Our friendship would change when both of my best friends started college. Even though Oar’s Rest Tech was right in town, I couldn’t count on things staying the same. Maybe they’d make new friends. Maybe I’d be the one to drift away like a lost kite, no one to chase after me. I squeezed my eyes shut against the image. There were a thousand things that could happen. Maybe Chad would finally buckle down and start taking school seriously. Maybe Penny would make new girlfriends, people in her marine technology program who would share her interests. What was holding the three of us together, after all? High school? Memories? Blurry nights of booze?

Chad was right. We hadn’t talked about anything real in a long time. These days it was all houseboat parties and lying around on the beach. Penny reveled in her role as party hostess—for her, fun usually involved a bottle or three. Chad and his friend John were fixing up a car together. And then there was me. Stuck in limbo. Penny had clearly changed, but I hadn’t. I was still the same Babe. I didn’t want things to change. And if they did, I didn’t want it to be now. Not when we still had the summer for ourselves. I’d worry about everything else when it happened.

Half an hour later, Penny swung by my lighthouse home with a four-pack of ginger beer tucked into the basket of her bubblegum-pink bike. “Hey!” she called out.

Using the wooden stepladder, I made my way down to the ground-floor kitchen to open the door. The third floor was the bathroom and laundry room, separated by a wall; the second floor was a cozily cramped living room with all my furniture pointed at a bookshelf instead of a television. I could still remember the look on my friends’ faces when they asked for my nonexistent Wi-Fi password. I preferred books to TV—any shows I sat through were usually just to bond with my mom. When I was younger, it was Sex and the City reruns. Now it was anything with glamorous, high-powered middle-aged women, and she watched them with her roommate, Abby. If I wanted to watch anything, I made do with the data on my phone and the public library’s hot spot.

From my fourth-floor bedroom, I’d seen Penny coming. I swung the door open before she even had to knock. “Hey,” I said breathlessly, running a hand through my hair like I had been in a rush to answer the door and not because I’d been standing behind it for a minute freaking out.

Her eyes zeroed in on the tote slung over my shoulder. “Where are you off to?” she asked, forehead scrunching.

“Work.” I had a long shift today at the Busy Bean.