Tommy van Stratten had shown up in the last hour, almost when Alice had given up hope. She was watching him without being obvious about it. (At least she hoped she wasn’t being obvious about it.) He talked to people when they came up to him—and a lot of them did, guys as well as girls—but mostly he seemed content to keep to himself, sitting by the fire sipping a beer, digging his toes into the sand. He’d gotten even handsomer since that photo in the clubhouse had been taken. His face was less round than it was before, more chiseled, his hair shorter, and his body lean rather than slender. The biggest difference, though, was in the aura he gave off. Where was that laughing, happy boy? He seemed so serious now. And sad. Why sad? Alice wondered. Because his dad’s legal troubles were weighing so heavily on him? Or because he no longer had his arm around that beautiful girl? A few times Alice thought—hoped—he might be sneaking looks at her, too, but then decided it was just absence of mind, him flicking occasional random glances out at the ocean behind her head. The lack of attention he was paying her was disappointing. For a fast second, he’d seemed as taken with her as she had been with him.

Soon the party wasn’t just dying, it was dead: the music switched off, the fire mostly burned out, the voices dropping, not just in number but in volume, too, so that the surf was the loudest sound that could be heard.

“Okay,” said Cybill after a while, “the fire needs to be put out.”

Everyone seemed to agree, but nobody did anything about it, being too drunk and comfortable and generally lazy-feeling, reluctant to start the long trudge back to the cars.

And then someone said, “Who’s that?”

Alice looked up. A figure was approaching them from down the beach. There was no moon that night, and the fire wasn’t throwing off much light anymore, so it was impossible to tell who the figure belonged to, to tell even if it was male or female, young or old. At last, though, it emerged from the darkness and someone—a different someone—yelled, “Hey, Jude!”

That prompted a chorus of Hey Judes, a few of them even sung to the tune of the Beatles’ song.