How much ice cream did u eat?I smirked at Annie’s text and leaned back on the soft lounge cushion to text back. The view from Gray’s deck was not at all bad, especially now, as the sun was setting behind me, glittering golden over the water. It was Friday evening and I was freshly showered after my first shift at Take a Dip, which had actually been kind of fun. Somewhere during the third hour I’d realized that making sundaes and cones lent a certain giddy satisfaction—the kids’ grins as they used both hands to take a dripping double-dip from my fingers, the glimmer of life in exhausted parents’ eyes when they saw their mango milk shakes. I felt like I was making people happy, which was rarely the case when slinging Depends undergarments and Pepto at the CVS back home.There had been a rush on the place around three o’clock that had lasted until four, but I was out of there at six, when the dinnertime lull was on. From what my coworker Sandy had told me, it was the evening shift that was the real killer—started around seven and didn’t stop till after eleven. Mitch didn’t have me scheduled for one of those until late next week. Apparently he liked to ease in the newcomers.The unfortunate part was spotting Hammond’s name on the schedule. Guess he hadn’t flubbed as badly as I’d thought on the banana split test. Our first overlapping shift was scheduled for the Fourth of July. I was already trying to think up ways to get out of it. And then I came home to find my mother and Gray coming inside from the outdoor shower, all wet and giggling, and found that, somehow, I just could not be in the same house with them. They were now inside, throwing together some kind of trendy summer salad in Gray’s state-of-the-art kitchen, listening to light rock on the stereo system, while Quinn was off at rehearsal. Thank God for the deck. Although, I was surprised that my mother had yet to come out here to talk about how I’d bailed on them that morning. Maybe she’d decided to just ignore it. Hopefully.I texted back.None.Liar!LOL. I figured if I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop. So when r u coming down?Tmrw late morning. Mom needs car in a.m. to drop off recycling. BTW have good Crestie dirt.My heart thumped and I stared at the screen. How could she have good Crestie dirt? Ninety-eight percent of the Cresties were down the shore or in Europe. She couldn’t mean Jake dirt, could she? Had she talked to him? Had he asked about me? Had he told her why he hadn’t called?I swallowed back the urge to ask. I did not want to appear interested in what Jake was doing. Because I wasn’t.Cool.The sliding glass door behind me zipped open, spilling out a blast of cold air and overproduced synthesizer. Crap. Looked like my reprieve was over. Here came the lecture.“Ally? You have a visitor,” my mom said.Or not. I turned around in my chair, expecting to see either Faith or Hammond—my two LBI stalkers. I almost dropped the phone when Cooper stepped out the door next to my mother. He was even more beautiful in daylight: a white T-shirt showing off his insane tan, his blond hair long enough to curl under his ears. I realized suddenly that I never thought I’d see this guy again—and that I was very happy to be proven wrong.“Hi,” I said.“Hi.”His grin almost knocked me out of my chair. My mother shot me an intrigued and expectant look. Her hand was still on the door and she stood sideways, because Cooper’s shoulders nearly filled the opening. He had a beach towel around his neck, and wore brown and tan Billabong swim trunks and flip-flops.My phone beeped, but I didn’t even look at Annie’s text. I just texted back.Gotta go. Hot boy arrival.There. That’d make her think I didn’t care what Jake was up to.“What’s up?” I asked Cooper, standing. I smoothed my cotton shorts over my thighs and cleared my throat, wishing I’d dried my hair after my shower.“I came by to see if you wanted to go for a swim,” he said.“Uh, yeah. I could do that,” I said.He’d remembered where I was staying. He’d stopped by. In all my years of coming down the shore, no local boy had ever noticed me. Not once. The packs of local kids always had this aura about them. They were almost never fully clothed, and had zero qualms about it. They could ride their bikes barefoot and ocean-wet, while toting long boards under one arm. Whenever they walked into a surf shop or the fudge place or a pizza joint, they knew someone behind the counter and would make plans to go places we’d never heard of even though the island was so small there was no way we hadn’t heard of everything.That was probably why I’d never considered hanging out with a local crowd to avoid the Cresties. It was an unimaginable alternative. But now, with Cooper standing there in all his beach-boy perfection, it definitely seemed like a viable—not to mention, very attractive—option. I felt this sort of warm satisfaction that he’d come to find me. It was as if I’d broken some kind of secret code.“Let me just go get changed.”Cooper turned sideways so I could slide between him and my mom. I shot her a smile—normally cute boys were something we bonded over—but she didn’t smile back. Instead, she followed me over to the stairs. Gray didn’t look up from the tomatoes he was slicing in the open kitchen.“Ally?” my mom called. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”“Yeah. I’ll be right down,” I shouted over my shoulder as I jogged up the steps. Inside the room I’d been assigned for the summer—cream walls, peach bedspread, Formica furniture—I yanked open the bottom dresser drawer and pulled out my two bathing suits. The blue Speedo was out of the question. It smashed everything down and made me look like a boy. The other—a striped tankini from last summer—left something to be desired, but at least you could tell I had female parts. I yanked my T-shirt off over my head just as my mom walked in.“God! You scared me!” I said, holding the shirt against my chest for a second.