On the morning of the Fletchers' barbecue—which should have been a day of celebration because, c'mon, free food—I woke up at the ungodly hour of four fifty-five. It was dark. It was cold. For a solid eight and a half seconds, I thought I might actually rather die than get out of bed.

"Fucking morning people," I grumbled at my ceiling.

I tossed my duvet aside and got to my feet, very much alive and very much unhappy to be up and at 'em. With all the stealth and finesse of a newborn elephant, I nudged the bedroom door open (it creaked) and tiptoed out into the hallway (where the floorboards also creaked, because of course).

In a rare stroke of luck, Aunt Rachel's door was closed. I slipped past it and down the stairs, my arms braced out in front of me as I felt my way through the pitch-black living room.

The kitchen was dark, too, but luckily the windows that looked out towards the ocean let in a bit of dim blue light. I snatched the home phone off the charging dock on the counter and plopped down on the tile floor, folding my legs and looking up to the display of the microwave. Four fifty-nine. Perfect.

I braced my thumb over the talk button.

In the same instant that the clock on the microwave clicked to five o'clock, the handset in my lap lit up and the opening bar of the ringtone played (Rachel had customized her home phones to play an instrumental, xylophone-heavy rendition of Snoop Dogg's 2004 hit single "Drop It Like It's Hot"). I hit talk before the xylophone could start up and pressed the phone to my ear.

"Hi," I grunted.

Blake Hamilton's laugh carried through the speaker.

"Goooooood morning Holden!" he greeted, with the smarmy affectation of an anchor from one of northern Florida's lower-budget news stations. "Today is Saturday, August 4th. The weather looks like—well, actually, it looks like total shit. Tropical Storm Donald is here. It'll probably rain. Now, for a special report on the Fletcher family barbeque, we're going to turn to Waverly Lyons, who has just woken up. Lyons?"

I smacked my lips together.

"My mouth tastes like expired yogurt."

Blake hummed thoughtfully.

"Yeah. Lyons, that might be one of the top five most revolting things I've ever heard."

I snorted and rolled my eyes.

"I can't believe I woke up for this," I said.

Alright, so five o'clock in the morning was an ungodly hour. But Blake was technically grounded until New Year's—which seemed fair enough, given that he kept sneaking out of the house—and Chloe had made him take up a two-week part-time job at the Marlin Bay Hospital teaching CPR, in addition to his lifeguarding at the beaches and job at the Holden Public Pool, to give him a better sense of responsibility or something. So I only got to see him when he was on duty at a beach.

One afternoon, after Blake had asked me when I'd be free the next day, I'd made a sardonic comment about being able to pencil him in from five to six o'clock in the morning.

Blake took me seriously.

And I, being the sucker I was, agreed.

There were few things I'd get out of bed for so early.

Blake was one of those things.

"You know," he huffed, "we wouldn't even have this problem if you had a cell phone. Like any other person living in this decade. Then I wouldn't have to wait until five in the morning to tell you about all the shit that happened the day before. I could just text you, like a civilized person. And send you memes. Do you know how hard it is to describe a meme, Waverly?"

I scoffed. "You're such a youth."

"Even my dad doesn't call people anymore."

"Hey," I said, feigning offense and trying not to laugh, "George is ahead of his time. A trendsetter. An icon."

"He wears long-sleeve shirts under Hawaiian T-shirts."

"Because he doesn't want to get sunburned! Do not start with me on this. You don't know what it's like to fear the sun."

"Speaking of, how are your shoulders?"

"Um..."

I'd spent the past few days trailing Blake and Jesse around the beach during my breaks, perfecting my surfer accent and humming the Jaws theme song behind Jesse's back when things got a little too tame.

Once or twice, I'd forgotten sunscreen.

It'd taken two whole bottles of aloe vera, but my shoulders had finally faded from purple to red, and then from red to a brown that peeled in itchy flakes. I prodded at one shoulder with my finger and winced. Still tender.

"You know," I finally said, "I've had worse."

"That's really upsetting."

"Yeah, well. It won't happen again this summer. Rachel's not letting me out of the house without sunscreen on."

"Good," Blake said.

"We got a jumbo pack from Costco for the barbeque today."

"You went to Costco without me?"

He sounded genuinely upset.

"I'll bring you next time. You can push the cart."

