“This is it,” he said, and the sound of victory was in his voice.

He pulled far enough forward so that he had room to close the gate behind us, and I watched through the back window as he wrapped the chain all around the gate and the post. He ran back to the car, and I thought he was going to drive us farther down the lane, but instead he reached in and fished around under his seat, eventually pulling out a large padlock with a key sticking out of it. He removed the key and held up the lock.

“Just in case,” he said, grinning. He ran back and clicked the lock in place. No one could follow us, at least not in a vehicle. They could climb the gate easily enough, but when he attached that lock onto the chain, it felt like he was blocking out the entire world.

I glanced at Mary—she was also watching Tom lock the gate—and I thought I caught a small glimpse of the anxiety she had shown at her house, as if Tom barring the way with a locked gate somehow wasn’t enough.

He drove carefully down the rutted lane, and the trees pressed in close on each side. We drove for about five minutes, the car heaving this way and that, the occasional branch reaching out and screeching along the length of the car. We were all quiet—we knew that any question we asked would be answered with Tom’s cryptic, “You’ll see,” or maybe we didn’t want him to tell us. We were holding our breath, wanting to discover this new and fabulous thing together.

We came around the last corner and there was the lake, a flat slate gray under the light blue Saturday morning sky. Farther up the lane, perilously close to the water, rose a kind of cabin—two stories clad in dark wood with oversized windows and a long back porch that reached out over the gentle waves. I could see the dock from there too, a long, straight line into the water.

“Wow,” Shirley said in a hushed voice.

Mary stared at the house, her eyes bright.

“Whose place is this?” I asked.

Tom smiled, shrugged. “Ours, I guess.”

“Thomas Avery!” Shirley exclaimed. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Whoa!” Tom said, and his laugh made Shirley even more disgusted with him.

“You can’t take over houses,” Shirley spat. “Not even if they’re abandoned. And in fabulous locations.”

“Well, if you would listen once in a while, I’d have a chance to talk,” Tom said.

Shirley’s eyes squinted as if she was trying to pierce through him with her gaze.

Tom laughed again. “Geez, Shirls. This is my family’s place!”

“No way!” I exclaimed.

“No way,” Shirley said matter-of-factly, the voice of reason.

“It is,” Tom replied, shrugging. “It is. My grandparents built it like fifty years ago. All their kids moved away from this crazy town—I guess they had more sense than us. All of them except my mom. And she hates the wilderness. And places without air-conditioning. My dad too. Their last idea of a relaxing weekend is coming out here and chopping wood and clearing the driveway and cleaning off the dock.”