Even if he stays a whole year at the camp, he’ll be just another boy among a crowd of nameless boys. They come and they go. And soon he’ll be gone too, shuttled back to wherever he came from. One of the flat states, or the humid states, back home to his parents and his friends. He’ll soon forget this place and the night a girl found him inside the woods and let him sleep in her home beside the fire. An old memory replaced with new ones.

He vanishes among the mass of boys—my first found item that was made of flesh and a thumping heart, and now he’s gone.

My own heart betrays my head, sinking in on itself. Concaving. As though a deep, unknowable pain is squeezing it into a tiny kernel. A feeling I don’t want to feel. I refuse to feel.

I turn back for the double doors, pushing the feeling away, when from the corner of my eye I see someone approaching. Tall and slight and moving not with the hulking stride of a boy, but with the ease of a girl who is at home in her own skin.

The willowy Suzy Torrez—acorn-brown hair tied in a ponytail at the back of her head, eyelashes so long they’re like hummingbird wings—saunters toward me, lips drawn into a grin. “Nora!” she calls.

I feel my mouth dip open and my smile fade. “What are you doing here?” I ask once she reaches me.

Suzy lives in Fir Haven and goes to Fir Haven High. I only know her vaguely—our lockers were next to each other last year, but we’ve never been friends. She has a crowd of besties who do everything together and a crowd of boys who fawn over her, and I don’t have either of those things. But I also don’t want those things.

Still, I see Suzy from time to time at the lake, mostly in summer, sunbathing down by the shore, stretched out on a beach towel with all her friends—lathered in coconut oil and laughing so loudly their voices carry across the lake. She usually has a summer fling with one of the boys at camp, a seasonal crush who she swaps out when the next selection of boys arrive. I’ve always envied the ease with which her heart can flutter from one to the next. A buoyant, pliable thing.