“What are you doing here?” asks Olivia.

Maggie checks herself for injuries. She has miraculously avoided landing on the bigger rocks, hitting mostly soft sand, though there is a smaller rock wedged under her knee, and she landed with her palms flat out. She pulls herself into a sitting position and tries to hold back her tears. “I was on a bike ride, and I saw—I saw—” She can’t get any more words out. Finally she says, “Never mind.”

Olivia Rossi fixes Maggie with her chocolate caramel eyes. Maggie finds there a mixture of sympathy and pity and she suddenly feels very, very young, and very, very stupid. She closes her eyes for an instant and when she reopens them Olivia is still gazing at her. Olivia is wearing a beautiful white sundress with spaghetti straps. She has a flower—a real live flower—tucked behind her ear; with her suntanned skin and her long perfect hair she looks like Moana. Maggie, in her T-shirt that has one atom saying to another I Lost an Electron and the other one answering Are You Positive feels like Heihei, Moana’s bumbling rooster sidekick. She is such a loser. (She has not one but two science shirts! The other one features the periodic table of elements and the words I Wear This Shirt Periodically.)

“Come on, Mags,” says Olivia. “Let’s get you out of here.”

They climb all 141 steps together. Maggie notices that Hugo is panting and lagging behind and she considers the possibility that vaping and the actual cigarette smoking haven’t done him any favors. Every now and then he kicks at one of the steps.

“Hugo,” says Olivia. “Put her bike in the back of your car. We’ll drive her home.”

Hugo says, “In dis?” and looks doubtfully at his small red car. Then, “What de fuck?” His accent, which Maggie once found charming, now sounds ominous.

“Yes,” says Olivia firmly. “We’ll put the bike in the back and leave the hatchback up.” They accomplish this quickly, and Maggie is grateful that Olivia says nothing when a grease stain from the pedal appears at the hem of her beautiful white dress.

“Okay,” says Olivia. She seems so in-charge and efficient, so adultlike, that Maggie can hardly believe she is only three years older than Maggie is. Olivia flashes Maggie her megawatt smile (no wonder Hugo has chosen her) and says, “Where to? Home?”

There is a physical pain attached to Maggie’s shame: it scorches like a sunburn, and she feels sore and tender all over. Every time Hugo looks at her, his glare seems to deepen. Also, there is an actual physical pain in her wrist.

“Maggie?” says Olivia. “We’ll take you home, okay?”

Maggie isn’t sure if her mother is back from dinner yet but she can’t take a chance on finding out. Her mother will re-ground her, or double-ground her. Can you be double-grounded? She’s not sure, but it doesn’t seem out of the question.

“Actually I’m supposed to babysit,” she says. “Can you take me to Corn Neck Road?”