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This time last year, my five best friends and I kicked off summer on Mason’s boat, Kingfish. He zipped us around the marsh grass while the water slipped into the color of sky. I watched Holden and Jorge fly off the tube while I wrestled the wind from my hair. Haven and I danced to steel drum music. We ate at the restaurant on the land side of the sound where people tolerated iffy popcorn shrimp and cold French fries for the view of distant trees and salt grass, everything pink and orange and red where the sun pulls down.

I looked at Everett, orange soda still fizzing on my tongue. The sun drew white sheets on the water and painted Everett’s face golden.

I was free. Kelsie and Everett were broken up. That summer was my oyster, so to speak.

He looked at me at the same time I looked at him—warm, like the leather seats baking my skin.

They all must be doing something like that now, finishing up a perfect day inside the beginning of the sunset, toasting to our last summer before college. Smiling. Swimming. Cracking jokes.

This is what replays in my mind on Blair’s kitchen floor, elbow-deep in a pail of suds, scrubbing the brown grout until it at least begins to resemble white. It’s a real Cinderella story, except I’m Cinderella, the evil stepmother, and both stepsisters all at once. I told them to go without me today. I didn’t think I’d be doing this instead, but things have a funny way of changing.

Sometimes, they change like the tides, slowly and gradually—a face aging with each new wrinkle. Sometimes, they change like a rush of water through a river, abruptly and suddenly. And sometimes, you don’t even notice the change until you’re wearing a dusty old pair of knee pads because it hurts to be on the ground like this.

Then you realize how quickly time passes when you’re occupied with other things.

A knock at the door pulls me from my trance. I wipe fallen hair from my face with a sudsy hand and open the door.

Everett Bishop.

“Welcome back, Quinn,” he says like he was in the middle of rehearsing it. He smiles with the right side of his face and brushes moppy black hair off his forehead.

The look on his face says what he couldn’t last summer—what he still can’t say now. There’s sorrow behind the stars in his eyes, and maybe a little bit of those galaxies I found there last summer, too.

His voice isn’t any different—it stopped deepening years ago—but it takes me a moment to remember how he speaks like he’s already written the words, how my name dances from his mouth.

A laugh dances from mine. These things will never change.

“It’s good to be back.” My heart is a penny, flipping between what we could have been and what we are now. I’m not sure where it lands, but I pull him into a hug anyway.

The last time I hugged him like this was just before last summer’s abrupt end. If I’d had a clearer head then, I would have known it was our last. Ironically, seventeen managed to be my most na?ve summer, but that’s what happens when you go so far beyond jaded that you loop back around and convince yourself things might actually be okay.

I’m back. It’s time to start over.

“It’s good to see you,” I whisper into his chest.

He smells like coconut-tinged cologne; I forget I don’t like coconuts.

I forget that I smell like sweat and bleach and the grime I’ve coaxed off the floor. Shit, and I’m wearing knee pads. I pull back and fix my hair. It falls right back into my face, wet and stringy. “Sorry, I’ve been cleaning up.”

“Can I help?” Everett closes the front door. His white-toothed smile contrasts with his olive skin. “Also, I brought s’mores stuff for later.”

My cheeks are hot coals. My heart leaps at the very fact that he’s standing in the living room at all. Have I been plucked from this timeline and put back into seventeen? “You didn’t go on the boat?”

“We’d never go out knowing you’re stuck here.”

I shrug. “I didn’t want to burden you guys.”

A look of shock strikes his face. “You’re only burdening me if you don’t have s’mores with me.” He shakes his head and grabs the back of his neck. “I mean, you don’t have to, I just wanted—”

“I’d love to have s’mores with you.” I cut him off and take the bag from his hands, smiling. “And I’d love your help.”

It doesn’t feel like the first day of summer anymore. A gentle evening breeze brushes through my bangs. My goosebumps, confused about the June chill, are soothed by my hoodie. Dewy grass adds to the confusion. Mosquitoes kiss my ankles and leave itchy welts behind.

After scrubbing the rest of the floor and bleaching mold off the walls, Everett and I lie on beach chairs on the edge of Blair’s backyard. My bones lie to rest, unwound and burning from within. Fireflies light up the trees, so we play a game from the past.

“I bet the next firefly is going to be on that branch sticking out past the rest.” Everett stretches out to soak up the moonlight. He needs moonlight because he is moonlight, like how humans need water because we are water.

Our knees touch and I feel his leg bounce, or maybe it’s mine.

I watch the silhouette of the tallest pine, waiting for a yellow light where the sky meets the trees. The sky turns one notch darker before my eyes. It feels like a forbidden glitch I wasn’t meant to see.

The firefly flickers a few trees down.

“There it is!” I point in the darkness.

