“I’m not kidding. I told Chad we were through yesterday, but I didn’t really handle it that great. He wants to come over, and I just know that if I see him so soon, I’m going to feel crappy and then—” Penny let her hair spill out of its bun and wound the elastic around her wrist. She waited for me to take a swallow before snagging the bottle back. “Please, Babe?”

Our shoulders brushed as I turned to look at her in disbelief. “What? You dumped him yesterday?”

She pursed her lips.

“You … you didn’t tell me.” I was in the deep end. I was always the first one she went to when it came to Chad, when it came to anyone. Loss took hold in my stomach, filling my limbs with cold. “Why—why did you break up?”

“I didn’t know that I was going to,” said Penny. “It kind of happened out of nowhere. I wasn’t planning it.”

“So you broke up with him … just because?” They had been together for years. Since we were fourteen. Was this a joke? Was there something I wasn’t getting? A minute ago, everything had been okay.

She looked back at me, stare for stare. There wasn’t a hint of a joke in her eyes. I’d always thought her brown was much more beautiful than my blue—warm and friendly and all-encompassing. She didn’t look that way now. Still, I waited for her face to break into a smile, for her to cry Gotcha! and tease me about how I’d fallen for it.

I felt sick, my stomach thrashing. Queasy, I looked away. I had this writhing thing inside me, something terrified and angry and wholly new. Something that Penny had birthed. Something that, worst of all, wanted to go along with what she wanted just so I could stop feeling this way. This sick, petrified way that told me that everything had just changed.

I wanted to heave. I wanted to scream. This was our summer—Chad’s and Penny’s and mine. The very last summer we’d have before college.

From where we sat, cross-legged on her deck, I could see the wooden slats of the pier where we’d used chalk to draw a yin-yang sun and moon. The fiery sunburst orange and the calm blue melded together to form one shape that represented wholeness and harmony.

That was us, Penny and me.

“It just all feels so same-y,” said Penny. Her voice sounded like it was coming from very far away. “Like we’ve been the same people our entire lives and nothing’s changed. College is my chance—his chance, too—to start again.”