“Did you check your grades?” she asked, because it was better to get the topic over with.

“Yeah, I saw them.”

And they were probably all As and A-pluses, because that was Jeremy. He had the same kind of “qualified day student” scholarship Annabelle did, but he actually deserved his. He had probably never even considered the possibility of getting a C. He’d be shocked by an A-minus.

“You checked yours, too?” he asked.

“Yep,” she replied, then scrambled for something else to talk about. “Hey, any news on Bertha?”

“Yes!”

A man with a little kid on the back of his bike rang his bell to pass. Jeremy fell in behind Annabelle as the man sped by. A summer dad, riding the kind of bike they rented out at the shops in town.

Then Jeremy caught back up, his pale brown eyes wide with excitement. “She pinged near Montauk, and she’s heading our way!”

Bertha was a great white shark who’d been spotted off the shore of the island last summer, and Jeremy watched her movements on a shark-tracking app. She was a juvenile—so young that her jaw wasn’t strong enough to eat seals or sea lions yet, and she couldn’t travel too far from the coast of Long Island, where her home was.

“You think she’s going to come back to the island?” Annabelle asked.

In front of them, the summer dad’s tires swerved as he hit a patch of sand.

“She might turn back like she did in January,” Jeremy said. “Or go in toward the Cape like in March. But maybe.”

He’d learned so much about Bertha because the shark spotting had messed up his dad’s summer business last year. Most of Mr. Green’s construction projects happened in the off-season, and then he took snorkelers and scuba divers out on his boat in the summer. After Bertha, most people had been too scared to go on boat trips, so Jeremy had started doing research to prove that sharks were almost never a threat to humans.

And Annabelle had gotten swept up in his interest. It was fun to see the world through Jeremy’s eyes—as a place where you could spot a problem and feel so certain you could fix it. And there was something that fascinated her about Bertha, this creature who was so big and terrifying and yet still barely old enough to go out and explore by herself. She imagined Bertha’s shark parents reminding her to be safe before they let her go out to swim around on her own, and then worrying while she was away.

“How big do you think she is now?” Annabelle asked.

They were out of their neighborhood now, reaching the marshy wildlife preserve. Seagulls squawked overhead, and a dragonfly hovered at the edge of the path.

Jeremy shook his head. “No way to know for sure unless another shark tagger finds her. Maybe nine feet?”

Up ahead, the summer dad pulled off to the side to check the bike path map, and Jeremy and Annabelle rode past, up to the mostly hidden entrance for Bluff Point.