Mini golf with Mia was the best because Mia came up with silly challenges, like making everybody crouch down and hit the ball pool-cue style, with the skinny end of their clubs. And this was what Annabelle had wanted all spring. No lacrosse girls for Mia to sit with at lunch while she had to meet her tutor. No video-game-obsessed guys from Jeremy’s advanced math class to invite him back to their dorm rooms to beat the next level of something or other. All the boarding kids had gone back to Boston and Connecticut and New Hampshire and New York, and now she and Mia and Jeremy could go back to being Annabelle, Mia, and Jeremy again, like last summer.

Annabelle had friends at school, too, but she wasn’t around that much since she spent so much time studying and swimming. They were always nice to her when she was there, but she never got the impression that they missed her all that much when she wasn’t.

She slid off her tank top, and Mia glanced at her black suit—the same one she’d been wearing the other day when Connor Madison had stared—and then looked away fast.

Back in the spring, Mia’s mom had taken the two of them shopping in Boston, and they’d tried on the same striped shirt. On Mia, it had looked like a regular T-shirt. But when Annabelle had stepped out of the dressing room, Mia’s mom had said, “Va-va-voom! Honey, I don’t think you can wear that shirt to school!” Mia had rolled her eyes and told her mom to stop making a big deal out of nothing. But she’d frowned at her own reflection in a way that told Annabelle she didn’t really think it was nothing. Now she was frowning down at her bikini top the same way.

Annabelle was about to ask if anyone wanted to go in the water when Mia said, “Hey, so what’s the deal with genius camp, Jer?”

Jeremy’s cheeks filled in with pink and he tried to brush away the hair that used to fall to his eyebrows before he’d gotten it cut. “I guess it’s happening.”

“Genius camp?” Annabelle repeated.

Jeremy reached behind her to flick Mia, but Mia pulled away so he only flicked air.

“That’s not what it’s called. It’s an enrichment thing at a college in Boston for a few weeks. It starts next month. Samir’s going, too.”

Samir was Jeremy’s closest guy friend at the Academy, and he lived in Massachusetts when he wasn’t at school.

“It’s kind of expensive, so I wasn’t sure if I could go, but there was this scholarship thing, so . . .”

He trailed off, and Annabelle squeezed the pink quartz rock, hoping that would balance out the way her throat squeezed up and made it hard to breathe.

What about us? she wanted to say. What about coming to Bluff Point every week and sharing a large cup at the Creamery—half peanut butter cup and half double-chocolate chunk—and going back to the Cape Cod shark museum like last summer to find out more about Bertha?