I handed Lucy the cake platter. “Being thrown naked onto the pier was punishment enough. Lorcan said if Vince didn’t want to be arrested for public indecency, he’d better run as fast as he could to whatever gutter he crawled out of.”

“He’s pretty good at playing the knight in shining armor.” Lucy laid the last piece of cake onto its side, easing it on the plate carefully so the mocha icing didn’t smear and the layers of raspberry and chocolate chip could be seen.

I would have loved to use blueberries, but I hadn’t had a chance to go berry picking at one of the local farms with everything else that had been vying for my attention lately.

“Is she still asleep?” Lucy asked. “Will she be okay?”

“She was knocked out when we left,” I said. “And … I think she will be.”

I had a feeling we all would be.

seventeen

I once saw a snake slithering up the road just outside of Busy’s. It didn’t move in a straight line, even though it would have been much faster. It wove left and right in a slow, hypnotizing dance, each zig followed by a zag. Predictable. It took its sweet time going where it wanted to go.

The weeks after the fish fry felt like that—languid and never-ending. Tourists came, tourists left. Tom and Ralph continued to be fixtures, alternating between playing chess and arguing about how far they got with the girls in their youth.

Every time the stories were told, they grew in the telling. The girls had grown up and grown away and were now relegated to challenges for my friends to win. If Tom had kissed Elaine under the stars, then Ralph took her out in his granddad’s boat. If Ralph got Annie’s number, then Tom had been the one to kiss her in the back of the old movie theater. Their competition over days long past had been amusing at first, but quickly paled. They knocked it off after we pointed out that their nostalgia was just on the side of skeevy.

The boat on the beach grew more and more each day. With so many people from Oar’s Rest pitching in, the bones of the boat were filled in with old planks from the pier and leftover wood from forgotten DIY projects. People contributed what they had—the boat was a patchwork of projects and lives. Then, using remnant silk from the craft store, someone made bloodred sails. Every day we saw the ripple of the sails from Busy’s, heard the hammers and the jovial, muffled voices of the boat builders.

“There’s got to be a story behind that,” Levi said one day as we sprawled on the beach after a long sandcastle practice.