“What do you mean?” I noticed she had a little accent, one I couldn’t place. Not the annoying kind, but the kind that melts hearts.

“I mean, just because I helped you today. It’s okay.”

“Oh, I know.”

“So, what? Is it Be Nice to Dorks Day or something?”

She laughed. “Are you a dork? You’re not a dork.”

I nodded. “I am. Ask anyone. I don’t have a single friend at the school.”

“That’s not true. You have me.”

“You can have any friends you want. You already have a lot of them. Don’t think you need me. Go be with them. I’ll be fine.”

“Oh, yeah … those guys.” She motioned to the cute girls on the boardwalk and screwed up her face. “Fake, fake, fake. They want things from me. I try to get away from them and they just follow me. It makes me so sick. You don’t, though.”

I tried to figure out what she meant. Just what did people want from her? She seemed to like hearing me tell her to get the hell away. I’d heard girls liked it when guys treated them like crud, something which boggled my mind. I didn’t want to find out that she was one of those stupid girls, so I just said: “It depends on what you have. I accept monetary donations.”

She laughed. Whoa. I’d never said anything that made a girl laugh before. “Do you live around here?” she asked.

“Um. Yeah. Seventh.”

“Oh. I’m in the Heights.”

The Heights was about two or three miles away from Seventh. “That was a long run you were taking this afternoon,” I said.

She shrugged. “Five miles or so.” I was just trying to understand what lunatic would run that far, before tryouts, at the hottest time of the day, when it was over ninety degrees, when she said, “I run because it helps me think. I kind of have a lot to think about.”

I nodded. Couldn’t argue with that.

We reached the lifeguard stand, and I hadn’t cried yet. I was silently congratulating myself for that accomplishment when she said, “You know, you are really brave. I’d be crying.”

I smirked. Actually, she’d taken the edge off the pain, made it tolerable. I realized I wouldn’t be able to shake her; she was planning on coming in with me and watching the lifeguard bandage me up. This girl was harder to avoid than the flu. And there was something about her. Something that just seemed … right. It was all adding up to one thrilling and terrifying realization:

I had a chance with this girl.

Geoff, a lifeguard, ushered me into his seat on the stand when he saw me. He didn’t have the gentle, female nurse’s touch my hormones would have really liked, so when he started to swab up my knee, I winced.

And this girl, this angel, stayed with me the whole time.

I knew I would eventually fall madly in love with her. But I’d had no idea it would start right then.

Twenty minutes later, I walked her back to the street. By then it was pretty dead. The sun was starting to slump in the sky. Most of the late-day beachgoers were gone and her friends weren’t there. It was completely quiet except for the crash of waves, the ping-ping-ping of the flag’s metal hardware striking the flagpole in the breeze, and an occasional screech of a seagull. The angel broke the awkward silence by saying, “Well, I just wanted to say thank you. Um, you know. For saving me this afternoon. You’re my hero.”

I thought of Emma. Yeah, right, me a hero. My lips moved in answer, but nothing came out.

She took in a sharp breath and moved away from my side a little, like she was about to say “See you” and leave. Like most girls did after a minute in my presence. It was like I could almost see any chance I had with her ticking away in those moments. Before she could go, I opened my mouth, still not sure what I would say, so I looked kind of like a fish gulping water. When I asked the question, I realized I already knew the answer. “Uh. So you—you go to Central?”

I cringed at how unsmooth I could be, while at the same time this creeping sensation overtook me. Something about her, about us, was weird. I couldn’t place it, which was why I stared at her with my mouth open, as if trying to pull something out of the far corner of my brain. She didn’t notice. “Yeah. Well, I will be.” She nodded her head a little like a yo-yo. “Just moved here from Maine a few weeks ago.”

“Er. Oh.” My hands were shaking so much I had to lace my fingers together. I’d sometimes had a fantasy—and this was definitely a fantasy, there was no mistaking it for my future—of me being smooth with the ladies, of always knowing what to say and when. I’d practiced those slick phrases over and over again in my head, but whenever I had the opportunity to actually use them, I’d failed miserably. Words would pile up over one another, confused in the jumble of future thoughts passing through my mind. This time, I opened my mouth and one of those cool witticisms came out. It didn’t even sound stilted. “What brings you to Sleazeside?”

She screwed up her face, confused. “Sleaze? Why? I think it’s nice here.”

The momentary sense of victory I’d felt dissolved into a pang of fear over having to speak again. But I handled it well. “Well, it’s not exactly Falmouth.”

“Well, no, but—” She paused. “Wait. How did you know I lived in Falmouth? Did I say that?”

“Um, yeah, you did,” I said, but all the while something began to dawn on me. She hadn’t. And yet I knew. I knew that and … and while she lived there, she liked to go out to the pier at the back of her house and eat peanuts and feed them to the seagulls. She had a red bikini that she never wore because she was always too cold and hated sunburn and sand in her suit, and one day she made the top into a flag and put it on her little sailboat, which she called The Mouse, after her first pet hamster she had when she was three.…

Whoa.

Her voice broke through then. “Oh. I guess I did.” I could feel her eyes on me, heavy, like they were cracking through the flimsy disguise I’d set up.

I expected her to run like hell in the other direction. But again, she didn’t. Instead, she plopped down in the sand and motioned me over with her chin. She wanted me to sit next to her. When I walked over, the sun reflected off her eyes; they were almost the color of the sky, so light blue they were almost white. I didn’t say anything as I sat. I was afraid of saying something else about her I shouldn’t have known. I swallowed, thinking of her in that little sailboat.

She filled in the silence. “My dad lost his job at the semiconductor factory, and we had to move in with my grandmother.” She wrinkled her nose. “Gram’s a little whacked.”

She had no idea what whacked could look like.

She was quiet for a moment, sifting sand through her fingers. “I heard what happened here today.”

I reached over, snatched a handful of black witch’s-hair seaweed, and started yanking it apart. “Yeah, it was a bad day.”

“I saw the ambulances. The Reeses are Gram’s neighbors. They live next door to us. She used to sit for …” She trailed off when she saw my body tense. “You probably don’t want to hear this.”

I let out a short laugh. “Bingo.”

She shrugged. “Fair enough. But it’s no wonder you fell. You’re obviously upset. Why did you …?”

“I just wanted to do the normal thing, I guess.”

She snorted. “The normal thing would have been to go home and sleep it off. At least, that’s what I would have done.” I cringed as she said that. Of course I didn’t know what was normal. I couldn’t even pretend to know. “Anyway, it’s not your fault.”

“I know,” I lied, not wanting to talk about it anymore. To her, it wasn’t my fault, but she didn’t know I’d knowingly left an unfit guard in my place.

More awkward silence. I put out my hand, lamely, wondering all the while if that was the way casual introductions were supposed to go, or if I would look too formal, like a bank teller extending her a loan. “I’m Nick.”