At last another summer had arrived. The families had reunited on Corfu, with preparations under way for their annual First Night Dinner.

Until landing in Corfu late the night before, Joey hadn’t seen Leo for over two months, not since she’d visited him at U of M over her spring break from Penn, their breaks luckily coinciding. After the prior summer, it had been torturous to separate for college, to see each other only for occasional spurts. But anticipation of the summer had kept Joey going. She’d spent many hours in her dorm room’s tiny, dark closet so as not to bother her roommates, winding the telephone cord around her finger, talking and listening to Leo but not getting to feel him.

Now that was done. Last night, she’d leaped into Leo’s arms, soaked up his sunshine smell, and felt herself relax into the eternity of summer, where moments no longer had looming expiration dates. The fall semester felt eons way, with three months stretching out ahead in her favorite place on earth. Joey felt the happy and kind and generous that seemed to come naturally when your entire being was one giant exclamation mark.

Her gaze skittered across the terrace, at all her favorite people. In the corner, by the door that opened into her family’s apartment, Rand and her father, Scott, were playing Lily’s favorite game, Tossing Lily and Sinead.

Sinead was Lily’s imaginary best friend, and Lily didn’t find it fair that she would be tossed and not Sinead. So what happened is that Scott gathered Lily, limbs like an octopus, and essentially passed her to Rand, who stood a foot away on the terrace.

Rand’s eyes lingered on the stock ticker floating across the screen he’d rigged so he was never far from his markets. Then he set Lily down and said in a cartoon voice, “Now it’s Sinead’s turn, Lily Pad.” He gathered an imaginary Sinead, hands quaking. “I think Sinead’s going through a growth spurt.”

“No, silly,” said Lily, licking a Kinder Egg. “Sinead’s littler than me.”

Joey smoothed her fluorescent-green tee, excited for Leo to see her wearing it again. Leo hated the color. Despised it. He believed fashion-oriented neon to be a bastard of those shades of green that arose in the natural order. He’d said it like gospel one summer, when that botany book was his fifth appendage and he’d scrutinized leaves and trees so that a walk to the sea could swallow the morning.

So naturally, Joey’s old, worn, neon shirt got a lot of wardrobe mileage in teasing him.