Zander dumps the little boat into the water, and while he parks the truck I hold onto the shiny yellow rope and make sure it doesn’t float off. I tie the rope to the dock and get into the boat so that I’m ready to go when Zander returns. When he steps down into the boat he’s smiling, but we don’t talk. He pushes us off from the dock and starts up the little black motor, kicking up a dark cloud of dirt that plumes out around the boat, like we’re floating on a billowy brown cloud. Soon, we’re at the center of the little lake, the only spot deep enough that you can’t see clear to the bottom. My seat is so close to the front that I have no choice but to sit facing Zander. He’s looping a wriggling brown worm around a hook, and we still aren’t talking. I used to think that meant something about us; that being able to sit in silence was somehow evidence of our close relationship, but now it feels awkward. When he has the worm twisted and knotted around the sharp metal, he holds the handle out to me.

I shake my head. “You can do it.”

“I can show you how.”

Realization smacks me in the head, the way I wish I could smack Zander with the pole he’s holding out to me. “Zander, I don’t actually want to fish.”

“But you said—”

“It was just an example. A dumb example,” I say.

“It made me feel like shit.”

That was sort of the point. “Breaking up isn’t supposed to be fun. Losing your best friend doesn’t feel great either.”

“I didn’t think you hating me would hurt this bad,” he says, his eyes dropping from me to the bottom of the boat.

“Did you think it would be a good time? Were you looking forward to it?”

“I thought you were leaving, Olivia. We’re seventeen, you think a cross-country long-distance relationship in our senior year was going to work?”

I don’t say anything, because it’s clear that he didn’t, and I did. If he had asked me two months ago, I would have said absolutely. Absolutely, Zander and I could survive a long-distance relationship for one year. That’s all it would have been, one year until college. One year until all of our plans would kick into gear. How could two people who’d known each other as long as we had not make it work? And if we couldn’t, then how could anyone?

“I didn’t tell my parents right away,” he says.

What? “Why not?”

“At first I just couldn’t figure out a way to do it. They would have had a million questions, you know?”

“You didn’t want to tell your mom what an ass you were?”