Everett points out another firefly on the edge of the yard. We wait in the darkness between their sparks. I expect it to reemerge closer to us, but it lights up above the back deck.

The game fizzles out once the fireflies stop flickering, once the day officially detaches from night. I lean the beach chair all the way back. My hair pools on the grass.

It’s dark enough to see all the stars in the sky. Beyond the trees’ looming silhouettes, Sagittarius is a rainbow umbrella among a shore of black ones. I swallow hard and close my eyes. The story of Sagittarius and Scorpio plays on my eyelids—Sagittarius the Archer taking a shot at Scorpio the Scorpion. This was how the universe intended it, written in the stars as an inevitable strike in the sky, like all the other ungranted wishes resting up there.

We sit like that for a little bit, listening to the symphony of cicadas and locusts in the trees starting then stopping then starting again like time is a conductor they’re following. Then the katydids snarl in response. Everything around us sings a perfect tune Everett and I can’t find our place in.

Until we do.

“How are you?” Everett’s voice breaks the silence.

“Good,” I say out of habit.

“But how are you really?”

I bite my lip. I’m not going to cry, not even in the face of such a lethal question. Those are words that always bring stifled pain to the surface—the final raindrop that splits open a dam—but no, not on my first summer night. Not in this moment with Everett.

I decide on the truth without the tears. “I miss last summer.”

I feel it on my face, wide and unrelenting and real: a smile. I haven’t smiled like this since the Ferris wheel. Visions of white moonlight and sugared air and Everett smiling next to me dance in my memory. That night taught me that joy is a prequel to everything after; pain waits at the bottom of the Ferris wheel.

My brain remembers this at random times, grants me a punishment for joy. It shoots my smile down, flicks my shoulders into a slump, curses my heart to the bottom of the ocean. The sinking feeling in my stomach isn’t a welcome one, unlike the flutters of cotton candy and our first kiss.

“I can’t really explain it, but there’s this feeling I get when I think about our time last summer, you know…” I lower my voice to pretend I’m not acknowledging it. My throat feels raw despite my efforts to fight crying. “…before.” The tickle inside my nose spreads to my eyes, and tears fall anyway. “I’m scared I will make it happen again.”

Everett clears his throat. “Quinn, you’re allowed to be happy.”

“I know.”

I do—but it feels like a bomb ticking out of time, like chanting “Bloody Mary” in Haven’s mirror, like finding a sick, stray dog on the side of the road. Stop it at the last second, don’t look it in the face, don’t call it by its name:

Happiness.

If you acknowledge it, there will be no more to spare.

I toy with a stray pine needle—better the pine needle than the skin around my fingernails.

I fixate on a cluster of stars I don’t actually know the name of. I’ve never wanted a shooting star more than right now. The night is perfect for one—a new moon, no light pollution from Blair’s street. Stars, please give me this. Let me wish for happiness.

Everett makes a subject-changing tsk sound between his teeth. “What’s made you happy lately?”

Happiness is so fleeting to me, such a noticeable rise from my usual lows, that I remember every positive moment vividly. High school graduation, me and my mom skipping niceties and attacking my cake with forks, a call with Haven while I packed for this summer. Today brought a spike in joy, so I brace more strongly for impact.

“The sailboat billboard on the highway before the causeway. You know, the one with the rich people eating hors d’oeuvres? It’s always how I know I’m getting close. Then when I got on the causeway, I rolled the windows down. It’s tradition.”

“I still remember the first time I saw the ocean over the causeway. I think I might have cried.”

I laugh. “Did you write a poem about it?”

“Of course,” he jokes.

I recite old poetry off my lips, my tone sarcastically wistful. “Waves crashing on the shore, stealing shells and bringing more.”

“Where’d that come from?”

“An actual poem I wrote when I was eleven.” I giggle and hide my face in my hands despite the darkness. Happiness becomes me. I don’t try to stop it or brace for impact.

“You’ve always been such a sap.”

“So have you!”

“You have to show me the whole thing.” He laughs. “Now I wish I’d actually written a poem, so I could be a bigger nerd than you.”

“Shut up.” I throw the haggard pine needle at him. “What’s made you happy lately?”

“The look on Jorge’s face when I officially beat him out for valedictorian.”

“I bet he was happy for you.” Then, because I have to, I add, “Nerd.”

“Being a nerd sucked when I had to give a speech at graduation.”

“Please tell me you went up there and sang ‘The Pi?a Colada Song.’”

“Every last word. They had to boo me off the stage. I can’t figure out what they didn’t like about it.”

I laugh, ear-splitting and real. “I think I have an idea.”

He laughs along with me, then lets the locusts fill the silence. “What else has made you happy?” he asks, serious again.

