Her cheeks heated up even as she brought a cold spoonful of ice cream to her mouth.

That wasn’t true, was it?

She remembered how smart she’d felt last summer at the shark museum, when Mr. Green took her and Jeremy and the people there assumed she knew as much as he did. And back in sixth-grade science, when Mrs. Mattson always told her how perceptive she was.

Maybe it was perceptive of her to know exactly when another swimmer was getting tired so she could pick up her pace and to notice the ways Mia was changing to fit with her new friends.

“I’m glad you’re home,” she told Jeremy. And his smile—that sweet smile that told everybody what a nice guy he was before he even opened his mouth to speak—spread across his face right away.

“Me too.”

They sat there for a while, eating their ice cream and waving away bugs that flew too close. When they finished, Jeremy sipped up the milky, sweet liquid that was left at the bottom of the cup, just like he always did, and when he tipped his head forward again, his whole chin was covered with chocolate.

“You look like a little kid,” Annabelle told him as she handed him a stack of napkins.

“Who cares?” he said.

And who did care, really? There were worse things than being like a little kid sometimes.

He wiped off his chin and then lunged toward her face with the chocolaty napkin he’d used, as if he were going to smear it on her cheek. She laughed and pushed his hand away.

“You wanna go see the seals on Saturday?” he asked. “The app says Bertha’s coming north again. Maybe we’ll spot her at Bluff Point going after a seal.”

Annabelle tried to grab a napkin back to wipe a dribble of ice cream off her arm, but when Jeremy held the napkins behind his back, she gave up and licked it off.

“Definitely,” she said. “But you don’t really want to see a great white shark, do you?”

Last summer when they’d gone out on Mia’s family’s boat, a dolphin had come pretty close to the bow, and Jeremy had been so surprised he’d screamed. Mia had teased him about it the whole rest of the day.

“I guess not,” he said. “But it would be pretty amazing to see one and not panic, wouldn’t it? To be brave enough to just appreciate how amazing it is, you know?”

Annabelle nodded. She didn’t have any desire to see Bertha for real, but she was pretty sure she understood why Jeremy felt that way.

If he were brave enough to see a white shark without freaking out, he might feel like he fit better with his fearless dad. Annabelle had seen the way Mr. Green’s face had lit up with pride when he watched Jeremy win third place at the big mathlete tournament on the Cape last winter, though. She was pretty sure his dad cared more about all the things Jeremy did well than whether or not he would be scared to spot a shark or whether or not he won any swim team races.