“Um, are you in Boston?” she asked.

There was a pause, and Jordan’s seagull laugh blared in the background.

“Why?” Connor asked.

It wasn’t an easy question to answer. “Well, I . . . I am, and I sort of need . . . I’m stuck.”

“You’re stuck?” Connor asked.

It wasn’t mean, the way he said it. It was just kind of thin. Off-handed and a little confused. Like it wasn’t really his problem if she was in trouble.

Just like it hadn’t really been his problem when she was in trouble the night they tried to get into Dennis Martin’s pool, she realized.

“Con, who’re you talking to?” a girl’s voice asked.

Annabelle struggled to swallow. “Is that Caroline?”

Another long pause. “Yeah. Look, I’m on the bus, and I don’t really . . .” He trailed off.

Tears blurred Annabelle’s eyes, but she willed them to stay out of her voice. “I saw your text.”

No response.

“Why did you text me?” she asked.

She didn’t only mean this afternoon. She wanted to know why he’d kept on texting her all those other times, too. And why he’d flicked her ponytail, and why he’d stared at her the way he’d stared at her when all that time he’d had Caroline.

“I was just making sure we were good,” Connor said. “That you were good. That you weren’t . . .”

He didn’t bother to finish that sentence, either. Or maybe he couldn’t, with Caroline right there.

Annabelle had never been good at the fill-in questions on Mr. Derrickson’s history tests, but she was pretty sure she knew how to fill in the rest of Connor’s sentence. He wanted to be sure that she wasn’t mad at him. That she still thought he was so great and wonderful, like Elisa had said.

A voice came on the intercom again. The Hyannis bus was leaving with all those other people but not her.

“Right,” she said. “Bye, Connor.”

She hung up without waiting for him to say anything else and buried her head in her hands.

What was wrong with her? She couldn’t believe she’d called Connor as if she really thought he’d rush over to rescue her just because he sent one meaningless text that took basically zero effort.

That was even more pathetic than showing up at that party when she hadn’t been invited and sitting down next to him in the sand. Even more pathetic than assuming she’d fit with her dad when she hadn’t seen him in ages and the bad memories were so much stronger than the good ones, like flashlights shining steady instead of fireflies blinking their faint glow.

Her phone buzzed with a new text from Connor. Sorry HB.

She stared at those two flimsy words—one he hadn’t even typed out all the way—and that lazy, empty frowny face. A sharp new feeling knocked a little bit of her shame out of the way and made her sit up straighter.