Annabelle didn’t think Mia had ever been bored last summer. She hadn’t waited around for other people to invite her along to plans. She’d made the plans.

Annabelle wished she could say, I’ll hang out with you today. You name the plan and I’ll do it!

But she couldn’t forget that Mia had seemed sort of happy when she’d messed things up with Connor. She was tired of feeling like Mia was keeping a tally of all the assignments she did badly on at school. And she didn’t want to be the kind of person she’d become around Mia this summer, either. The kind of person who left Mia out on purpose and wanted her to be jealous.

Maybe all the competitiveness between them had ruined their friendship completely, or maybe there still could be something good between them if they gave themselves a little break. She really wasn’t sure.

She thought of that blackberry-thyme muffin—how Kayla had said the thyme wasn’t bad as long as you knew it was coming. How lots of things would be easier if you knew what was coming, but that’s almost never how things went.

It was a tiny island, though, like Mia had said. They weren’t going to lose track of each other. If there was some part of their friendship left to salvage once the bad feelings had passed, they had time.

“This summer hasn’t gone the way I wanted it to at all,” Annabelle said.

She braced herself for Mia to say something X-Acto-knife sharp again, about how Annabelle shouldn’t have ditched her and Jeremy or thrown herself at Connor.

But Mia said, “Me neither. I kind of . . . I miss last summer.”

“Me too,” Annabelle agreed.

But she wouldn’t choose to go back to last summer if someone offered her the option.

She didn’t want to have to live through the most humiliating moments of this summer again—that was part of it. But she wouldn’t want them wiped away, either.

She thought of that first-day-of-summer-break Annabelle again, so discouraged after her history exam and so excited when Connor noticed her. She was glad for all the ways she’d changed since that day, even though she wasn’t glad about all the things that had changed her.

“Well, I’m meeting Mitch, so I should probably go,” she finally said.

Mia nodded. “Okay. Cheerio, Annabelle,” she said, using their silly old goodbye.

“Ta-ta, Mia,” Annabelle replied.

And she went out into the rain, breathing in the sweet, fresh smell of it and not really minding the way it drenched her bare legs and made her flip-flops all squeaky and slippery.

Chapter 33

Back home that afternoon, Annabelle took apart her old shell lamp and then scattered the perfect, store-bought shells along the rain-drop-speckled sand at the little beach. She decided it wasn’t so helpful to have something that looked so pretty but wasn’t real. Like that necklace Mrs. Sloane wore, with the pink quartz pendant that was too shiny and round.