“Is this your little sister?”

“She ran after me,” Dee says. “I couldn’t stop her.” Lulu swings, bored, from Dee’s hand. She says something to herself under her breath. She squints in the sun, eyes serious and far away. In one sweaty palm she clutches her straw sun hat with the pink ribbon tied around it.

“How old is she?”

“Six,” Dee says. “Put your hat on or you’ll burn,” she tells Lulu.

“No.” Lulu loves her hat but it is an object to be treasured, not worn.

Loathing strokes Dee, feather light. Why does she have such an annoying family? She takes the hat from her sister and puts it roughly on her head. Lulu’s face crumples.

Trevor bends down and addresses Lulu. “You want to go get some ice cream?”

Lulu nods twenty or thirty times.

Dee considers, shrugs. They queue. Trevor and Dee don’t get ice cream. Lulu gets chocolate, which Dee knows will spread all over her face and clothes, and then her mother will scream at them both. But right now she finds that she does not care. Trevor’s hand hangs a millimeter from hers, then brushes, finger to finger. Something is coming, it is in the air like heat haze, like thunder.

Dee does not argue when Trevor steers them away from the ice-cream stand, through from the burger-scented, colorful crowds, toward the trees. Dee thinks of what her parents would say, but defiance wins out. Just this once, she thinks, I want to do something all my own.

In the pine-striped shadows the three of them move soft as tigers. The crowded beach falls behind them quickly, is lost in the tapestry of hushing leaves. Soon there is only the sound of the black water kissing stones. They track the pebbled shore, climbing over rocks, fallen branches, nests of briars. Even Lulu is quiet, excited, possessed by the sense of trespass. Her white flip-flops are too flimsy for the rough terrain. But she doesn’t complain as her feet and ankles become beaded with scratches. The yellow-headed boy lifts Lulu when she cannot get over.

Dee grows impatient. She pushes on ahead, pulling him by the hand. They come to a place where the trees open out somewhat, where the pine needles look soft and there aren’t too many thorns. A rock shaped like a canoe pushes out into the water. Dee and the boy look at one another. The time has come for whatever is coming.

“I want to go home,” Lulu says, scrubbing one eye with a fist. Her cheeks are pink, sunstruck. Somewhere in the shadowed pines she has lost her hat.