Well, Lucy would find out eventually. “Chad and Penny broke up,” I said. “That’s why she’s not competing with him in the sandcastle competition.”

Lucy’s eyes widened before she squeezed them tight in a wince. “Oh, shit. I knew I said something to make things weird, but I didn’t know—”

“It wasn’t you,” I said. “It was already weird. She totally put me in the middle.”

“What do you mean?”

“She didn’t exactly break up with him right. So I had to take care of it.”

There was a long, drawn-out silence. Lucy watched me wash the same mug over and over in what was, I knew, an aimless endeavor.

“You’re kidding,” she said. “She actually asked you to do that?”

“She needed me,” I said, because it felt disloyal to say anything else. Even if I wanted to. And then, because I needed to tell someone, and I definitely wasn’t ready to tell Penny yet, I said, “He kissed me.”

Lucy lowered her voice. “What? He just decided to up and kiss you? That fast?”

I waited for her to tell me I was a terrible friend, that I had to come clean, that I was in the wrong—but she didn’t. Her eyes welled with sympathy. Sympathy for me. Surprise and relief surged through me. Lucy was on my side.

She sighed and reached over to turn the tap off, forcing me to stop rubbing at the mug. “You’ll wash the paint right off,” she said with a forced, cheerful smile. She held her hand out and I passed her the mug, which she dried off with a drying rag and replaced with the others.

I snagged the black elastic on my wrist and looped my hair through. “Can we not talk about this right now?”

“Sorry.” Lucy exhaled. “I can’t believe that she—wait, can I just say this one thing before we drop it?” I nodded. “I can’t believe she had you do that! They’ve been together forever! She owed him more than—and him! What is up with him? Didn’t he care that he’d just been dumped? He just … he kissed you? Just like that?”

My hands tangled in a snarl of blonde hair as I wound my hair into a sloppy bun. She’d just voiced so much of what I was thinking, and her outrage felt like a warm, safe blanket wrapping around my shoulders. I shot Lucy a smile. “Thank you.”

She made a disgruntled sound in the back of her throat, like a cat working out a hairball.

“Trust me,” I said. “Anything that you’re thinking has already gone through my mind. Multiplied by a thousand. Raised to the power of freaking out.”