The water was blue-black, the little red houseboat sweet and forlorn by itself out there. When we were little, a family had vacationed in it. There were two kids our age, a sister and a brother, and we could see them from the dock or the porch, hanging out their towels and swimsuits on the railing, sitting in little folding chairs in the sun. The parents seemed silent and detached. But we thought we would like the kids. The boy wore a straw hat all the time, even in the rain. The girl had short hair like Peter Pan. I thought about swimming out to meet them, but I was too shy.

And then—the sister died. She drowned. Not here, but off Block Island at the end of one summer. The family came back the following summer, but it was different. They were too sad, even from a distance we could see that. The boy spent hours alone on the deck of the houseboat staring at the water, the horizon, the shore. That was the last we’d seen of them. The boat had been empty ever since.

I shivered.

“Someone walking over your grave?” Cole said.

“I’m still alive.”

“The place where your grave will be. Haven’t you ever heard that?”

“Where did you say you live?” I asked. “New York?”

He paused for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “But I gave up my apartment there. There was no reason to stay.”

“So you’re just planning to start over...here?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. It depends.”

“Won’t you miss city life?”

He gave a dry laugh. “Not really. I’ll miss the coffee at my favorite diner. What’s worth missing? Stuff? No, just people.”

“That’s true, I guess.” But I was thinking of the college applications hidden in the pantry. There were things to miss that weren’t people, and weren’t stuff. Experiences. Dreams for ourselves. There were things I missed, was missing every day.

I looked over at him. The skin of his stomach was so taut, it folded when he sat, like a hem. My chest tightened into a tough twist of sorrow that I didn’t quite understand, a longing for the past, the future, a longing for him in some complicated way I didn’t like at all.

“You don’t need to be afraid,” he said.

“I’m not afraid.”

“I can see your heart beating.”

I clapped my hands over my chest. “I’m not afraid.”

I felt an electric sensation coursing through me, as if I’d swallowed ocean water bright with bioluminescence. I could feel those water-stars gliding up and down the avenues of my body.