Blake hummed, sounding a little appeased.

"So what's the Fletcher's house like, anyway?" I asked, picking at the lint on my socks. "I'm picturing that house from Home Alone. People running around everywhere. Lots of booby traps. Blond children flooding basements and letting tarantulas loose."

"You know," Blake laughed, "you're not that off."

We talked for what felt like hours—and, simultaneously, only a few minutes—before Blake suddenly went quiet and I could hear the muffled wailing of an infant somewhere on the other end of the line. Isabel was awake. Which meant Chloe and George would be up any minute, too. It was only then that I glanced up at the microwave and realized how long we'd been talking.

It was six forty-eight.

"Oh, yikes," I whispered. "Um, you're gonna be late."

"Shit. Is it really that late?"

"Late being a relative term," I mumbled.

"I've gotta get to the pool," Blake said, ignoring me. There was a great deal of rustling on the other end of the phone and a few unintelligible grunts of exasperation. "Where're my fucking shoes—okay, and my whistle. Shit. I don't even have time to brush my teeth."

I scrunched up my nose.

"You're gonna do that before the barbecue, though, right?"

Blake sighed; I could practically hear him roll his eyes.

"Of course. Soon as I'm done, I'll shower and brush my teeth."

I opened my mouth to protest on the shower—I kind of liked the way Blake had a tendency to smell like chlorine and sunshine—but decided there was really no way to say all that without sounding creepy.

"I'll see you at the barbecue," I whispered.

"See you there," Blake whispered back, and then hung up.

I sat on the kitchen floor for a moment, phone cradled in my hands as I let myself readjust to the silence of the house.

I pictured Blake next door, running around the house with his hair all disheveled and his cheeks flushed pink while Isabel hollered in her crib. Blake had been an only child for most of his life. I wondered what it was like to have a sibling drop into your lap—all chubby cheeks and flailing limbs and rancid diapers. Part of me envied him. I'd always kind of fantasized about having a brother or sister. A partner in crime. Someone on my team. A living being who understood what absolute assholes my mom and dad could be.

Still, there were a few perks that came with being the only child of two parents who'd ceased to care about anything, offspring included.

For starters, no one noticed if I holed up in my bedroom to watch eight consecutive seasons of a television show. No one noticed if I let the puddle of dirty clothes on my desk chair turn into a waterfall and create a sea of sweaters and inside-out jeans on my floor. No one noticed if I paraded around without pants and tried out weird, unflattering home-made facial masks.

Honestly, I hadn't quite realized how used to being left alone I'd gotten until about ten o'clock that morning—after I'd tucked myself back in bed and then woken up again, at a more reasonable hour, to hop in the shower—when Aunt Rachel bumped my bedroom door open with her hip and came bouncing in with a basket of laundry tucked under her arm.

            "My darling little polar bear, I just folded your—oh."

She blinked at me.           

I blinked back. A single dollop of sunscreen rolled off my foot, which was lifted in the air with all the grace of a drunk man attempting pointe ballet. I'd just used about half a bottle of SPF 100 to slather up my arms and legs the way a small child might paint a pristine white canvas—messily, and with great enthusiasm. I wasn't wearing pants, obviously. Or a shirt. My bra did not match my underpants.

"What's up?" I asked, as casually as one can when half-naked and dripping with sunscreen.

"I folded your dress," Rachel announced, lifting a folded square of cobalt blue—Lena's longest dress, which she'd shoved at me the last time she came marching over to Rachel's to demand we paint our nails and watch extreme sports fail videos on YouTube.

"Oh. Thanks. Um. My hands are a little—uh, sticky."

"I'll put it on your bed," Rachel said, doing an admirable job of pretending she wasn't debating whether to laugh at me or apologize for barging in without so much as knocking.

"Great. Perfect. Yes."

"See you downstairs in fifteen?" she asked.

"Affirmative. Yep. You got it."

She slipped out of my room, and I let my foot hit the carpet with a little wet thump.

I finished rubbing in my sunscreen—a feat that took fourteen of the fifteen minutes Aunt Rachel had allotted me—and tugged on Lena's dress, which had been church-with-grandma-length on her but was just barely family-friendly on me. I tugged at the hem of it and darted into the bathroom to spin in front of the mirror, checking that a gust of wind wouldn't turn the barbecue into an unasked-for, low-budget Victoria's Secret fashion show.

