We had just come out of the pool house when she appeared: the loveliest girl I’d ever seen, emerging from the rose garden and traipsing across the yard in an oversized white T-shirt and a pair of white-framed Wayfarers, a thick paperback book under her arm.

“Is this Charlie?” the girl asked.

“I told her about you,” Arch said. “Charlie, this is Vanessa. Jamie’s twin sister.”

“Nice to meet you, Charlie,” she said.

“Hi,” I replied.

Vanessa pulled her T-shirt over her head to reveal a two-piece seersucker bathing suit. She walked around to one of the lounge chairs and settled in to read her book.

She was still very much a girl—just shy of fifteen—but she had emerged from the chrysalis. Were it not for their matching blond hair, no one would ever believe she and Jamie were twins. The only features that betrayed her youth were the braces on her teeth and a stray pimple near the corner of her mouth, which could have easily been mistaken for a beauty mark.

“Whatcha reading?” Arch asked.

“Sense and Sensibility,” she said. “Last of my summer reading books. The quiz is on Monday.”

“Can’t be any worse than Black Boy,” he said.

“It’s actually pretty good,” she said. “Did you do all of your summer reading, Charlie?”

I nodded. I’d read the books the first week of summer and had scanned back over them every night, thinking about what kind of questions I might ask about them on the first day of class to show how carefully I’d read.

“Which did you like best?” Vanessa asked.

“A Separate Peace,” I said.

“Oh, please,” Jamie said. “I’ve never been so bored in my life.”

“I thought it was good,” I said.

“You’re a terrible liar,” Jamie said.

I did like A Separate Peace. It was about a prep school for boys. Every page seemed pregnant with precious intelligence. I regarded it less as a story than as a user’s manual.

Jamie grinned and gave me a playful punch so I would know he hadn’t intended to embarrass me, or if he had, he wanted to walk it back.

“Just messing with you,” he said.

We didn’t do much of anything that afternoon, but it was all a dazzlement to me—splashing around in the pool, lounging on recliners, listening to the radio. Arch performing jackknife dives and backflips. Vanessa reading on her recliner. I was marveling at the fine shape of Vanessa’s calves when a shadow falling across the pool startled me out of my daydream. Mr. Haltom loomed over us in his shirtsleeves.

“Hey, Uncle Jim,” Arch said.

We climbed out of the pool to greet him.

“Hello again, young man,” Jim said.

“Hello, sir.”

Feeling his powerful fingers squeezing my own, I found it unfathomable that Jim Haltom could ever have been a boy himself.

“How are you liking Yeatman so far?”