Most people agree with Ainsley. It’s her quote that gets tattooed on arms, next to words like wanderlust and traveler, in calligraphy. Jenna was an Ainsley, always reaching for the next branch, the next success. I’ve always identified as an Emmeline, happy being spontaneous if that spontaneity is confined to a small space.

But my snow globe has been shaken up, and now I’m not so sure.

But if I must be confined, I wish this could be my snow globe forever, this moment with Nolan Endsley. The possibility is stuck in my throat in a small, hopeful lump.

I set my book down and stare out over the lake. A speedboat races across the horizon and the occasional distant shriek of water-skiers meets my ears. Gulls circle overhead, their greedy cries melting into the sound of lapping waves. I tilt my head back and imagine taking a photo of a seagull from beneath its flight, against the dazzling blue sky. A Bird’s Belly View. It would be stupid and cheesy enough that even Jenna would have been tempted to laugh. She would have pinned it on her wall, too.

I try to return to my book, but after reading the same page twice, I throw it behind me with a groan.

“That bad?” Nolan asks, without looking up from his book. His expression is rapt, consumed by the story. “Did a character die?”

“No,” I say. “I’m just … I’m lost.”

There’s a sharp jab in the fat of my right hip, and I roll over to see Nolan’s prying finger retreating to turn a page.

“Found you,” he says. “You can’t be lost with somebody sitting right next you.… Do you ever find out if the ghost in this book is actually a ghost? And do the stones work for everyone or just her?”

The cynic in me wants to argue that togetherness does not cancel out lostness. Instead, the whales come back, even though I keep swearing I don’t need them anymore, and I let myself sink back into the snow globe with Nolan.

Two hours pass before Nolan’s phone begins to ring, an unsophisticated, robotic melody that is nothing like modern ringtones.

“Nineteen ninety-five is calling,” I quip.

“We weren’t even alive in nineteen ninety-five,” Nolan says, before he shuts the ringer off and goes back to his book.

“Anyone important?” I ask.

Nolan half smiles at me over the book, settling onto his stomach in the warm sand. “Not particularly.”

This is proven incorrect when, fifteen minutes later, a red pickup comes roaring into the driveway of the blue house on the hill above us.

Nolan and I sit up, brushing sand from our arms and stretching away the sunny laziness and our respective plots as Alex comes stomping down the hill, his face thunderous.