Everyone who lives here is in their twenties. They come from places like Bulgaria and the Czech Republic and Macedonia and Poland to work the summer season. It’s a special program where they get a temporary visa. A whole group of them work at the next-door restaurant, which is no longer a pancake house but serves a huge buffet. I hear them early in the morning—marching across the gravel driveway, then later their accented voices—“More scrambled eggs! Out of muffins! Someone take out the garbage!” By midday they return, limp and greasy, their showers throbbing through the thin walls. After, they sit out around the small swimming pool on the folding chairs and gossip, the girls with the insides of their pale arms turned up, faces tilted to the sun. All of them adore Kamal.

“He’s so cute!” the girl in the fringed denim shorts squeals.

“I want those curls,” her blond friend adds.

They bring us the food that isn’t taken, so we eat well—cold eggs and quiche and sausages and muffins. They give us a map too, showing what beaches we can use, and if we can fork over the money, Doris will give us a piece of paper to get our beach and pond stickers too.

On our third day on the Cape, we drive to the lighthouse. Carlos brings his sketch pad and Kamal bounds ahead. We pay for our tickets and climb up the twisting steps until we’re at the very top, gazing out over scrub brush and a rolling golf course and beyond, the Atlantic Ocean, flat and shiny blue, surrounding us. Then I remember staring at the Google map, how Cape Cod curls around like a great arm, jutting out into the water but somehow embracing too.

Kamal leans into me. I put my arm around him, pull him close. “I want to stay,” he whispers.

Stay. It sinks into me, this new pebble-word.

“It’s perfect,” Carlos says. “We’re, like, at the end of the earth. No one’s going to find us here. We can hide out.”

He shuts his eyes, and I notice the fringe of his lashes, golden brown.

Another word: hide.