“—but she’s seaworthy, I swear.”

We gazed at the herd of plastic swans.

“Which one do you want to set free?” she asked, pretending to consider them carefully.

“I can’t decide between the one with the elaborate goatee or the one that has four stars and would ride this bird again written on the arse.”

“Four stars, though, we can’t argue with that kind of review,” Ruby mused.

The mighty bird was trapped in a shallow part of the sea enclosed by a fence of buoys. It was supposed to prevent children from pedaling off into the horizon and perishing at sea, but it was extremely inconvenient.

“We’re going to have to wade in and pull it out on the sand,” I decided.

Ruby nodded. “OK, well, you do that, and I’ll be here waiting.”

“Oh, come on, wuss. It’s three inches of water. Get your butt in with me, Quinn.”

Ruby sighed and kicked off her shoes.

Getting the swan to the shore was easy enough, in spite of the freezing water lapping at our ankles. Getting it across the sand, past the enclosure, and back into the sea was the hard part. There was grunting, sweating, and much profanity.

“Isn’t this nice,” I panted, once we had finally set sail. We’d squeezed into the swan side by side and we were pedaling off into the distance. Neither of us felt the cold anymore.

“Maybe I’ve overlooked master thief as a career option. What do you think?”

I laughed. Then Ruby laughed. Then we couldn’t stop laughing.

“We stole a ten-foot swan,” she said between peals of laughter.

“We stole a four-star, ten-foot swan,” I corrected her. Then I laughed again. It wasn’t that it was that funny. It was just ridiculous and the giddiness of it was making us silly.

“I don’t think this happened in any movie,” Ruby said finally when we both calmed down. She let her hand drift along the surface of the water. Like the night at the drive-in when I thought we might have been stranded at the mercy of a back-seat serial killer, I considered pointing out that if this were a horror movie she could lose a hand right to a water demon or be dragged out of the boat by a serial killer and I’d have to leave her and paddle to shore. But I thought it might spoil the moment.

“I’ll include it in my memoir,” I said instead. “When they make the biopic, it’ll be one of the early scenes.”

“Oh, you think you’re interesting enough to have your own biopic?” she teased.

“Maybe not right now, but once I’ve cured cancer or brokered world peace, they’ll have to give the public what they want.”

“What do you want to do, you know, ‘when you grow up’?” Ruby asked.