squeaked, and desk legs groaned as the clock on the wall tick-tick-ticked. Faster and faster, it seemed, even though Annabelle knew that was impossible.
She was almost out of time.
And the thing was, she got extra time. She and the four other seventh graders with “learning accommodations” got forty-five minutes longer than the rest of the kids, who’d already pushed in their chairs and turned in their exam booklets and burst into the hallways to celebrate the start of summer. But forty-five extra minutes didn’t do Annabelle any good when her brain had gone as hazy as the harbor on a foggy day.
She ran her fingertip across the skinny blue lines in the booklet where she was supposed to be writing her essay. The essay that counted for 25 percent of the history exam grade, as Mr. Derrickson had told them over and over. She traced one, two, three lines across the page and wished she were staring down at the thick black lines along the bottom of the pool.
She didn’t need those black lines to guide her from one end of the pool to the other anymore. Her body always stayed straight, and she knew exactly how many strokes to take before it was time to flip underwater and push off the wall, propelling herself back the other way. But she still liked knowing they were there, as familiar as everything else about swimming. The glint of sunlight on the pool’s pale blue surface. The mingled scents of sunscreen, chlorine, and greasy snack bar food. The splash of diving in and the cool welcome of the water.
The learning specialist, Ms. Ames, put her hand on Annabelle’s wrist.
“Just write down anything you remember, okay?” she whispered. “Like we talked about. That way Mr. Derrick-son can give you credit for what you know.”
So Annabelle took three deep breaths, the way she always did before a race, and tried to tune out the clock’s echoing tick and the other kids’ frantic writing.
She managed to fill up half the page . . . but she knew exactly what Mr. Derrickson would do when he read what she’d written. He’d scrawl question marks in the margins with his green pen. He’d write, “Irrelevant,” and “Please answer the question,” and “Where is your thesis?”
She flipped through the rest of the test. All those multiple-choice questions with all those choices that sounded right. The fill-in-the-blank section Mr. Derrickson had insisted was “easy-peasy.” “Automatic points for anybody who’s studied at all.” Right.
“Okay,” Ms. Ames said from the front of the room. “Put your pens and pencils down, please. And congratulations! You’re officially done with seventh grade!”
Two kids whooped and high-fived each other. Annabelle looked at the essay she’d barely started, barely holding back tears as she gathered up her things.
She managed to echo Ms. Ames’s “Have a good summer” before stumbling into the hallways that had emptied out almost an hour ago. When Mia and Jeremy and everyone else had all gone to lunch without her.
The other four extra-time kids were all boarding students, so they told Annabelle they’d see her at middle school closing ceremonies and headed to the cafeteria or the dorms. Annabelle pushed open the side door, stepping into the bright June sunshine.
She gulped in the island air—a little bit salty if you really paid attention, even this far from the ocean. It was over, anyway. Seventh grade was finally done, and summer stretched out ahead of her, full of adventures with Mia and Jeremy and summer swim team practices at the pool, where most of the kids didn’t go to the Academy and she got to be Annabelle the star butterflyer, not Annabelle who could never finish her work on time at school.
Mom’s car was waiting at the curb, and she rolled down the window. “Belle! How’d it go, honey? Did we study the right things? Did you feel ready?”
“I’m never ready for Mr. Derrickson’s tests.”
Annabelle plopped down onto the hot front seat, tossed her things on the floor, and slammed the door closed.
Mom’s eyebrows folded in, forming that tiny worry line right in the middle. That was how she used to look at Dad, back when things got really bad. And it was how she looked at Annabelle now, way, way too often.
“Well, you worked so hard,” Mom said. “I’m sure all that effort paid off.”
Then she nodded. As if she could nod those words into being true. She patted Annabelle’s knee and reached up to grip the steering wheel, her silver bracelets clinking. Mitch had given her one of those bracelets for each of their wedding anniversaries. She had three so far, and she wore them all the time.
“Where to?” she asked as she pulled away from the curb. “My next meeting isn’t until two. We could go out for a special lunch. Do you want to call Mitch to see if he’s free? I know he’ll want to celebrate with you, too.”
Annabelle watched out the window as they drove along the school’s winding driveway, past dorms and fields and high school kids who sat on the grass, laughing as they signed each other’s yearbooks. Past the gray-shingled office where they’d come for her admissions interview two years ago—the summer before sixth grade, when she and Mom and Mitch had first moved to Gray Island.
