He didn’t finish that thought. Thank God.

“I can’t believe you’re taking this so lightly!” he said, changing tactics. “Are you that accustomed to prompting death threats that you take them all in stride?”

“I didn’t think of it as a death threat!” I cried. Until now, of course. “They just trashed our cabin. Nothing violent. You’re the one who keeps talking about violence. You’re the only person who is taking that spray paint seriously.”

“Yeah, and that’s also unlike you. Aren’t you the girl who came to me last year because of a trashed room?”

“No, I went to you because of a missing girl!”

“Well, I’m not going to wait for you to go missing.” Said with the utmost finality.

That made me pause for just a moment, but I regrouped. “There is no reason to think this was anything more than standard, senseless vandalism, no matter who’s responsible.”

Poe just stood there for a second, as if weighing his words. “There’s more. Stuff I didn’t say at the meeting.” He grabbed my hand. “I have to show you something.”

I pulled back. “Let me get dressed first.”

“Fine.” But he just stood there, arms crossed, dark hair falling into his eyes.

“Um, could you please turn around or something?”

A ghost of a smile. “Make me.”

I yanked the shower curtain shut between us.

Combed and dressed, but still damp, I let Poe lead me across the compound and down the path to the docks. Our journey was silent, but with none of the awkwardness that had marked our last walk together. Perhaps we stood more closely than usual, but otherwise, there was no sign of the heat that had so recently consumed us both.

When we reached the boats, I drew back. “This is as far as I go.”

“The boat won’t leave the dock. I wouldn’t even know how to do that. Get on.”

I groaned and followed him aboard the smaller boat. Poe picked up a flashlight from a box in the cabin and walked over to the railing. “Look at this.” He knelt and shined the flashlight at the railing. I saw a series of scratches in the paint around the hole that, until recently, had held the chain in place. The chain I’d broken through as soon as I fell against it.

“What am I looking at?”

“Someone stripped the joint.”

“It just wore thin.”

“No. You can tell by the markings. It was a screwdriver or something. I’ve built enough porches and trellises in my time to tell the difference. This thing was going to blow the second someone put weight on it.”

I made a face. “There’s no way that anyone could have known it was going to be me. It was just a coincidence that I was standing by this rail.”

“But you’re the only one who could have been really hurt if you did fall.”

“Anyone can get hurt falling off a boat.”

“You’re the only one who can’t swim.”

I stared at him and everything clicked into place. “Jamie—”

“And there’s more,” he said.

I crouched beside him and cupped my hand around his chin.

“I have to show you the life jacket. I—”

I shook my head and kissed him. “Stop.”

When I opened my eyes, his expression was confused.

“No one is after me. I promise. I know you feel guilty about scaring me at the initiation last spring. But stop beating yourself up about it. I’m fine. I’m not angry at you anymore.”

“This isn’t about last spring.”

“Yes it is. You’re the only person who spends any time at all thinking about my phobia. And it’s making you read into things.” I stood and brushed off my knees. “And that’s me telling you this. The Diggers’ resident conspiracy theorist…and pain in the ass. So you know it’s the truth.”

He swept to his feet and walked across the deck. I stood there, waiting, letting the night breeze blow around my face and cool my skin. Poe leaned against the far rail, staring out to sea and watching the play of starlight on the water. After a while, I walked across the deck and joined him. Minutes passed.

“I just kept thinking that if I hadn’t…done that to you…” he said at last. “That maybe you wouldn’t hate me.”

“That’s silly,” I said. “I hated you for much better reasons than that.”

“But not anymore?”

I looked down at our hands, beside one another on the rail, and twined mine in his. “Nope. Not anymore.”

“Because of yesterday?”

“Stop asking me that.” I squeezed his hand once, then let it go. “Ask the real question.”

He was silent for a long time. “Fine. What is this?”

I shut my eyes tight against the sight of the water and the night, but I could hear the sea slapping against the side of the boat. I could hear Poe breathing, and over it all, I could hear the blood rushing in my ears.

It’s Spring Break.

CONCLUSIONS I REACHED LAST NIGHT

1) The view from a boat railing is a lot more enjoyable when the boat is only three inches from land.

2) As with the SATs, if you don’t know the answer to a question, you’re better off skipping it.

3) I’m not giving up on boys. Not yet anyway.

4) Kisses Nice.

CONCLUSIONS POE AND I REACHED TOGETHER LAST NIGHT

1) It’s very unlikely that anyone is after me, in particular. For nefarious purposes anyway.

2) For the time being, we will not mention our private time to anyone else.

3) See #4 above.

I know nothing about conclusions Poe may have reached on his own. Like I said, the boy is very hard to read.

When I finally returned to the cabin, the girls were all sharing guilty expressions, and for a second I thought they suspected everything.

“We were just talking,” Clarissa said, “and we think we owe you an apology.”

“For what?” I was truly mystified.

“For putting you on the spot about George,” Demetria said. “Glass houses and all.”

I looked at the three of them. “It’s fine.”

“You don’t need to avoid us, is all we’re saying. We won’t talk about it anymore,” Jenny said. She was on the floor with a screwdriver and computer innards.

“I’m not avoiding you.”

Clarissa shook her head. “Come on, Amy, you weren’t in the shower all this time.”

I decided to pretend that their apology was acceptable to me, and that I wouldn’t avoid them anymore. Except I was hoping to get in another swimming lesson with Poe tomorrow morning. Or “swimming lesson,” as it were. I feared feigning interest in an isolated jog would prompt a request from Demetria to join me, so I decided to just let the whole situation work itself out tomorrow, and spent the rest of the evening learning how to construct a working computer from slightly battered scraps.

Jenny really is a genius.

And as I settled into bed that night, it occurred to me that knowledge of that sort of thing was bothering me less and less as time went on. I hadn’t gone to Andover, or Horace Mann or Eton. My high school had been the average kind, and I’d been the best student there. Such was not the case at Eli. Here, I was surrounded by geniuses. I’d figured out early in my college career that there were people like Jenny and Brandon and Lydia and Josh—truly brilliant, truly luminous, whose names would appear in history books that my children and grandchildren would read, and there were people like George and Odile—who through beauty and charm and personality would make the cult of celebrity their own. And then there were people like me. People who, through the arbitrary wisdom of the admissions office, might share space with the big shots for four years, might be their friends, their confidantes, their associates, their lovers—but would live a life well below the global radar. I knew it, and over the years, I’d come to accept it.

And I understood that it didn’t make them any better than me. Jenny was a computer genius, but she had enough issues to overcome that I didn’t want to trade places with her. Odile might get her name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but she also had to deal with every bad hair day being splashed on the cover of a magazine.