“Never mind,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry.” She lowered her eyes, and then she looked up at him out of the corner. She was nailing this.

Maybe Cam Hartwell was not so perfect after all. Maybe, like everyone else on the planet, he was human, and he was curious. He met her eyes. His eyebrows lifted. And then she was pointing at a bench and they were sitting down next to each other and she was telling him everything.

39.

The Squad

Sometime during July Alexa Thornhill posted on her Instagram a photo of Katie and Morgan at Canobie Lake.

(We all followed Alexa’s Instagram account. She knew a lot about fashion! And makeup! When she Rented the Runway for her prom dress she posted the three dresses she was deciding among. Most of us voted for the KaufmanFranco red high low gown, which she did, in the end, choose. Though two of us stood firm for the Giambattista Valli sweetheart dress.)

Anyway, when we saw that photo we were all like, Whaaaat? Canobie Lake is typically a group activity. Three of the moms take all of the girls. It’s always been that way, since they were too small to go on the Yankee Cannonball, since before they built Untamed. Maybe not everybody can go every year, maybe somebody is at summer camp or on a family vacation or what have you, and the moms rotate in and out, depending on who is available, but at least everybody is included! Everybody is invited! Everybody is given the chance to opt in!

This year, apparently, it was a couples’ activity, the couple being Morgan and Katie.

After that, Maya and Riley went to Canobie together. Then Callie and Izzy. Taylor and Audrey ran into Anna and Abby, and it was said that they didn’t even make eye contact in the line for the log flume.

It was almost funny, but not that funny, how Katie Griffin changed everything. Forever, the girls had all been one big happy group, and suddenly there were these . . . well, for lack of a better word, these factions forming. Everybody starting to break off in twos. We’d been working hard since these girls were in Pull-Ups to keep this group together, and it was not nothing to do that. The organization required. The group texts that had to be tended several times a day. The plans that had to be considered and reconsidered before being offered to the whole group. We had done all of this upfront work for a reason. We were going to go to middle school as one, a united front, a whole lunch table.

And then one new person came in, and look what happened. Things started splintering like pieces of a felled tree. Breaking off like icicles from the edge of a roof.

Maybe we are mixing our metaphors here. But surely you get the picture.

40.

Sherri