It’s a perfect summer day, and the beach is crowded. Colored umbrellas and beach chairs cover the sand like confetti. Boogie boarders ride the waves. Sandcastles line the water’s edge.

I spot Brandy. Alone. Relieved, I start down the wooden steps to the beach, but by the time I’m halfway down, I see Tressa walking out of the waves with a boogie board. She sees me, so I don’t feel like I can just turn and go now. Especially if Brandy has missed me at all.

“Hey,” I say as I reach them.

“Hey, Dels,” Brandy says, and that makes me happy.

Tressa smirks. “What are you doing here? Cleaning rooms?”

There’s a girl getting buried in the sand right next to us. Her friends are slowly covering her up, and I can hear her whining, “Why can’t one of you do this instead?”

“What’s the big deal?” one of the kids asks.

“Don’t be such a baby,” snaps another. “You said you wanted us to do it.”

“Hel-looo?” Tressa asks, pulling me back. “What are you doing here?”

The voice of the girl being buried bugs me. And I think about the day I had lunch with Brandy and Tressa. Or, rather, I didn’t because I thought they’d make fun of my sandwich. I remember pretending to know things and like things I didn’t just because I wanted them to like me.

Tressa laughs.

The girl behind me cries.

I hear Grammy’s voice telling me they can’t break me.

I stare Tressa in the eye and straighten my back. I step forward. “I’m here because I live here. The Cape is my home. And, yeah, I was cleaning rooms because that’s what my grammy does here and she needed my help. She works hard and is a great person. You are not.” I turn to Brandy. “And you . . . you are just disappointing.”

Brandy goes from watching me to looking at her feet.

I turn away and walk over to the girl being buried in the sand. She stops crying and gazes up at me. This stranger standing over her.

“Listen,” I say. “You can either stay there while they throw shovelfuls of sand on you or just climb out. Your choice. Not theirs.”

Then I head toward the stairs, not even looking back at Brandy or Tressa. And it feels really good to step away from the shovels of sand they’ve been throwing on me for weeks and finally climb out of the hole.

Chapter 24

STORM

The meteorologists on TV sound happy and excited this morning. Which means that we are in for some pretty fierce weather today.

The morning is humid but nice. People are on the beach. So I head off to find Grammy and help her clean some bathtubs. With her knees, she often has me help with those. I hear people talking about the storm and how disappointing it is to get bad weather on vacation. I completely disagree. Although I’ve never been on a vacation. Why would we leave the Cape to go somewhere else? Olive says she hasn’t been over the bridge since God was a boy. I guess that was a long time ago.