“I’m sorry, but would you care to explain?” she whispered, closing the door behind her.“Explain what?” I asked. I turned my back to her to change.“That boy,” she said impatiently. “Who is he? How do you know him?”“His name’s Cooper,” I said as I shimmied into the bathing suit top. “He’s a local.”“So . . . what? We’re just hanging out with random local boys now?” she asked.My skin bristled at her comment. Why did the word “local” sound so negative when she said it?“Is there something wrong with local boys?” I asked. “Is he not rich enough for you? Because guess what, Mom, we’re not rich either. Or did you forget that?”I whipped my T-shirt off my bed and pulled it on, then quickly reached back to braid my hair, sliding in front of the full length mirror on the closet door.“Ally,” she said with a sigh.“Besides, it’s either hang out with him or have no friends all summer, because I am not hanging out with Hammond and Faith no matter how many times you try to throw us together,” I said.My mother stepped up behind me, her face hovering just over my shoulder in our reflection.“This has nothing to do with money, Ally. You know that,” she said, just barely holding on to her patience. “It’s just that we know nothing about him.”I tightened the rubber band around my braid and let it snap. “Well, I know one thing. I’d rather be on the beach with him than standing here having this conversation with you.”I grabbed my flip-flops and a towel out of the closet and started past her, but she stopped me with a hand on my arm.“Ally, what is going on with you?” she hissed under her breath. “First you ditch out on dinner last night, then breakfast this morning, and now you’re completely overreacting to everything I say. You still haven’t even told me why you changed your mind and decided to come down.”I looked at my hands. That was not something I felt like trying to explain right now. Not with Cooper downstairs waiting on me.“Clearly it had nothing to do with wanting to spend time with us,” she added with a hint of sarcasm.I looked into my mother’s eyes. All my potential replies sounded petulant and childish. I wanted to tell her I didn’t like it here, living in this house where you couldn’t put your feet up and you had to dry off completely before stepping inside, where Gray got all tense if he found a crumb or a stain or a droplet of water. I wanted to tell her that all the rules made me tense, but that seeing her and Gray together one hundred percent of the time made me even tenser. Watching them touch hands grabbing for a morning bagel and letting their fingers linger. Seeing the way they looked at each other when I made a joke or Quinn said something silly. It all felt too much like a family, and it wasn’t a family I wanted to be a part of. I wanted to be a part of my family. Me, her, and my dad.But I couldn’t say any of this. So instead I said, “Remember when you and dad renewed your vows?”Her eyes instantly looked sad. She dropped her hand and turned away from me. “Ally—” She sounded fed up, at the end of her rope.“Mom, I’m just asking. Do you even remember that? Because it wasn’t that long ago,” I said, following her toward the sliding glass doors that led to the deck outside my and Quinn’s rooms. “You guys were really happy. I know Dad screwed up, but don’t you even want to talk to him?”“He didn’t just screw up, Ally,” she said, giving me a look that made me feel two inches tall.“For the past two years you’ve been telling me that I have to find a way to forgive him. That he didn’t mean to do what he did,” I said tersely. “But now that he’s back, you won’t even talk to him. You’re such a total hypocrite.”I’d never said anything that harsh to my mom in my life, and as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to take them back. But instead, I turned around and walked out of the room, trying to escape before she reacted.“Ally, get back here,” my mom said quietly.I kept walking and jogged down the stairs. Cooper was waiting in the living room, the TV remote in his hand, a Wimbledon tennis match playing on the big screen.“This TV is sick!” he said, his eyes bright.I grabbed his wrist as I raced by. “Come on. Let’s go.”Startled, Cooper dropped the remote. It clattered on the glass coffee table and an odd squeak escaped Gray’s throat. We had just made it to the glass door that looked out over the main deck with the infinity pool, and the beach, when my mother reached the loft railing one story above.“Ally!” she shouted. “This conversation isn’t over. Not by a long shot. We’re going to talk about this later.”I slipped outside and slammed the door as hard as I could. Every inch of me clenched in humiliation.“Sorry about that,” I told Cooper. Then I looked down at my hand around his arm, and released it, embarrassed.“Don’t worry about it.” He held the ends of his towel with both hands. “My mom can be a bitch too.”“My mom’s not a bitch,” I said quickly.He shot me this look like whatever, which somehow made me feel foolish. And also made me wonder what his mother was like.“Well, thanks for giving me an excuse to escape,” I said.“No worries.” He placed his hands on the railing and looked out at the empty beach below. It was low tide, and the waves were gently lapping the shore. “Damn. This is beautiful.”I stared at his profile. Suddenly I wished Jake could see me right then, standing out here, looking out over the ocean with this perfect beach boy. I bet he’d regret not apologizing then. He’d regret the fact that he’d yet to call.“Yeah, but maybe we should walk up the beach a little,” I said, glancing warily at the house.He shrugged. “Works for me.” For a second he leaned back, clinging to the railing with his feet planted, then looked at me mischievously. “Race ya.”And he was gone, jogging down the wide wooden stairs in his flip-flops with a teasing laugh.“Cheater!”I ran after him, letting the wind whisk away the last bits of my anger. I could deal with my mother later. For now—just this once—I was going to pretend it was actually summer.