She didn’t explain how she found that out, and Annabelle’s throat went dry as she remembered the way Connor had laughed at the pool when Jordan had called Elisa manly. Her heart hurt for last-summer Elisa almost as much as it hurt for herself.
“Well, now you have somebody way better to flirt with,” Kayla whispered to Elisa, glancing over toward the counter. Elisa’s eyes darted over, too, and Annabelle followed her gaze.
The guy who was working was tall with brown skin and short hair. When he noticed Elisa looking, he motioned for her to come over.
“Hey!” he said, pointing at the specials board. “What’s with this new drink? Chai-infused oatmilk?”
Elisa’s freckled cheeks flamed pink.
“Go,” Kayla urged. “Teach him how to make the oaty-chai magic!”
Elisa tossed her ripped-up napkin at Kayla, but she was beaming as she walked to the counter.
Kayla had gotten a giant muffin, and she pushed the plate toward Annabelle. “You want any? It’s blackberry thyme. The thyme’s kind of weird, but not bad as long as you know it’s coming.”
Annabelle took a little piece and watched Kayla tear one off, too.
She bit her bottom lip instead of eating the piece of muffin. Kayla had tried to talk to her about Connor even though that was obviously uncomfortable, but Annabelle had never said anything about where Kayla had been last summer and what she was recovering from. She still wasn’t sure how to talk about it, but she should at least try.
“Um, I know I’ve never really said anything about . . . when you were sick. And how you were at the treatment place last summer. I’m sorry you had to go through that. It must have been really hard. And I’m really happy you’re better.”
Kayla pushed her bangs out of her eyes, and the gesture made her look even more like Jeremy than usual.
“It’s still pretty hard,” she said. “But thanks. For saying that.”
“You’re welcome.” Annabelle took a sip of her lemonade, which was the perfect balance of tart and sweet. She was glad she hadn’t tried to order some kind of coffee drink just because the older girls did. “How’s Jeremy?”
Kayla took a bite of muffin. “He’s good, I think. Though I’m sure he’d be better if you guys made up.”
Annabelle’s cheeks burned, so she took another sip to cool them down. “I want to fix things when he gets back.”
“Good,” Kayla said, nodding as if that had fixed the situation already, just knowing that Annabelle wanted to make things right.
Annabelle pictured Jeremy’s hurt, angry face and was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be that easy. But she was also pretty sure she would figure something out.
After Annabelle said goodbye to Kayla and Elisa, she put on her raincoat and walked up the street to meet Mitch at his office for lunch.
But on her way, she peeked into the window of the bagel place, and there was Mia, by herself at one of the front tables. She almost kept going, but then she changed her mind and went in.
“Hey.” She slid off the hood of her coat and approached Mia’s table.
Mia’s dark eyes went wide with surprise. “Oh. Hey.”
She was wearing the bright pink shirt she’d gotten on that shopping trip in the spring. Annabelle had bought the same one in light blue, and Mia had chosen a pale green one at first, but her mom had vetoed that, saying pale colors did nothing for Mia’s complexion and she had to “go bold” if she wanted to stand out.
“What are you up to?” Annabelle asked, and Mia held up what was left of her bagel as if to say, What does it look like?
Right. Annabelle was about ready to give up and leave, but then Mia heaved an enormous sigh.
“I have literally nothing to do until practice, and practice is probably going to get canceled if there’s lightning. Reagan went back to Connecticut and Jeremy’s in Boston and Genevieve’s babysitting and I don’t know what any of the other swim team girls are doing. So I’m stuck here on this tiny, boring island eating this bagel as slowly as I can to kill time.”
Annabelle stared at Mia, remembering what rainy days had been like last summer.
Once, the two of them had made scavenger hunts for each other inside Mia’s house. Another time they’d found five different cookie recipes—peanut butter, chocolate chip, double chocolate, oatmeal raisin, and snickerdoodles—and combined the best parts of each recipe into a batch of mash-up cookies, even though Mia’s mom told them there was no way all those things would taste good together. The cookies were pretty terrible, but Mia had insisted she loved them, and Annabelle had choked down a couple in solidarity.
