“Yeah, well, maybe she should have said that instead of just marooning us at the lagoon.”

“We got home okay.”

“It was the principle of the thing,” I say.

“I miss you, too,” says Touch. “You realize you’ve ditched both of us, right?”

The cake hardens in my mouth like cement.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, brushing me off.

“No—Touchstone. I mean it. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” he says. “I know you’re sorry.”

“Besides,” I say, trying to lighten the mood, “I thought you’d be happy I was gone. Just you and Celia out here, all by yourselves. Isn’t that, like, your wildest dream?”

Touchstone blushes deeply, and I feel guilty, naming the thing that neither of them likes to name, those old feelings that Touchstone carries around with him like a sack of stones.

“She’s busy with Oliver Teller,” he says, and his voice grows disdainful. “They went on a date.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” says Touch.

“Does she like him?”

“I mean, he’s Oliver Teller,” says Touchstone. “Aren’t you obligated to like him?”

“Sorry, dude,” I say. “That’s a tough one.”

“C’est la vie,” says Touchstone, but I can see the hurt in him, how it drags him down like an anchor.

“You know what I wish?” says Touch. “I wish the spring were real.”

“Same,” I say, and in the silence, I think not of Celia or Oliver Teller or even Jess but my father, far away on the East Coast, who was now nothing more than a series of missed calls on my phone. If I drank from the spring, maybe I’d forget all about him.

Touchstone and I eat for another minute—we’ve done considerable damage to the cake—and then I shoulder my tote bag and leave for what seems like a better place, the exact same way my dad did.

THE DROPPED ACORN REVISITED,
or French Words That Start with W

Perhaps the spring’s magic worked by keeping the beloved away.

Ros had been staying at Jess’s for nearly two weeks, and the whole house slept poorly in their absence. Not just the people, but the Lily Pad itself: Its joints shifted and creaked all night, as though it were deeply disturbed by the events of the summer. Ros sent texts—pictures of Jess’s cats or bouquets they were making—and I occasionally dropped in at the Hidden Fern to see them and say hello. But the house knew in its bones that things were going wrong, that something had disturbed the easy comfort of the Triumvirate, something far worse than Touchstone finishing all my granola with his hands. Time passed slowly and painfully. The Trojan Women opened. It was the third week in July, and Ros was officially a ghost.

It hurt.