Connor replied right away. Not much. Missed you at practice today.

Missed you! She squeezed her pillow to her chest to keep from squealing.

Hope you guys went through the door at the pool instead of climbing the fence, she wrote.

LOL, he replied, and she squeezed her pillow tighter. Maybe swimming really wasn’t the only thing she did well. Maybe she was pretty decent at this, too.

Over the next few days, Annabelle and Connor texted every night. Annabelle usually had to text first, but Connor always asked her questions—like what she had done that day, and if her hand was any better, and whether the summer people seemed more obnoxious than usual.

Every time he asked a question, she got that warm, belly-full-of-hot-chocolate feeling. Because every question he asked meant that he wanted to keep the conversation going. That he liked texting with her as much as she liked texting with him.

There was one time when he sent a text that didn’t make any sense—a haha no don’t do it! when she hadn’t said anything funny, and she had no idea what he was telling her not to do. And then he followed it up with an Oops! Sorry meant to send to someone else! And then she had to wonder how many other people he was texting with right then, and who they were.

But Jeremy had done that to her once with a text that was supposed to go to his mom. It didn’t have to mean anything.

Other than texting with Connor and wondering whether or not her dad had gotten her letter yet, she didn’t have much going on except tutoring. On Friday, when the rest of the swim team had a meet on Cape Cod, she beat Janine to the library for their session and chose her favorite table—the one that looked out at the sparkling water on the horizon.

She stared out the window, wondering why the ocean seemed gray from this distance even though it was always blue or green up close and wishing she could ask Jeremy what he thought.

Jeremy, who was supposed to go straight from today’s meet to Boston, since his summer program started tomorrow. Who hadn’t even said goodbye.

“Hey there,” Janine said, sliding into the seat across from Annabelle. “How’s the wrist?”

Annabelle shrugged. “Hurts.”

“It must be hard not to be able to swim, huh? When I had shin splints and couldn’t run last summer it was the worst.”

Janine shook her head at the memory, and Annabelle noticed that Janine’s tight curls stayed put when her head moved, instead of swinging side to side the way her own hair would. Back when Janine went to the Academy, she’d worn her hair in a straight ponytail or a tight, high bun, but since she’d come back from college this spring, it was like a puffy cloud around her face. She looked older this way. More confident, too.

At the Academy, Janine had fit in better than Annabelle did in some ways, since she was smart. But Gray Island wasn’t exactly a diverse place. There were some other black kids who boarded at the Academy, but not many. And there were even fewer black families who lived on the island. More came from the mainland for vacation . . . but not that many more.