Annabelle didn’t think Mia had ever been bored last summer. She hadn’t waited around for other people to invite her along to plans. She’d made the plans.
Annabelle wished she could say, I’ll hang out with you today. You name the plan and I’ll do it!
But she couldn’t forget that Mia had seemed sort of happy when she’d messed things up with Connor. She was tired of feeling like Mia was keeping a tally of all the assignments she did badly on at school. And she didn’t want to be the kind of person she’d become around Mia this summer, either. The kind of person who left Mia out on purpose and wanted her to be jealous.
Maybe all the competitiveness between them had ruined their friendship completely, or maybe there still could be something good between them if they gave themselves a little break. She really wasn’t sure.
She thought of that blackberry-thyme muffin—how Kayla had said the thyme wasn’t bad as long as you knew it was coming. How lots of things would be easier if you knew what was coming, but that’s almost never how things went.
It was a tiny island, though, like Mia had said. They weren’t going to lose track of each other. If there was some part of their friendship left to salvage once the bad feelings had passed, they had time.
“This summer hasn’t gone the way I wanted it to at all,” Annabelle said.
She braced herself for Mia to say something X-Acto-knife sharp again, about how Annabelle shouldn’t have ditched her and Jeremy or thrown herself at Connor.
But Mia said, “Me neither. I kind of . . . I miss last summer.”
“Me too,” Annabelle agreed.
But she wouldn’t choose to go back to last summer if someone offered her the option.
She didn’t want to have to live through the most humiliating moments of this summer again—that was part of it. But she wouldn’t want them wiped away, either.
She thought of that first-day-of-summer-break Annabelle again, so discouraged after her history exam and so excited when Connor noticed her. She was glad for all the ways she’d changed since that day, even though she wasn’t glad about all the things that had changed her.
“Well, I’m meeting Mitch, so I should probably go,” she finally said.
Mia nodded. “Okay. Cheerio, Annabelle,” she said, using their silly old goodbye.
“Ta-ta, Mia,” Annabelle replied.
And she went out into the rain, breathing in the sweet, fresh smell of it and not really minding the way it drenched her bare legs and made her flip-flops all squeaky and slippery.
Chapter 33
Back home that afternoon, Annabelle took apart her old shell lamp and then scattered the perfect, store-bought shells along the rain-drop-speckled sand at the little beach. She decided it wasn’t so helpful to have something that looked so pretty but wasn’t real. Like that necklace Mrs. Sloane wore, with the pink quartz pendant that was too shiny and round.
For now, the only things she kept in the bottom of the lamp were the broken shell from Kelsey Bennett and the salt-and-pepper granite stone from that awful night with Connor.
At first, looking at the stone had made her cringe with shame. But it was strong, that rock. Strong enough to survive getting tossed around by waves and buried under sand. And Annabelle wanted to be strong, too.
Even if that meant doing scary, embarrassing things, like sitting on the bad-kid bench outside of Mrs. Sloan
e’s office while everyone else was in foreign language class, because maybe dropping Spanish really would help her do better in eighth grade. And apologizing to Jeremy.
The day after Jeremy got home from his summer program, Annabelle got a ride to his house. She was waiting on his front steps when Mrs. Green’s car pulled into the driveway after swim practice.
“Annabelle!” Mrs. Green said. “What a nice surprise.” Then she mouthed, “Good luck,” and headed inside.
It had been a month since Annabelle had seen Jeremy, and his hair had grown enough that the front part reached his eyebrows again. He didn’t get out of the car right away, even though she knew he’d seen her.
She walked over to the car holding up the slightly melted to-go cup of ice cream she’d picked up at the Creamery and brought over in a cooler. A large, with half double chocolate chunk and half peanut butter cup. And eventually, he opened the car door.
“I brought a peace offering,” she said. “And I won’t laugh at you if you end up with chocolate lipstick, I promise.”