When I was sure I was good, I dug a tube of mascara from the drawer beside the sink. I tried to ignore that my usual foundation—SPF 40, shade 001—seemed paler than it had been at the beginning of the summer. I tried not to pinch my split-ends and wonder when all the sun I'd been getting had managed to bleach them brilliant gold. I didn't like to think about how much time I'd spent in Holden, or how much I'd changed (outside and inside), because my summer had an expiration date that couldn't be compromised.

When I made my way downstairs, still tugging self-consciously on the hem of Lena's dress, Rachel was sitting at the kitchen sink, perched on a stool, with a bucket of solvent and a cup of stained paintbrushes. Her hair was pulled back into what might've been a French braid—it was hard to tell with all the stray curls—and she'd put on her fancy shoes, which meant a pair of espadrilles that didn't have duct tape or paint splatters on them.

"Oh, look at you!" she beamed as I started for the fridge. "Figures you'd wait until we've got a tropical storm coming in to put on a dress."

"Funny," I huffed.

"You look very pretty, Waverly. Very grown up."

I tugged open the refrigerator door and ducked behind it so Rachel couldn't see the sudden flood of warmth in my cheeks. Her words were a comfort I packaged away in my head for later, if I started to doubt myself again.

I'd been up way too late the night before trying to practice my eyeliner and soaking my hair with homemade leave-in conditioner, wondering if Blake would use the Fletcher's barbecue as an opportunity to reintroduce me to Chloe and George as his girlfriend, or if he'd already told them about us, or if he'd decided he didn't want his parents knowing that he'd started canoodling with the girl next door.

He was already grounded until New Year's, after all.

In any case, I was suddenly terrified of rolling up to the Fletchers' in my usual oversized T-shirt and sloppy ponytail. The fact that Rachel had noticed my sudden burst of caring about what I looked like was somewhat reassuring.

"So we're taking the pie, right?" I asked.

"Yes, ma'am. Second shelf, next to the eggs. Oh, and remember to grab the ketchup from the back. Gummer's allergic."

I frowned.

"Gummer?"          

"Yeah. Lena and Jesse's dad. Gummer."

"His parents named him that?"

Rachel gave me a look that said don't be silly.

"It's short for Montgomery," she explained.

His parents named him that? I wanted to ask again.

I decided to hold my tongue, tucked the ketchup under my arm, and grabbed the Key lime pie Aunt Rachel had baked the night before while we watched three consecutive hours of Parks and Recreation and I marinated in Costco-brand aloe vera.

"Alright, I'm just going to soak these brushes in some water all day while we're gone," Rachel announced. She stood and patted down the front of her long-sleeved denim dress—another of the fancy staples she kept at the very back of her closet. "Gosh, I'm hungry. I think I'd kill a man for a turkey burger right about now."

I slipped my flip-flops on and hustled out the door before Rachel could get homicidal.

I was halfway out onto the porch, my eyes straying to the Hamiltons' empty driveway, when a gust of wind came barreling down the street and nearly lifted the tinfoil covering off the pie. I let out an unattractive squawk and slapped my hand down on top of it just in time.

"I guess the storm's really rolling in," Rachel commented as she joined me, keys in hand and head tipped up as she squinted at the gloomy sky. "I hope Donald doesn't ruin our barbecue."

I scrunched my nose.

Rachel and I climbed into the neon green Volkswagen together, Key lime pie nestled safely in the back seat and ketchup bottle stowed down by my feet. Rachel claimed it was too chilly to leave the windows of the car rolled down, what with the malevolent wind and all, so we bumped up the volume on the radio and sang along with songs I knew would be stuck in my head later, the way overplayed hit singles have a tendency of doing.

The Fletchers lived about ten miles inland from Holden Point, where the palm trees and tall grass gave way to the wetlands. Rachel didn't know the route by memory, so I had to read her directions from her phone. When the monotone GPS voice announced our destination was on the left, I looked up and saw a wide driveway that trailed off to a white plantation-style house with a wraparound porch and a raspberry red front door. It wasn't a huge house—not for Florida, anyway—but it did look a bit like a sized-down version of the house from Forest Gump.