The Academy was a boarding school, mostly, for sixth-to-twelfth-grade students from the mainland. But Mom had read on their website that they “strive to be a community school” and set aside financial aid for “qualified day students” who live on the island. So she’d filled out an application for Annabelle, and somehow Annabelle had gotten in.
Because barely any other island kids had applied, probably. Because most island kids thought everybody at the Academy was snobby.
“You must be hungry, huh?” Mom said.
She was, but if they went out to lunch in town, Mom and Mitch would know everybody and everybody would ask about school because that’s what everybody always asked about. And anyway, after this morning, her whole body ached with the need to swim.
“Actually can you drop me off at the pool?” she asked. “I can eat there.”
“But you don’t have practice today,” Mom pointed out. “Yeah, but we did yesterday,” Annabelle reminded her, as if she needed to be reminded. “And I really need to swim today, since I skipped it.”
Mom had made Annabelle stay home from summer team practice to squeeze in a few more hours of studying, not that those extra hours had done any good.
Mom sighed, and Annabelle sort of wished Mitch had been the one to pick her up. Mitch would have agreed to take her to the pool in an instant because he got it—how important it was for Annabelle to train. How good she was, and how great she could be.
“You probably have lots of work anyway, right?” Annabelle said. “With all the summer people wanting you to plan all their parties? Could we do takeout from Lombardi’s tonight instead? I’m in a gnocchi mood.”
Mom hesitated at the stop sign, but she turned left instead of right, toward the pool instead of back to town. Annabelle’s shoulders relaxed for the first time since she’d sat down to start her test that morning.
“All right, Belle. You deserve to celebrate how you want. The pool and Lombardi’s it is.”
Mom probably wouldn’t feel that way if she’d seen how little Annabelle had written for her essay, but Annabelle kept her mouth shut and watched all the giant vacation homes they passed, mostly occupied again now that summer was finally starting.
When they got to the pool, Mom said the same exact things she always did: to be safe and reapply sunscreen and drink plenty of water. Then she leaned over to give Annabelle an extra-tight, extra-long hug.
“I’ll come back to get you after my two o’clock meeting,” she said into Annabelle’s ear. “And, hey. I’m proud of you no matter what. You know that, right?”
Annabelle nodded as she pulled away from Mom’s hug and then stepped out of the car. But did that even count, the kind of pride you didn’t have to do anything good to earn?
After Annabelle ate lunch at the snack bar, she changed into her new black racing suit and lowered herself into an open lap lane between two grown-ups. One of them was swimming a smooth, quick freestyle, and the other bobbed up and down in a slow breaststroke.
She pushed off the wall and started to swim, feeling the familiar pinch of her goggles and watching bubbles stream ahead of her as she blew out air.
Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke.
Once she reached the other end, she flip-turned and pushed off, her strong quad muscles launching her forward. Her mind cleared, just like always, and her arms and legs took over. Each time she came up for a breath, she heard a burst of noise—people chatting, little kids shouting by the baby pool—but then her head was back under where she couldn’t hear anything other than the swish, pull, and kick of her own body. By the time she reached the wall again, her muscles itched to speed up, and it felt so good to pick up her pace.
This wasn’t like school, where she was always aware of what everybody else was doing: who finished tests early, who wrote so much that they had to ask for extra paper, who hissed a “Yes!” when a teacher handed back an assignment. In the pool, she could sense where other swimmers were without wasting any focus on them. She was only vaguely aware that the distance between her and the freestyler in the next lane stretched longer and longer as she swam faster and faster. She barely even noticed when the two other lap swimmers finished and got out.
After her fingertips touched the wall at the end of her last lap, she was surprised to see an older girl standing over her, clapping.
She pushed her goggles up her forehead. It was Elisa Price, dressed for the fourteen-and-up team’s practice in a navy and yellow team suit. Annabelle was used to seeing Elisa with a swim cap on, so it took a second to recognize her with her thick brown curls loose around her freckled face.
“Well if it isn’t the girl who broke all my under-fourteen fly records!” Elisa said, and Annabelle grinned.
“I still have to shave off some time to beat your freestyle ones, though,” she replied as she pushed herself out of the water.
Elisa laughed, showing the little gap between her front teeth that made her look friendly and unintimidating, even though she was so tall and strong and finishing her sophomore year at Gray Island High.
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna be a problem, judging by what I just saw,” she said.
