“Yes! So he can watch over us one more year!”

“Then his work is done!”

But when we’re done laughing about that, Grimshaw gets very gloomy again. “I’m seventeen,” she sighs. “Where’s my life?”

four

IN THE SUMMERS, MY DEAD father’s family lives in a rambling, shingled place on a cliff overlooking a cove that opens to the ocean in Maine. It has a carriage house in back and a small beach down a steep walkway. No Internet, of course. We visit them there every year, although it’s more like a summons than an invitation. We share their DNA, so they have to deal with us once a year. By the time I get there, Allegra has already found not just one job but two, at an ice cream store and a gift shop in town, and Aaron has been hired as a junior counselor in a youth soccer league. It’s just me and my grandmother, so I try to make myself useful. I offer to paint the trim on the house, but no, I’d probably just drip paint on the shingles and make a mess. I offer to mow the lawn. No, I’d be taking bread out of the mouths of deserving local people. I offer to polish the—no, no no, my grandmother waves me away. After that, my choices are to either get a job and be a productive citizen or read, so I read. The house is full of books, and it takes me a week just to read all the titles, making sure I stay at least two rooms away from my grandmother.

Last summer I took sailing lessons, so when I find the book I want to read for the day, I go down to a little rocky beach on the cove and take out our sailboat, the Signal. I’m not a very courageous sailor, I just venture around and get to know the inlets and little islands. I always take a sandwich with me, too, and whole days can go by with nobody saying anything to me at all. This begins to feel like my real life, like there is this other Serena who lives with a family in a faraway place and has one friend, who occasionally laughs at her jokes. Sometimes I miss that Serena, and I can see that her life really isn’t so bad, and I can’t remember what she was always so angry about, and I can see that she could be nicer to people, even her stepfather, and follow more rules, maybe, and not act like it’s her divine mission to point out the lapses in other people’s logic.