“You’re going to bring cupcakes when you come visit though, right?” I asked. “Otherwise we might not have a deal.”

“Will you help me?” Eliza said to Carter.

He grabbed my legs and she pushed from behind, launching me into the water. Which, after sitting in the heat for a few hours, felt amazing.

When I came up, Robert and Hannah strode over to us, hand in hand. I elbowed Carter and he sighed. After Carter had decided he didn’t really want to try things out with Hannah, she finally gave Robert a shot. My boy must’ve done all right, because she pretty much never left him alone. Not that he wanted her to.

Behind them, Jamal and Josh Daley waded in the shallow end, taking turns spiking an inflatable beach ball at Madison, who sunbathed on the pool’s steps. After the bottle spinning disaster, Austin realized he wanted something from Madison that she’d never be able to give him. Madison had stayed hung up on Carter for a few weeks, until one night she and Josh Daley hooked up and never really stopped. They were good for each other too; both of them had lightened up and become consistent faces in our friend group. Last I heard, Madison and Josh were planning a gap year to bike across Africa.

“Karvotsky’s looking for you guys,” Robert announced.

“Ooh, yeah.” Austin stood. Carter and I pushed ourselves out of the pool.

“We’ve got to do a thing,” I said to Eliza, as Carter scooped up the top-secret notebook from underneath his bright beach towel. For real, the thing even said Top Secret.

“Can you tell Olivia to turn up the music?” she asked as we headed away from the pool and into the O’Connors’ backyard.

Every year, Eliza and Carter held this huge end-of-school party, which was an even bigger deal this year, because of graduation and everything. Ms. O’Connor had it pretty much down to a science. Snacks by the pool, snacks by the badminton net in the yard, snacks inside—mostly it was a party full of snacks.

She and my mom were in the kitchen at that moment, in fact, making sure the snack situation was under control. My dad was as far away from this party as he could be, since most of the soccer team was there. And his presence would’ve been weird.

Coach Dad had stopped pushing me as hard after I got my Clarkebridge scholarship. Turned out that when he wasn’t spending as much time with me, he could spend more time with my mom. I didn’t know whether he’d cleaned up his act with her, but they seemed happy. They hadn’t grounded me since Jeff’s party either.

They’d been close, however: When Chef Pizzeria showed up covered in Jell-O and pillows in the school hallway, no one knew who the culprits were. My mom even suspected Jamal until pictures made the town newspaper, featuring striped pillowcases that looked suspiciously like mine. She’d yelled at me for half an hour. But with the image of me at college and unable to cause trouble at her house looming in the near future, she ended up just letting it go.