Other high school swimmers were here, too, which meant it was later than Annabelle had realized. Her friend Jeremy’s older sister, Kayla, waved from across the pool, and two guys—Connor Madison and Jordan Bernstein—were over by the lifeguard stand, yanking off their T-shirts and pulling on swim caps as they laughed with the new lifeguard.
Thick clouds had covered up the sun, so Annabelle wrapped her arms around herself to stop shivering.
“Go dry off,” Elisa said. “But good to see you, Annabelle. And I’ll try to emotionally prepare myself for seeing my name erased from the rest of the under-fourteen record boards this summer.”
She swiped at her eyes as if she were tearing up and then gave Annabelle’s shoulder a squeeze.
Annabelle passed Connor and Jordan on the way to get her towel, and when she walked by, she heard Connor’s low voice.
“Wow. Looks like Hummingbird’s all grown up,” he said. Quietly, but not that quietly.
And when she glanced up, his green eyes were on her, laser focused. As if she were more interesting than any of the high school girls who were always giggling at his jokes and finding reasons to touch his arm.
As if he definitely didn’t see her the way everybody used to—as the little girl who was fast enough to swim with the bigger kids but had to move her arms and legs hummingbird-quick to keep up.
As she wrapped herself in her towel, her belly went as warm as if she’d chugged hot chocolate. Her new black suit fit differently than her other racing suits did. The straps were thin and the front dipped low enough that she could see the freckle in the middle of her chest—the one most of her shirts covered up. Her other racing suits flattened her out, but this one didn’t. And the leg openings were cut extra high, which meant her legs looked extra long.
Connor Madison had noticed.
Connor Madison, who was finishing his freshman year at the high school and was so funny and charming that even the seniors flirted with him. She couldn’t wait to tell Mia. The other day, she and Mia had agreed that Connor was the cutest boy at the pool.
Right now, Annabelle didn’t feel at all like the girl who had barely written anything on her history exam essay.
She felt powerful. Unstoppable. Extraordinary.
By the next week, Annabelle had convinced herself her grades wouldn’t be that terrible.
After all, she had worked really, really hard. She’d gone to every extra help session. She’d reviewed with her tutor every day during lunch and with Mom every night at home. She’d definitely failed Mr. Derrickson’s final, but exams didn’t count for that much of the overall grades. And anyway she’d turned in all that extra credit.
On the morning that grades were scheduled to be posted online, Mom sat next to her at the kitchen table as she opened up her laptop and logged into her school account.
Her hand shook as she tried to click on the link that read, “Annabelle Marie Wilner. Seventh Grade Report Card.”
“You okay?” Mom asked, and Annabelle knew without looking that the worry line had formed between her eyebrows again. “I can leave the room. Do you want to check by yourself?”
Annabelle shook her head. The grades would be mailed home, too. It’s not like she could keep them a secret. She took three deep breaths and clicked.
And then she jerked her hand back as if the trackpad had burned her finger.
B+ in science. B− in math. C in Spanish. C in English. C− in history.
Mom gasped when she saw the grades, then covered her mouth as if she could force the gasp back in.
Three Cs. After all that work.
Three Cs on her final seventh-grade report card was the absolute best she could do.
“Oh, Belle.” Mom reached out for a hug, but Annabelle ducked away and stood.
“I’m . . . I’m meeting Jeremy and Mia. I have to go.”
Mom’s worry line was etched in so deep that Annabelle thought it might get stuck there, the way kids used to say your eyes could get stuck if you crossed them for too long.
“You did your best, honey,” Mom said. “That’s what matters.”
Right.
Annabelle hurried to the front hall to grab her things. “I’ll be back by three,” she called.
“Be safe! Love you!” Mom called back.
Annabelle bolted for the door so Mom wouldn’t have to come up with any more lies to make her feel better.
Or to make herself feel better. About having a daughter who could only get Cs, no matter how hard she tried.
Outside, the sky was bright and cloudless—the same blue as the hyacinths in bloom all around the island. Annabelle fastened her helmet, dropped her bag in the basket of her bike, and started to ride.
She was meeting Jeremy and Mia at Bluff Point, their favorite summer place. It was right off the bike path, so they were allowed to go by themselves, and far enough away from the fancy neighborhoods full of vacation homes that it was never crowded, even once summer people took over most of the island.
Annabelle usually loved riding her bike. She loved that she made her own breeze, even when the air was hot and still like today. She loved the soft buzz of her tires against the worn pavement and the way she knew just how hard to pedal to get through the patches of sand that sometimes covered the ground. Biking was almost as good as swimming for clearing her head and making her feel completely in control.
