Abby comes bounding up with Josie and Jenny Wong. “It’s lava, Ada!” she yells. “Oh my dog! I just found out I love lava!”

Maybe she’s thinking about Pop, too.

“I know,” I say. “Isn’t it cool?”

“Actually, it’s hot,” she informs me matter-of-factly. “It would burn you if you fell in. It would burn you right up! Thank goodness that they don’t throw people in anymore, right?”

She asks me to lift her so she can see better through the binoculars, and I do. Then she tells me she wants down and the second her feet touch the ground she runs off again with Josie and Jenny to get ice cream.

Alone again, I stand staring at the faraway glow of the volcano. It feels like I’m waiting for something. A disaster? A sign? I don’t know.

Then I become aware of Nick standing next to me, the orange light accentuating the sharpness of his small, upturned nose. It’s like a ski jump, Nick’s nose.

My breath seizes. Oh my god, I asked him to have sex with me, and now what?

Am I really going to go with option one?

“Nice evening to see a volcano, don’t you think?” He turns to me. “Apparently there’s a tour where you can hike down to a spot where the lava is going into the ocean. That would have been pretty awesome. And there’s a boat tour, too. This is still cool, though,” he says.

“Actually, it’s hot,” I say.

He makes a sound that’s a cross between a snort and a laugh. Then silence. In the far, far distance, the volcano lets out a spray of hot, liquid rock. “So,” Nick says finally.

Which is how I know we’re going to talk about it. It. What I said.

“So . . . ,” I reply.

“I have a question about what happened earlier.”

“At the restaurant?” Of course he means the restaurant.

“Yes,” he confirms.

“So, what’s your question?”

“My question is, why?”

“Why?”

“Why did you ask me to have sex with you?”

My heart bangs into my ribs. “I—uh—I’m kind of going through something right now.”

“I noticed. But like what, exactly?”

For all of three seconds, I’m tempted to tell him. It would be so good to tell somebody. Get it off my chest. This stuff feels like it’s sitting there like a stack of weights. “Well, my parents, you see . . . and then I just broke up with my—” I start, but I don’t want to get into it. “I didn’t—and then I saw—” Oh god, I’m going with option two, which is, I realize, even worse than option one. “I’ve had a lapse of sanity, I think.”

He nods quietly. “So you didn’t mean it.”

But here’s the thing: I did.