There was a lone live oak tree in the front yard. Moss hung in threads from the upper branches, along with a tire swing and a pair of sneakers—Jesse's, it looked like—that'd had their laces tied together before someone chucked them up into the thick of the tree.

There were four cars in the driveway, including Jesse's mud-splattered Jeep and the Hamiltons' silver sedan. Rachel pulled her neon Volkswagen in behind them. Outside, the air smelled damp and green, somehow—like the produce aisle of a supermarket, or the botanical garden I vaguely remembered visiting on a third-grade field trip.

It was significantly warmer inland than it was out by the ocean, warm enough that I could've run around in a bathing suit if I was really determined to cling to summer, but the sky was still decidedly overcast.

I gathered up the Key lime pie from the back seat of the car. Rachel discreetly pointed out a spot on my neck where I hadn't rubbed the sunscreen in all the way.

"Not that you can really tell, anyway. You're—I mean, no offense, but you're pretty pale, kiddo."

We marched down the rest of the driveway side by side, the hem of Lena's cobalt dress swinging around my thighs. The wind was gentler this far inland, but it still whispered across the front yard and made Aunt Rachel tug at the sleeves of her denim dress.

There were eight different sets of wind chimes suspended from the beams over the front porch. Rachel rang the doorbell, and I wondered if anybody would be able to hear us over the cacophony.

Lena was the one to open the door.

Her hair was loose around her shoulders, a mess of blonde curls that'd blown out in every direction with the humidity, and she had on an apron—one of those novelty ones, with a cartoonish depiction of a muscular man's body in a red Speedo.

She took one look at me before beaming and clasping her hands like a mother seeing her daughter off to prom.

I huffed and shouldered past her.

"Do not say anything," I warned.

"Not even hot damn?"

"No."

"You're no fun," Lena whined, stepping back from the doorway so Aunt Rachel and I could step inside. From the foyer, I could see through to the living room and what appeared to be a library. Everything in the house was a cluttered mix of new and old—grand chaise lounges arranged around a fireplace with an enormous flat-screen television mounted over the mantle; framed prints of Miami and Orlando in the early twentieth century hung between photos of a young Jesse posing with a soccer ball tucked under one arm and a little tiny Lena smiling, gap-toothed, in an all-white uniform with a yellow belt around her waist. It was a full house, lived in and warm.

I'd never been somewhere like it. For a moment, I felt like an astronaut exploring an alien world, my spacesuit too bulky and restrictive to let me pretend this was my own home planet.

"Hi, Ms. Lyons," Lena was saying behind me.

"Hi, dear," Rachel greeted. "I love the apron."

Lena chuckled. "Thanks. Dad put Blake and me on grill duty."

My stupid heart hiccupped at the sound of his name and I spun around a little too quickly. It was unbearably pathetic.

"Where should I put this?" I asked, trying to keep my voice even as I held up Aunt Rachel's pie.

Lena, of course, saw right through me.

"Why don't I take that," she said, reaching her arms around her waist to untie the strings of the apron, "and you can go be on grill duty."

We traded. Lena hustled off with the pie, Aunt Rachel at her heels and me trailing a few steps behind as I looped the apron over my neck and tied the strings in a sloppy bow at my back.

The Fletchers' kitchen was enormous.

They had two industrial-grade refrigerators and a marble-topped island surrounded by eight or nine mismatched bar stools. There was food everywhere—potato salad and fruit salad and actual salad and a two-gallon pitcher of what had to be sweet tea were scattered on the island. In the middle of it all was a lanky blond woman who bore a startling resemblance to Lena, from the light hair to the freckles to the way she was hacking at a lemon with an ostentatiously large knife.

"Boss!" Lena sing-songed, announcing us with a flourish.

Her mom looked up and saw me.

And pointed her knife in my direction.

"You. Must. Be. Waverly."

Great.

Another Fletcher to add to my list of Fletchers I Low-Key Fear.

"Hi, Mrs. Fletcher," I said.

Lena's mom put down her knife and tossed two handfuls of lemon wedges into the pitcher of sweet tea. Then she rounded the island and came to a stop right in front of me, so she could put a hand on each of my shoulders and give them a squeeze.

I almost crumpled like a piece of tissue paper.

Now I knew where Lena got her strength from.

"It is so nice to meet you," Mrs. Fletcher said, then stepped back and offered me her hand to shake. "I'm Amanda."

"But we all call