But today, she couldn’t stop thinking of those Cs on her report card and that look on her mom’s face. The shock that Annabelle couldn’t do any better. There was something else behind that shock, too. Shame? That Annabelle was her daughter, and she was this bad at school?
And how many more Cs would it take before the school decided that she wasn’t a “qualified day student” who deserved special financial aid after all? And what would Mom do then?
Bike tires spun on the ground behind Annabelle, and then there was Jeremy, pulling up beside her. Jeremy would know the right word for that look on Mom’s face, if Annabelle told him about it. He knew the right word for everything.
“I saw you from way back by Brambleberry Street, but I didn’t think I’d catch you,” he said.
“I guess I’m slow today.” She forced herself to smile.
Jeremy grinned back. “You? Never.”
He’d gotten a haircut since school had ended, so the longish light brown pieces that usually hung out the front and sides of his bike helmet were gone. He wore one of his dad’s GREEN CONSTRUCTION T-shirts, and the baggy sleeves hung to his elbows.
“Did you check your grades?” she asked, because it was better to get the topic over with.
“Yeah, I saw them.”
And they were probably all As and A-pluses, because that was Jeremy. He had the same kind of “qualified day student” scholarship Annabelle did, but he actually deserved his. He had probably never even considered the possibility of getting a C. He’d be shocked by an A-minus.
“You checked yours, too?” he asked.
“Yep,” she replied, then scrambled for something else to talk about. “Hey, any news on Bertha?”
“Yes!”
A man with a little kid on the back of his bike rang his bell to pass. Jeremy fell in behind Annabelle as the man sped by. A summer dad, riding the kind of bike they rented out at the shops in town.
Then Jeremy caught back up, his pale brown eyes wide with excitement. “She pinged near Montauk, and she’s heading our way!”
Bertha was a great white shark who’d been spotted off the shore of the island last summer, and Jeremy watched her movements on a shark-tracking app. She was a juvenile—so young that her jaw wasn’t strong enough to eat seals or sea lions yet, and she couldn’t travel too far from the coast of Long Island, where her home was.
“You think she’s going to come back to the island?” Annabelle asked.
In front of them, the summer dad’s tires swerved as he hit a patch of sand.
“She might turn back like she did in January,” Jeremy said. “Or go in toward the Cape like in March. But maybe.”
He’d learned so much about Bertha because the shark spotting had messed up his dad’s summer business last year. Most of Mr. Green’s construction projects happened in the off-season, and then he took snorkelers and scuba divers out on his boat in the summer. After Bertha, most people had been too scared to go on boat trips, so Jeremy had started doing research to prove that sharks were almost never a threat to humans.
And Annabelle had gotten swept up in his interest. It was fun to see the world through Jeremy’s eyes—as a place where you could spot a problem and feel so certain you could fix it. And there was something that fascinated her about Bertha, this creature who was so big and terrifying and yet still barely old enough to go out and explore by herself. She imagined Bertha’s shark parents reminding her to be safe before they let her go out to swim around on her own, and then worrying while she was away.
“How big do you think she is now?” Annabelle asked.
They were out of their neighborhood now, reaching the marshy wildlife preserve. Seagulls squawked overhead, and a dragonfly hovered at the edge of the path.
Jeremy shook his head. “No way to know for sure unless another shark tagger finds her. Maybe nine feet?”
Up ahead, the summer dad pulled off to the side to check the bike path map, and Jeremy and Annabelle rode past, up to the mostly hidden entrance for Bluff Point.
They locked their bikes at the rack in front of the dunes, where Mia’s pink cruiser was waiting. As they walked onto the beach, Annabelle kicked off her flipflops, letting her feet sink into the soft sand. The waves were bigger than usual, leaving hissing white foam after they’d broken, and the seals were out, some resting on the rocks and others bobbing up and down in the water. She took in a big, salty gulp of ocean air.
Mia wore a bright blue bikini and lay facedown on her towel, kicking her already tan legs up and down as she read something on her phone. Annabelle had the kind of fair skin that either burned or did nothing, and Jeremy did, too. But Mia could spend five minutes out in the sun and boom: Her olive skin was golden-tan. “One good thing about Greek genes,” she’d told Annabelle once.
