“Yeah,” he says. “I know it is.” My ear is to his chest, and I like hearing the vibration of his words before they leave his mouth. “These little seaside towns are full of ghosts. Every stretch of beach, from here up to Maine and all the way down to Florida, they’ve all got these wooden benches. And each one of them has a plaque in remembrance of somebody. A grandmother or an uncle or a town founder. Someone who donated books to the library.” He’s stroking my arm. Trailing his fingers up and down my skin, like Val is trailing hers through the water. I shiver and nestle in closer to his body. “Every time you wanna sit down, you’re rubbing shoulders with ghosts.”

“You’re sitting with the dead,” I tell him. “Somebody’s memory. That’s not the same thing.”

“No,” he says, and I feel him pull me closer. “But a memory can haunt you, if you let it.”

I feel the truth of that in the hollow pit of my stomach.

“Think about how much you’d have to love someone,” Jude says, “to stick around and haunt ’em.”

It’s quiet for a minute. Just the slap of water against the wood of the dock.

“I’m not in love with Chester,” Val finally tells us. “I wish I was.” She lifts her hand out of the water, and I watch the little droplets fall from her fingers. “I tried to be.”

“It’s not your fault,” Lex assures her. His head is resting on Jude’s stomach, and Jude’s hand is moving through his fiery hair. “You can’t know what love feels like until you feel it.”

We stay on the platform until we start to get cold. Then we follow each other back into the water.

We bob and float, content to let the current carry us home. Val and Lex and Jude are laughing. I watch Cole moving through the water just ahead of me. The shape of his shoulders in the moonlight. His arms. It’s beautiful.

He’s beautiful.

We reach the beach together—five strange creatures crawling out of the sea—all arms and legs and dripping hair—and we treasure hunt for our clothes.

A T-shirt here. “Found it!”

A pair of underwear there. “Oh my God! Finally!”

Some shorts that got tossed into the dune grass. “What the hell?”

Lex gives up looking for his second flip-flop. Jude thinks maybe he left it too close to the water and the sea took it as a prize.

The fog is curling around our ankles.

I look back out toward the swim dock, and just for a second, I catch a glimpse of us there. Silent-movie versions of ourselves. Bodies bathed in moonlight. And the soft glow of the lighthouse. I watch Lex push Jude into the water. Val throws her head back and laughs. Face to the sky.