“Sure.” Better to get out of here than to get roped into unpacking boxes. Mom packs like we’re never leaving here. In reality, I think I could survive with my swimsuit and a towel. And my paints. Maybe a small library of books. Okay, I need a few things. But still not as many as Mom.

Dad looks up at me from where he’s hunched over a box in the dining room. “Don’t forget,” he says, giving me a wink. Dad’s here for almost two weeks before he has to check in at the office for a few days, and then mostly he’ll be here, working remotely, like he has for the last five years or so. I glance out the window to where our little boat is already tied alongside the dock that juts out into the still water. Mom hates driving the boat, but Dad and me, we’ve always lived out on the water, the wake misting our arms, wind burning our cheeks. Driving it still makes me nervous though, and I usually opt to let someone else do it. Boats steer funny; they’re not like cars, which turn exactly when you want them to. Asher says I think too much to drive a boat properly. As if thinking is ever a bad thing.

Down the road from us, there’s a tiny convenience store called The Little Store—its actual name, I swear—that also doubles as one of the town’s two pizza places. It’s dark, like the walls of our house; like the mossy insides and writhing bodies inside the white container of worms my father sends me to retrieve on the first day of vacation every year. When I was twelve, I would ride my pink bike—balancing the plastic container precariously on my handlebars the whole way home.

Now, I steal Dad’s car keys from the little nail by the front door, and give a quick “I’ll be back” as the screen door slams behind me. Through the open kitchen windows I can still hear the rustle of paper bags as Mom unpacks a week’s worth of groceries from the local market twenty minutes away, where she grumbles about everything costing twice as much as at home.

I walk alongside the house, down the little cement sidewalk that runs to the gravel driveway. Straight ahead of me is the monstrosity—as my parents call it—that is Nadine and Charlie’s house. They own Lake House A and B, and until two years ago, they also owned four more tiny shoebox rentals, before they tore them down to build their dream house. Technically, this place is called Five Pines Resort, but with two houses left to rent it hardly qualifies, if you ask me.