She popped up and ran over to Annabelle and Jeremy, spraying sand with every step. She looked like the old Mia right now, with her dark eyes all lit up. The Mia from sixth grade and even the first half of seventh, who made Annabelle a card on National Best Friend Day and painted Annabelle’s nails team colors before all their big meets last summer.
But when she opened her mouth, it was second-half-of-seventh-grade Mia all the way.
“I did it! Nothing below an A-minus except art, which my parents couldn’t care less about!”
The words pushed all the soothing, salty-fresh air out of Annabelle’s lungs, but she told herself to be happy for her friend.
“My dad’s taking me anywhere I want in August to celebrate!” Mia said. “I think I’m going to pick L.A.”
Her family was one of the few year-round island families with enough money to afford the full Gray Island tuition and plan a trip across the country in honor of a report card. They lived up the coast from Annabelle and Jeremy, in a neighborhood full of vacation homes. They used to be summer people who lived in Boston the rest of the year, but they’d moved here full-time right around the same time Annabelle had. Mia’s dad’s company had moved their office, so he was going to work from home anyway, and her mom, who had grown up in California, missed being near the ocean all the time.
“Congrats,” Jeremy said. “That’s awesome.”
Then he snuck a wrinkly-foreheaded look over at Annabelle, and her heart cannonballed to the bottom of her stomach.
Jeremy knew. It didn’t matter how hard she had tried to hide it. Jeremy knew how stupid she was, and he felt sorry for her.
She was already sure Mia had figured it out, since Mia peeked at her papers and lingered in the doorway when teachers talked to her after class. But Jeremy never peeked or eavesdropped. He was in a different section for history, so he hadn’t heard Mr. Derrickson say, “I can’t teach you if you don’t even try” loud enough for everybody to hear as he handed back a mostly blank quiz. And he was always busy with mathletes or sitting with his guy friends when she went to Ms. Ames’s office or met her tutor at lunch.
“Um, yeah. That’s really great!” Annabelle managed. “Good job!”
She walked over to Mia’s towel and sat next to it without bothering to spread out her own. Jeremy plopped down on her other side, and then Mia lowered herself back down, too. A little ways away, a lifeguard blew his whistle and motioned for two kids who’d gone out too far to come back in.
“How’d you guys do?” Mia asked. “You met Mr. Derrickson like a zillion times for history help, right, Annabelle? Did you do well?”
Annabelle focused on the seals that bobbed up and down in the water, out past where the lifeguards let swimmers go, waiting for their turn to sunbathe on the rocks.
“Um, yeah,” she said. “I studied a lot. My grade was . . . eh.”
She shrugged to show it didn’t really matter and buried her toes in the sand.
“Aww, Annabelle.” Mia put her arm around Annabelle’s shoulders, and Annabelle squirmed away to pick up a rock. Pink quartz, it looked like.
“Mr. Derrickson’s the worst,” Mia said. “He seriously wants people to fail. He’s, like, a Satanist who takes pleasure in making people suffer.”
“You mean a sadist?” Jeremy asked.
Mia reached over Annabelle to flick him in the ear. She never really minded when Jeremy corrected her, though. She was confident enough in her own intelligence that it didn’t shake her when she got a word wrong.
“The point is, he’s a miserable person. And not a fair teacher. That short-answer section was ridiculous—we barely ever talked about any of that.”
Mia talked faster and lower than she used to. In the spring, she’d joined the lacrosse team and become friends with all the prettiest, loudest eighth graders. She sounded just like them now, and she said everything like it was a fact, even when it wasn’t.
“It was a really hard final,” Jeremy agreed.
But it hadn’t been too hard for Jeremy or Mia. Only for Annabelle.
Annabelle wiped the sand off the pink quartz rock and ran her fingers over its rounded end. Pink quartz, white quartz, and salt-and-pepper granite—those were the most common kinds of rocks on the island, because they could handle getting pounded by the waves. She’d learned that her first year at the Academy, in sixth-grade science.
When they did their unit on the island habitat, she’d had questions about everything: why there were so many of those three kinds of rocks, why the ocean looked blue in the morning and greenish by afternoon, why all of the beaches were bordered with dunes.
And her teacher, Mrs. Mattson, would tell her, “What a terrific question!” And Jeremy would say, “I’ve never stopped to think about that!” And for as long as she was in science class, she almost felt smart.
Mia took the rock to examine it, and then dropped it back in Annabelle’s palm. “Hey, what are you guys doing tomorrow? Wanna play mini golf?”
“Okay, yeah,” Annabelle said, willing her voice to sound happy.
