I tried to dissect her words. Even though I hunted for an undercurrent, there wasn’t one. Carefully, I said, “Not yet. I’ll do it after work.”

“Cool.” She lifted the cup. “See ya!”

After she left, for one quick, hard stab of a moment, I wished everything could go back to the way things used to be. Before we graduated. Before Penny asked me to handle the fallout with Chad for her. Before Chad kissed me. Before I let him.

Life wasn’t meant to be preserved in amber, though. Already, the soft-focus memory of being seventeen was blurry around the edges. It was like clinging to a cloud. At seventeen, life had been perfect. Invincible. I had my friends, my girlfriend, my mom. Then poof, all gone. How had things gotten so complicated? Was it like this for everyone? How did you hold on to your life when it was changing so fast?

four

Days passed, Thursday sneaking up on me in the blink of an eye. It was the summer of everything and nothing. Sleepy starts and sleepy ends.

No one was in a hurry to do anything because we all knew these were the last few days of summer when the town belonged to us, the people who had been here all along.

But soon, the mornings began with the peppering of hammer falls all over the town as local businesses started getting ready for the tourists. HELP WANTED signs went up, gift shop windows filled with new displays, and flowers bloomed in the streets.

Even Busy’s did our part with newly painted trims and soaped and shined windows overlooking boxes of geraniums and lavender. A faint smell of paint lingered, so we’d put our fans on to clear the air.

“Must be almost tourist season!” Lucy remarked cheerfully as she pulled the ice-cold French press out of the fridge. Her bubbly vivaciousness couldn’t be dampened, not even by the oppressive blanket of humidity that threatened to send my soft waves billowing into Hermione Granger circa Sorcerer’s Stone hair.

“Must be,” I agreed, watching her give the press a swish.

Busy’s was the local watering hole for everyone in need of an afternoon coffee break, and iced coffee seemed to be the order of the day. Already, Busy’s had emptied two of the enormous French presses and now we were on the last one.

Lucy and I were used to working in unison, so as she began to pour the chilled coffee over the ice cubes in the tall glasses, I set to work grinding more beans. The process for the perfect iced coffee was easier than people thought, but the time that went into it required a lot of planning ahead, and that was reflected in the price. We were still priced a lot cheaper than the nearest Starbucks, though, and our coffee tasted light-years better.