Jeremy didn’t smile, but he took the ice cream and followed her over to the front steps. She sat on the bottom one, and he took the top.
“I’m sorry I was awful to you,” she said. “And thank you for helping me that night when I got hurt. I was wrong to go along with everyone, and I was really wrong to get mad at you when . . .” This part still wasn’t easy to say, even though she knew it was true. “When you were right. About Connor not really caring and everything. And you were just being a good friend.”
Jeremy nodded as he pried the top off the ice cream and took his first bite. “It’s okay,” he said finally.
“It’s kind of not, though,” Annabelle said. “I’m sorry I was such an idiot.”
Jeremy’s head snapped up just like Mom’s did if she ever heard Annabelle use that word. “Don’t say that. You’re not an idiot.”
“Yeah, right,” she said, forcing out a fake little laugh.
“You’re not,” Jeremy said. His voice was louder this time.
“Well, I was stupid to get all caught up in Connor and being on the high school team and . . .” She made herself say it. “I’m not smart like you and Mia.”
Jeremy pushed his chocolate scoop to the side a bit and handed the cup to Annabelle. “Duh,” he said, and it stung, even though it was true. But then he added, “You’re smart like you.”
Her cheeks heated up even as she brought a cold spoonful of ice cream to her mouth.
That wasn’t true, was it?
She remembered how smart she’d felt last summer at the shark museum, when Mr. Green took her and Jeremy and the people there assumed she knew as much as he did. And back in sixth-grade science, when Mrs. Mattson always told her how perceptive she was.
Maybe it was perceptive of her to know exactly when another swimmer was getting tired so she could pick up her pace and to notice the ways Mia was changing to fit with her new friends.
“I’m glad you’re home,” she told Jeremy. And his smile—that sweet smile that told everybody what a nice guy he was before he even opened his mouth to speak—spread across his face right away.
“Me too.”
They sat there for a while, eating their ice cream and waving away bugs that flew too close. When they finished, Jeremy sipped up the milky, sweet liquid that was left at the bottom of the cup, just like he always did, and when he tipped his head forward again, his whole chin was covered with chocolate.
“You look like a little kid,” Annabelle told him as she handed him a stack of napkins.
“Who cares?” he said.
And who did care, really? There were worse things than being like a little kid sometimes.
He wiped off his chin and then lunged toward her face with the chocolaty napkin he’d used, as if he were going to smear it on her cheek. She laughed and pushed his hand away.
“You wanna go see the seals on Saturday?” he asked. “The app says Bertha’s coming north again. Maybe we’ll spot her at Bluff Point going after a seal.”
Annabelle tried to grab a napkin back to wipe a dribble of ice cream off her arm, but when Jeremy held the napkins behind his back, she gave up and licked it off.
“Definitely,” she said. “But you don’t really want to see a great white shark, do you?”
Last summer when they’d gone out on Mia’s family’s boat, a dolphin had come pretty close to the bow, and Jeremy had been so surprised he’d screamed. Mia had teased him about it the whole rest of the day.
“I guess not,” he said. “But it would be pretty amazing to see one and not panic, wouldn’t it? To be brave enough to just appreciate how amazing it is, you know?”
Annabelle nodded. She didn’t have any desire to see Bertha for real, but she was pretty sure she understood why Jeremy felt that way.
If he were brave enough to see a white shark without freaking out, he might feel like he fit better with his fearless dad. Annabelle had seen the way Mr. Green’s face had lit up with pride when he watched Jeremy win third place at the big mathlete tournament on the Cape last winter, though. She was pretty sure his dad cared more about all the things Jeremy did well than whether or not he would be scared to spot a shark or whether or not he won any swim team races.
“Wait, I thought you said Bertha’s not old enough to eat a seal,” Annabelle said.
Jeremy stood up and held a hand out to her. “Doesn’t mean she can’t try,” he said, and Annabelle held out hers—nearly healed now—and let him gently pull her up to standing.
