Next to them, on his own blanket, Darius sat sketching with charcoal, and he’d brought out a boom box and was playing some Cuban jazz tape that his abuela had sent with him to Gwynns. Other kids were dancing farther down the hill, music traveling in the fractious air. It all seemed so—it was a dream. Dare’s thick brown hair, nearly black, fluffed up in the wind, releasing his scent, incense and sugar and roses.

Jack felt young, finally allowed a few seconds to be a child, and he felt so old, because this moment was temporary, and he knew that real life wasn’t really like this. It was just another kind of fantasy.

He was in between.

And not everything was perfect. Maybe twenty feet from them, from this peaceful illusion he’d have to lock away before returning home for the summer, were Theo Beaumont and Genni Jones. He’d been trying not to look at them—Jones in a skimpy bikini (because that girl had no shame) and Beau’s shirt unbuttoned, pale skin turning pink.

He wondered if they were together.

He wondered if he and Meg were together.

“You have that face.” Meg’s umber eyes were open, watching him.

“What face?”

“The thinking-too-hard face.”

“I’m not trying to. It’s just my face. I have very little control over it.”

Dare laughed into his sketchbook. “That’s true.”

Jack then made his disgruntled face, and Meg stuck out her tongue at him and smiled.

“We just finished exams.” She sat up, so close. “So stop thinking.”

“I—”

She was getting closer, leaning in, and he was frozen like a small thing being hunted, and he didn’t know what was happening, and for some reason there was a—a splintering, where he thought yes and no at the same time, and she kissed him.

And he saw spring sunlight in the fur of her eyelashes.

He had forgotten to close his own eyes, so he did that, because that was what he was supposed to do, right?

Her lips were soft but a little chapped—she always chewed her bottom lip when she studied—and he put his hand on her shoulder. And he loved her in the way he thought love must feel, and somewhere in there, between feeling her collarbone and smelling her lotion and listening to the ascending piano part of the jazz on Dare’s stereo, he realized that this was his first kiss.

It was—it was nice. Not exactly what he had expected, maybe, but it was Meg kissing him, so it must have been good.

“I think I may be sick.”

His eyes snapped open, and he pulled away fast, blushing, and wiped his lip with the back of his hand.