Guess I’d be going to the ninth-grade dance with Nikki.

Elliot glanced over at me. “Can you tell me more about how boys suck?”

“Boys don’t want girls who are interesting,” I complained. “They want girls with boobs and who wear slutty clothes, and flirt.”

Elliot slowly put his book down on a patch of beach grass beside him. “I don’t want that.”

Ignoring this, I went on, “And girls do want boys who are interesting. Girls want the shy geeks who know everything and have big hands and good teeth and say sweet things.” I bit my lips closed. I might have said too much.

Elliot beamed at me, metal finally gone, his teeth perfect. “Do you like my teeth?”

“You’re weird.” Changing the subject, I asked, “Favorite word?”

He stared out at the ocean for a few breaths before saying, “Cynosure.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It’s a focal point of admiration. What about you?”

I didn’t even have to think: “Castration.”

Elliot winced. He stared down at his hands in his lap, turning them over and inspecting them carefully. “Well, for what it’s worth,” he whispered, “Andreas thinks you’re cute.”

“Andreas?” I heard the shock in my own voice. I narrowed my eyes as I stared down the beach at where Andreas and George wrestled, and tried to imagine kissing Andreas. His skin was good, but his hair was too shaggy for my taste and he was a little bit of a meathead.

“He said that? He’s with Amie.”

Elliot scowled, picking up a small rock and throwing it toward the thrashing surf. “They broke up. But I told him if he touched you I would kick his ass.”

I barked out a loud laugh.

Elliot was too rational to be offended by my reaction: what Andreas lacked in brains he made up in serious muscle.

“Yeah, so, he tackled me. We wrestled. We broke Mom’s vase, you know that ugly one in the hall?”

“Oh no!” My distress was convincing, but I was mostly elated they’d been fighting over me.

“She grounded us both.”

I bit my lip, trying not to laugh. Instead, I stretched out on the sand, returning to my book, and lost myself in the words, reading over and over again the same phrase: It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real.

Hours may have passed before I heard a throat clear behind us, saw Dad appear. His frame blocked out the sun, casting a cool shadow over where we lay.

I registered only once he was there that I had slowly shifted so I was lying with my head on Elliot’s stomach, in our secluded stretch of sand. I pushed to sit up, awkwardly.

“What are you guys doing?”

“Nothing,” we said in unison.