I run a quick hand up my calf to check. My legs are smooth as a baby’s butt this time. This could actually work.

But then it happens exactly the way it did before. Kissing. Touching. His fingers on the button of my shorts. My breath seizing up in my chest. Sitting up.

Stopping us.

“Wait,” I gasp, and it’s so frustrating I feel this way that I want to cry. “Afton’s right. I can’t do this. I’m not ready.”

There’s the look on his face: the one I sketched before. The shuttered eyelids. The frown. And then the frown becomes a sneer.

“Oh, Ada,” Leo says. “Don’t be such a fucking square.”

I wake up in darkness, the kind of velvety black that makes me feel swallowed whole. For a few seconds I have no idea where I am, and I can hear the ocean, the shushing of waves. Then my eyes adjust. I remember I’m in Hawaii. It’s a clear night, the sky a deep blue outside the wall of windows, punctuated by the ebony shapes of the palm trees.

I turn to look at Afton in the bed next to mine, but she’s not there. After dinner she set out on her own and hadn’t come back by the time Mom put Abby to bed and closed the door between our rooms. I fumble for my phone and check the time: it’s not quite one in the morning.

I open the texts and stare at her last text conversation with me, all from before our fight. Most of our texts are silly: a string of emojis or funny remarks to show one another how brilliantly sarcastic we both are. I can’t shake the sense that everything’s going wrong. Leo. Mom and Pop. Afton, where she seems fine one minute, pissed off the next, and is now missing. She’s a big girl, I tell myself as my finger hovers over the screen of my phone, tempted to check up on her. Afton is fierce and fearless. She always has been. She can handle herself.

Plus, the words don’t be a fucking square are still stinging in my brain.

So I tell myself that I am not my sister’s keeper. And I roll over and try to go back to sleep.

The next morning Mom comes into our room predictably early, towing a sleepy-eyed Abby behind her. “I have to go now,” Mom says briskly.

I turn over to check for Afton. She’s there, in the bed next to mine, all that’s visible a long trail of wheat-colored hair sticking out from under the comforter.

“You’re in charge of the munchkin,” Mom says.