“I’d rather talk,” he said. “I can’t talk with anyone else. You know how people in town feel about her family.”

Summer people; pushy strangers dripping city money: I knew. I also knew how much people like us depended on that money. I had classmates who cleaned their houses, pruned their shrubs, tended their boats and docks. My father stocked special hobnailed boots to tempt the bankers who wanted to hike. Raney’s first words to me, early that summer, had been a request to grab the line she tossed from her sailboat to the dock where I was standing. I was carrying a box of twine I’d picked up for my father, and she might have thought I worked at the boatyard. When she asked me later if I’d like to sail with her, I thought at first she was offering me work.

Instead we sailed across the lake to dances, we swam together, we picked berries and made ice cream and met college boys and out-of-town flyers at parties and band concerts. I slipped away from my sisters to join her every chance I got. She didn’t follow our rules; she acted like they didn’t exist—and from out of all the others, she’d chosen me. Me, to confide in, and misbehave with, and join her in flirting with the intriguing visitors who normally would have ignored me.

I’d turned my back on everyone else and then, when she returned to Rochester at the end of August, been stupidly surprised to find that my classmates, who since first grade had been inhaling the same dust in the same rooms where the same clocks moved too slowly, thought of me as a defector. A few of them, not kindly, let me know I’d only been that summer’s friend, picked as others had been in other years, to be dropped eight weeks later.

I wrote her four times after she left. She didn’t answer until she came back with her father in early October. The note she sent then gave me hope. She was bored, she wrote. So bored! What should we do? I was offended, I was delighted, I wanted to snub her, I wanted to see her. I couldn’t meet her on the Saturday she came back—I was washing bottles at Whitcomb’s that day, and I was anxious to pile up my earnings while the weather held—but I said I’d meet her at the dance that night.