Ms. Jelly’s is on the main street, and everyone coming from the marina has to pass by it. That’s what made it an important landmark in my summer landscape. Along with the Red Engine ice cream booth, which was down by the beach and just up from the marina. It was the boat traffic that May and I cared about back then—boats that brought the other summer kids, whom we met at tennis lessons and sailing.

There were rotating crushes on the boys and superficial friendships with the girls. Age didn’t matter the same way it did during the year at school. We all hung out in one big group, slumming it at the beach with the locals, daring each other to jump off rocky cliffs, racing our parents’ boats. On rainy days we crammed in together under the wooden shelter of the tennis club weaving gimp bracelets to exchange or making circles of sailing rope around one another’s wrists and then burning the ends so they melted together.

At the end of summer we all exchanged mailing addresses with the promise of writing, wishing our summer friends could be our year-round friends, but once those cottages were closed and the leaves began to turn, so did our minds. Summer friends became just a memory, no letters were ever exchanged, but when we were all reunited in July it was as though no time had passed at all. That was the magic of the lake, the spell of summer, the fickleness of youth.

The last summer I spent at Avril Island, I was twelve. The exact age when crushes on boys actually start to mean something and those friendships with girls are crucial to your very existence.

I had a boyfriend. Matthew. He had blond hair and freckles, a killer serve, and his clothes always smelled like the lake air that dried them on his backyard clothesline. He wore Stan Smiths, cutoff cargo shorts, and a wrist full of rope bracelets that I painstakingly burned together just so that I could touch the soft, tanned skin of his arm over and over again. We held hands walking around this very town, sat pressed together on boat rides, and had one fleeting kiss at a sailing club dance.

My phone buzzes on the table in front of me, breaking the spell of memory. It’s Beatrice, asking me where her Rollerblades are. I imagine her sister, Madeline, already wearing her own Rollerblades and helmet, sitting by the front door waiting patiently for Bea to locate hers. They were made in one womb but are from different planets.

I text back a few options and then signal off with a kissy emoji. I hate them—emojis—but it’s their language, so I’ll speak it.