Mini golf with Mia was the best because Mia came up with silly challenges, like making everybody crouch down and hit the ball pool-cue style, with the skinny end of their clubs. And this was what Annabelle had wanted all spring. No lacrosse girls for Mia to sit with at lunch while she had to meet her tutor. No video-game-obsessed guys from Jeremy’s advanced math class to invite him back to their dorm rooms to beat the next level of something or other. All the boarding kids had gone back to Boston and Connecticut and New Hampshire and New York, and now she and Mia and Jeremy could go back to being Annabelle, Mia, and Jeremy again, like last summer.
Annabelle had friends at school, too, but she wasn’t around that much since she spent so much time studying and swimming. They were always nice to her when she was there, but she never got the impression that they missed her all that much when she wasn’t.
She slid off her tank top, and Mia glanced at her black suit—the same one she’d been wearing the other day when Connor Madison had stared—and then looked away fast.
Back in the spring, Mia’s mom had taken the two of them shopping in Boston, and they’d tried on the same striped shirt. On Mia, it had looked like a regular T-shirt. But when Annabelle had stepped out of the dressing room, Mia’s mom had said, “Va-va-voom! Honey, I don’t think you can wear that shirt to school!” Mia had rolled her eyes and told her mom to stop making a big deal out of nothing. But she’d frowned at her own reflection in a way that told Annabelle she didn’t really think it was nothing. Now she was frowning down at her bikini top the same way.
Annabelle was about to ask if anyone wanted to go in the water when Mia said, “Hey, so what’s the deal with genius camp, Jer?”
Jeremy’s cheeks filled in with pink and he tried to brush away the hair that used to fall to his eyebrows before he’d gotten it cut. “I guess it’s happening.”
“Genius camp?” Annabelle repeated.
Jeremy reached behind her to flick Mia, but Mia pulled away so he only flicked air.
“That’s not what it’s called. It’s an enrichment thing at a college in Boston for a few weeks. It starts next month. Samir’s going, too.”
Samir was Jeremy’s closest guy friend at the Academy, and he lived in Massachusetts when he wasn’t at school.
“It’s kind of expensive, so I wasn’t sure if I could go, but there was this scholarship thing, so . . .”
He trailed off, and Annabelle squeezed the pink quartz rock, hoping that would balance out the way her throat squeezed up and made it hard to breathe.
What about us? she wanted to say. What about coming to Bluff Point every week and sharing a large cup at the Creamery—half peanut butter cup and half double-chocolate chunk—and going back to the Cape Cod shark museum like last summer to find out more about Bertha?
But what came out was “What . . . what about summer swim team?”
Jeremy let out a little laugh as he ran his fingers over the top of his short hair. “I think the team will manage without me.”
“Maybe,” Mia said in her loud new lacrosse-girl voice. “But who will judge our amazing pool handstand competitions and order too many fries at the snack bar so we can steal the extras?”
“Those aren’t extras!” Jeremy protested.
Annabelle made herself laugh along with them, but the sound came out shrill, like the bark of those bobbing seals who wanted their turn on the rocks.
Jeremy stood and brushed the sand off his legs, careful to step far enough away that it didn’t hit Annabelle and Mia. “Wanna swim?”
Mia flopped back on her towel and picked up her phone. “You guys go. I need to text Reagan back.”
Reagan was one of Mia’s lacrosse friends who had just finished eighth grade. She was the loudest girl on the whole team, and she cursed and made fun of people in a way that she pretended was silly but always felt mean. Annabelle hadn’t been that sorry to see her go back to Connecticut.
“She’s super bored at home,” Mia said. “I’m telling her she should visit so we can give her the true Gray Island experience!”
The true Gray Island experience. Like Mia had given Annabelle after they met at an Academy welcome event before sixth grade. Since Mia had come to Gray Island every summer for years, she’d already known that you could watch movies on the beach on Thursday nights in August, and that the Creamery’s cookies were half price after five, and that the burger shack by the lighthouse had the best fish and chips and the best sunset views. She’d made it seem like having Annabelle with her made all of her favorite summer things even more fun. But maybe now, having Annabelle with her wasn’t enough anymore.
Annabelle squeezed the pink quartz rock again—harder this time—before she buried it in the sand. Jeremy held a hand out to help her up, but she didn’t take it. She pushed herself off the ground, shed her shorts, and bolted for the ocean, fighting the pull of the sand with every step.