When she finally came up for air, she tried to imagine herself diving beneath everything she couldn’t face thinking about—those Cs on her report card, the look on her mom’s face, Jeremy leaving in July, and Mia still choosing Reagan over her when Reagan wasn’t even here. It didn’t really work, though.

Chapter 4

When Annabelle and Jeremy got dropped off at the pool the next day, the older team’s practice was ending and Mia was already there, standing with a bunch of other girls from the middle school team. She was telling a story in her loud, low voice that made everyone look over to see what she was saying.

Annabelle wasn’t sure how she did it. Mia was always in the middle of things at school, too, even though she missed everything at night and some things on the weekends, when she was at home instead of in the dorms. And lately, swim team was the same way.

Most of the other kids on the North Shore Sands summer team went to the public school, and they were always talking about stuff that happened at school and making jokes about Academy kids, with their expensive clothes and hyphenated last names and the way they took up the whole sidewalk when they went into town. But whenever they did that, Mia would say something funny or give someone a compliment and boom: The Academy jokes would stop, and everybody would circle around her.

Annabelle was still watching Mia as she started for the locker room, and she almost walked right into the strong, tan chest of a guy wearing only a navy-blue racing suit. She stopped short, stumbling, and then two hands reached out to steady her.

Connor Madison. His fingers sizzled against her bare shoulders.

“I’m—I’m sorry,” Annabelle stuttered, but Connor grinned at her.

“Not a problem, Hummingbird. I like it when people almost run into me. Keeps me on my toes.”

Most people had stopped using her old nickname by last summer, once she’d hit a growth spurt that had left her towering over half the boys. But Annabelle liked that Connor still called her that. It felt special, coming from him.

“Oh, um, okay,” she said, even though he was obviously kidding.

But she couldn’t focus on how silly she sounded because Connor’s hands were so warm on her shoulders, and his blond hair had brighter blond streaks in the front from the sun like she always wished her own dirty-blond hair would get, and his eyes were so, so green. Almost as bright as her mom’s birthstone, peridot. Which Mom thought was “garish,” but what did Mom know.

The tips of Connor’s ears were sunburned, and the skin at the tops were peeling a tiny bit. Annabelle wanted to touch them, even though the idea of touching dead skin should be disgusting. Mia’s cousin, who’d never stopped texting with her boyfriend when she’d visited last summer, had told Mia and Annabelle that when you really, really like somebody, that changes how you see them, like how 3-D glasses change the way you see a movie. That’s probably the kind of thing she was talking about—not being grossed out by somebody’s dead ear skin.