Lindquist reaches down for her glass of soda water and finishes it. But she doesn’t sit. She’s just stalling for time, she’s trying to think. A week ago, she would have walked away, but today—I don’t know, maybe it’s the passionflower in my hair, a symbol of some kind, marked friend—she considers what she should say to me and not say to me.

“Bring me the roll of film in the morning,” she says, “and I’ll tell you about that airplane.”

For the record, Leo and I did nothing but kiss on the beach that afternoon. On my honor! You never know when a pair of pint-sized ruffians might tumble down the path, for one thing, and for another this was a different kind of kissing from the kissing I was used to. When Leo drew back and stroked my hair with both hands, the way you stroke a cat, I thought about telling him I had never done this before, just kissed a boy and nothing else, but I realized how that made me sound, what kind of person that made me. So I said instead that we should probably head back to the house, before we did something we might regret.

“I don’t regret this,” he said. “Do you?”

“Yes.”

He leaned his forehead against mine and said he was sorry. I asked for what. He said he had got me all wrong, he’d sized me up and figured I was just using them all, Irene and the entire family, that I was some hard, cold villain who would break his heart.

I told him he was probably right, that maybe I was that villain.

“Maybe,” he said, “but I’m starting to figure I could take that chance.”

The touch of his forehead was warm, the muscle of him, the sanded skin, the breath. I sat on my knees, in the V of his legs, his gentle arms on either side of me, his hands resting at the back of my head. I was surrounded. I thought that I had come to like Leo a great deal, over the course of the past weeks. I had maybe come to like him too much.

I had come to like them all too much.

I kissed him one more time and clambered to my feet.

“Believe me,” I said, “you shouldn’t take that chance.”

Five hours later, when the black night presses against the windows, I’m regretting this moment of high-mindedness with all my might. My God, what I wouldn’t give to have a Leo lying next to me, equipped and willing to give me oblivion.