“Brandy, cut it out,” I say. Opening my eyes and looking back over my shoulder, I see Ronan standing over me. “What do you want?”

“I’m guessing you don’t want the word boring written across your back in white letters.”

“What are you talking about?” I jump to my feet and hear Tressa laughing. Brandy punches her the way a friend does, kidding around. The way she used to punch me.

I’m still confused. Write on my back in white letters? This kid is bonkers. “Listen,” I say. “I don’t know what you—”

“They wrote on your back with sunscreen,” he interrupts. “They wrote boring in giant letters. I don’t know how long you’ve been lying there, but if you burned . . . or tanned . . . or whatever . . .” He takes a step back and turns to leave. “Anyway, I did you a favor by waking you up.”

Tressa laughs, but it sounds fake. Like someone in a play who isn’t very good at acting. Brandy and I lock eyes for a second, but she looks away quick. So she was in on it. I feel like I’ve been punched.

The boy is a ways down the beach now. Throwing rocks.

I reach for my back and feel gobs of sunscreen. I scoop my T-shirt off the sand, shake it hard, and put it on. “Thanks a lot,” I say as I trudge away.

I look at my watch. It’s been a long time. I worry I’ll have that BORING sign on my back. A sign I can’t wash off. This is just great.

Walking across the lawn, I think to look for Grammy, but she’ll know something is wrong by looking at me. I’m way too humiliated to explain.

Loneliness rises all around me like fog in the early morning. And I realize how much I miss the friends who don’t make my stomach hurt.

I know Aimee and Michael are practicing today, and so I decide to go to the playhouse.

It’ll be a good reminder that I still have decent friends in the world.

And I guess I’d like to see what a play about an orphan looks like.

• • •

The Cape Playhouse looks like a barn filled with rows of benches. It’s dark and smells like a hot attic. I count seven ceiling fans spinning above.

The rehearsal is what I expect—a bunch of kids singing, “It’s a hard-knock life.”

A hard-knock life, huh? All these actors with their mothers waiting for them outside in their cars. After practice, they’ll all go to the beach or out to lunch at one of those fancy places where you can’t go barefoot like you can at my favorite place, Saucepan Lynn’s.

The worst thing, unfortunately, is Aimee. She can sing, that’s for sure. But she’s loud and chirpy as she sings about not mattering to anyone. The kinds of feelings I think you’d squeeze and squash, not be singing about with outstretched arms and showing every tooth you have.