Chapter 34
The next morning, Annabelle and Mitch got up early and went down to the little beach before the sun got too strong. Annabelle didn’t have to wear her brace anymore, and the physical therapist had cleared her to swim for real.
There wasn’t a buoy out in the water to swim to, but Annabelle didn’t need one. She knew how many strokes to take for every lap, and she didn’t need a wall to push off of when she changed directions.
Mitch’s two daughters were coming the next weekend, and Mitch was bubbling over with plans for all the things he wanted to do to make their visit special. And Mom and Mitch had encouraged Annabelle to email Dad when she was ready. They thought Dad had had the right idea—emailing back and forth to get to know each other a little bit again, and then maybe a phone call or two before they dove into seeing each other.
But for now, she was focusing on letting her wrist and thumb heal the rest of the way and getting ready for the school year in her tutoring sessions with Janine. And maybe even getting herself in good enough shape to be back for the last meet of the season—the rematch against South Shore—if Mom and Mitch agreed.
It would be pretty humiliating, showing up to see Connor and Jordan and Ruby and all of those people she’d embarrassed herself in front of.
But Kayla had come back to swim team this summer, even though everybody knew why she’d missed last season and nobody knew what to say about it. And Elisa had been hurt by Connor, too, but she hadn’t let that get in her way. And Annabelle had already survived plenty of other humiliating things and kept on going.
She might not be fast enough to help the team win the medley relay and beat South Shore out for the league championship after not swimming for a month. And she might not be able to do any better in Mr. Derrickson’s history class next year, either. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t try.
“I think I’m ready to keep up today,” Mitch said as they walked down the beach a little bit, away from the sandbar, and waded in until the water was deep enough to start.
“Good luck with that,” Annabelle told him.
Then she pulled down her goggles, kicked her feet off against the sand, and began to swim. The cold, salty water prickled her skin, and the gentle current of the tiny waves gave her just enough resistance to make her feel powerful enough to do almost anything as she pushed her body forward.
When she finally came up for air, she could hear the waves’ steady rolling and Mitch’s arms an
d legs splashing behind her, and then she was back underwater, blocking out everything but herself and propelling her body forward, out toward that infinite horizon.
Acknowledgments
I don’t think I would have become a writer if I hadn’t first become a middle school teacher, and I know I wouldn’t have written this story if I hadn’t been inspired by the students I taught and the conversations we had.
To all of my former students: Thank you for energizing me with your passion and creativity and for strengthening my resolve to write this kind of upper-middle-grade book. And very special thank yous to Lily Cappello and Madison Scheuer, who offered excellent advice about the swimming elements of this story, and to Dasha SotnikPlatt, one of the most exuberant and prolific readers I’ve ever known, who read a book I’d written about Annabelle’s stepsister and said, “I want Annabelle’s story next.” It took me several years, but here you go!
Sara Crowe, thank you for loving Annabelle back when she was a secondary character in Lissy’s story and for urging me to keep writing this book. I so appreciate your enthusiasm and your hard work on my behalf.
Maggie Lehrman, thank you for believing that we need stories like Annabelle’s and for guiding me along to realize my vision for this book. You are calming, encouraging, and wise, and I’m especially glad you helped me develop the girl power at the core of this story. Thank you to the awesome team at Abrams for contributing your many talents to creating this beautiful book. Nishant Choksi and Hana Anouk Nakamura, thank you for the incredible cover and book design. Jenny Choy, Trish McNamara O’Neill, Hallie Patterson, and Brooke Shearouse, thank you for all that you do to get my stories into the hands of readers.
Laura Sibson, thank you for helping me enrich the swimming scenes and understand Annabelle’s unique intelligence . . . and for hosting me for many lovely writing dates and supplying me with delicious coffee and second breakfasts to keep me going. Jen Petro-Roy, thank you for your valuable insights about Kayla’s character and eating disorder recovery. And Cordelia Jensen, my treasured friend and sometimes coauthor, thank you for reading this story more times than even my very specific memory can keep track of and for all the ways you helped me problem-solve and find the heart of this book. I am a better—and happier—writer because of you.
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