“How deep do you think this is?” I said, paddling to stay afloat.

“Sometimes all you have to know is that it’s too deep to stand,” Ros said, but they humored me. They took a deep breath and plunged down into the green depths.

“Too deep to touch,” they said when they popped back up, and I felt a little flurry of fear. Maybe we would get giardia. Maybe there were snapping turtles or other foes in the water that were waiting for us. Maybe…

“Don’t freak out,” Ros said, noticing the expression on my face. “If some horrible river monster comes to drag you away, I’ll save you. I promise.”

That was all I needed to hear.

Later, Ros washed our clothes (the washing machine was bat-free) and then hung them to dry on the porch railing. We curled up on the outdoor couch, and they collapsed against me in laughter while we made Touchstone do impressions of us and our history teacher, Mr. Greeb, and my big bulldozer black Labs, which I already missed. When the temperature dropped—dramatically, as we started to lose the light—Touchstone pulled on his fleece jacket and made himself comfortable in one of the far chairs, and Ros brought the frog-patterned blanket outside and spread some of it over them and some of it over me too. Even after our showers, we both smelled faintly of river.

“You look so cozy,” Touchstone said, and he snapped a photo of us on his phone.

“Let’s see,” said Ros.

Touchstone passed his phone to Ros, and they held the device between us. We might have still smelled like river, but we looked, frankly, gorgeous as hell, clean and pink cheeked from our showers with twisty, semidried hair, comfortable in leggings (me) and a soft pair of jeans (Ros), me in my Power Jam T-shirt that Ros had given me for my last birthday, Ros in a navy-blue striped tee that was the exact right amount of loose. The blanket was draped across us in a perfectly cozy, casual way, and the light from the setting sun made us look resplendent, like Greek gods. That photo looked like what I’d been envisioning all spring, the sort of image that kept me going through convincing our parents; through the long school days when we’d whisper Lovesick Falls to one another to boost morale, the name alone enough to inspire wild daydreams; through finding our way here on an old road atlas (my parents’ rule for driving was that I needed to know how to read a map). The long and short of it was, we’d done it: Under my leadership, I’d spirited us away to this wondrous, plucked-from-myth place called Lovesick Falls, and we looked beautiful.

I should’ve felt ecstatic. But what I felt, seeing that photo as the sun went down, was a pang of homesickness.