Pretty soon, everyone tired of the game and Annabelle relaxed a little. Ruby asked Jordan about some sort-of-famous person whose lawn he mowed—Dennis Martin, who directed movies, apparently. She made a big fuss out of how great the movies were, and Annabelle nodded along, even though she hadn’t heard of any of them.

“He’s a good guy, actually,” Jordan said.

“What?” Connor said. “I thought you’d never even spoken to him.”

“Well, not directly,” Jordan admitted. “His wife is the one who sets everything up with the lawn mowing. But I heard him on the phone the other day while he was sitting out by the pool. You could tell it was a business call, but he was real laid-back about it.”

Connor grinned and patted Jordan on the back. “Right. Yeah, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before you turn on the old Bernstein charm and Dennis Martin’s inviting you over to hang out by the pool and tell him all your great ideas about his next movie.”

Ruby took her hair out of its clip. “That pool is ridiculous.”

“You swam in it?” Annabelle asked.

“Um, no.” She shook her head so that her hair swished against her shoulders and the flowery smell of her shampoo overtook the usual pool smells of grease and chlorine and sunscreen. “Dennis Martin’s pool. I wish.”

“Someday, Rubes,” Jordan said, “I will charm Dennis Martin, just you wait and see. And then you and I will be floating around in his pool and he’ll be asking us to do a cameo in his new movie.”

Connor caught Annabelle’s eye and raised one eyebrow before turning to Jordan. “Good luck with that, man,” he said. Then he pointed over to the grassy lawn where the game of cornhole was always set up: two slanted wooden boards with holes on the back end, about ten feet apart, and little bean bags you tried to throw onto the boards or into the holes at the back. “Wanna play cornhole?”

Annabelle used to play all the time with Mia and Jeremy, but Connor was asking Jordan, not her, and she couldn’t get up the nerve to invite herself to join.

So she slipped out of the shorts and T-shirt she’d worn over her suit, slathered on some more sunscreen, and settled on a chair with her summer reading book. If she could get through a whole chapter and explain it to Mom on the way home, even though she’d missed tutoring, Mom might not be quite as mad.

Ruby spread out on the lawn chair next to her with a magazine and actually sounded interested when she asked what Annabelle was reading. “Oh, I love that book!” she said.

But with Ruby right next to her, Annabelle was too embarrassed to hold her index card under each line and move it down the page to keep her eyes focused. And it was too hard to pay attention to tiny black words crammed too close together on a page when Connor Madison was nearby, chatting with the pretty college-aged lifeguard as Jordan divided up the beanbags and waited for him.