“I did?” And then I notice that Brandy looks much older than me, with makeup, a purse, and the kind of clothes you buy in little stores instead of big ones. I feel a little funny about my faded Boston Marathon T-shirt even though it was the greatest tag sale find of the summer last year. But Brandy is smiling, and I am happy to see her.

“I’ve already pulled out our collecting pails,” she says, and that feeling in my stomach melts away. She’s the old Brandy.

Since kindergarten, we have collected rocks and shells each summer and glued and painted them to make sculptures.

“But first,” I say, pulling at her sleeve, “let’s check on the house.”

Underneath a huge group of flowering bushes, there is a small stone house that we made the summer before second grade, hoping fairies would move in. That was five summers ago. Now we just check on it first thing.

I drop to my knees and push the branches aside. The house isn’t there.

“Where is it?” Brandy asks, crouching next to me.

“I don’t know. You think someone took it?”

She laughs. “Well, it wasn’t a mobile home, so yeah. Unless the fairies finally showed.” She takes a step away.

I crawl through nearby bushes to look for it.

“C’mon,” she says. “Let’s just head down to the beach.”

“Don’t you care?” I ask.

“I mean, I wish it were there, Dels, but some little kids probably found it. So, whatever.” She tugs at my sleeve. “C’mon. Let’s go down to the beach. I have a tan to work on.”

A tan? Since when does she care about a tan? I follow, but the little voice that my neighbor Henry always warns me not to ignore—the one people hear in times of danger or when they’re about to do something dumb—tells me a cold front is on the horizon. The air is shifting. I’m upset that the house is gone, but I’m mostly worried that Brandy couldn’t care less.

We grab the pails, and when she runs, I do, too. The Fiesters have an old red pail and a blue pail that Mrs. Fiester and her brother used on the Cape a million years ago. They’re made of scratched-up metal with rust along the bottom edges. We use one pail for shells and one for rocks so that the shells don’t get broken.

“Okay,” she says. “Rocks or shells?”

“You choose.” I smile, just happy to be back on Seagull Beach with Brandy. I miss her the rest of the year. We chat once in a while, but it isn’t the same. We can’t wait until her mother and my grammy let us have our own phones. Although I think I am most excited about the app that tracks global lightning strikes.

We spend the morning hanging out on the jetties, collecting things, and having a couple of splash fights with our feet. Finally, we get back to the picnic tables and spread everything out and talk about what sculptures we’ll make.