“The sound of locusts,” I say with a mystical smirk. Ever since he taught me the difference between the sounds of different bugs, I would lie in my bed on lonely nights in Raleigh and listen to the locusts, thinking of the bike trail, his front porch, and other conflicting times. But I haven’t heard the sounds as one again until now, this moment, where the cicadas, katydids, and locusts act as background noise to something bigger, but manage to symbolize the entire memory.

“Cicadas are my favorite.”

“You know, we’ve never given the crickets enough attention.”

“They get enough. What else?”

There’s no need to light a fire when both of us are content in darkness, so I look at him even though I know he can’t see me. The stars can, and Sagittarius probably twinkles in anticipation. “Seeing you. Thank you for helping me clean.”

Thank you for being there.

Thank you for knowing I needed it.

Thank you for being you.

“You know I only came over for s’mores.”

“Of course. I only let you in for the s’mores.”

“Obviously.”

We laugh, no fire, marshmallows, or chocolate in sight.

Jorge kills nine matches and an entire bottle of lighter fluid before the fire takes hold. It lights our faces orange. Embers fly around his face like a sparkler on July Fourth.

Fire crackles. Smoke douses the air. Stars blanket the skies above us.

Jorge leans back in his chair, wearing pride on his face, now glowing in the firelight.

Haven rests her head on his shoulder, burrowing into his black hair chopped at his shoulders. She already told me they started dating in April, but seeing it in person brings a new perspective. Haven wouldn’t have dated him when he first joined the friend group—she was too hung up on a guy who threw beer bottles on the dunes, and Jorge has always been more sensitive. He hasn’t bought a new pair of shoes since his feet stopped growing and he picks up trash from the beach while he’s looking for shark teeth.

Haven, like me, has changed like the sand around a coursing river. That change is a welcome one.

She smiles at me across the fire, her black hair glowing orange in the bonfire light. We already exchanged official hellos when she got here, falling to the grass when she burst from her family’s golf cart and ran into my arms.

The six of us ease into the fire’s calming warmth.

It invites Everett next to me, moving his beach chair closer than it was in the darkness. I fall into a trance on Everett glowing in the flames. His hair is the color of dying embers.

He notices my stares and meets my gaze, his brown eyes marshmallow soft. He pulls a leaf from my hair and tosses it into the fire.

I don’t feel guilty about my smile. “Thanks.”

“This thing is a beast!” Holden screams from the side yard. He wrestles the water hose from its winter hibernation in a game of schoolyard tug-of-war. He untangles it enough to reach the fire, then sits in his rocking chair with a huff. “You’re welcome.”

Haven performs a slow clap, earning a middle finger from Holden.

I play along. I missed him enough to please him just this once. “Thanks, Holden. You’re so strong.”

“I know.” He flexes his biceps, flashing the smile three years of braces gave him. “It’s all those marlins I’ve been reeling in.”

“You wish you’d ever caught a marlin,” Haven says, rolling her eyes.

“How dare you say that.” He points to Haven, then to me. “And how dare you be gone so long.”

“Guilty.”

He takes his shirt off and throws it into the darkness behind us.

“God, Holden.” Haven rolls her eyes and looks at Mason. “How do you handle him?”

Mason snickers. “I don’t.”

“What? I don’t want to smell like fire later.”

We’re sure to smell like burnt wood by the end of the night—even Holden’s tossed shirt—but that’s one of my favorite scents to shower away, right next to sunscreen.

Mason’s the first to dig in to the marshmallows. Holden lets his entire marshmallow burst into flames while everyone else spins their marshmallow gently at the top of the flames.

I let the flame burn my marshmallow a toasty brown shell, squish it between two graham crackers, and let it melt the chocolate before my mouth does the rest.

Over s’mores, Haven tells the story of how she and Jorge started dating. It started with a mutual agreement to go to prom together but ended with a midnight chat in the car over cherry slushies. They had their first date at Hammerhead’s and Holden asked to wait tables that night. He filled their sodas every five minutes and brought out five baskets of hush puppies.

“Your first mistake was having your first date at our job,” Holden says. “Your second mistake was going out with him.” He throws a marshmallow at Jorge.

Jorge catches it and throws it in his mouth. “Love you too, man.”

I point at Holden. “Your mistake was stalking Haven on her first date.”

He throws his hands up. “I was keeping my baby sister safe.”

“I was born two minutes before you,” Haven says.

He shrugs. “The point still stands.”

I imagine Holden peering around the doorframe during the date. He’s a walking juxtaposition—a boxer holding a kitten, a secret riptide on a calm ocean. He can try to intimidate Jorge, but I’m sure all he did was look like a duck who thinks fluffing its feathers is scary.

We take turns telling stories from the past year apart. Everett talks about his valedictorian speech, how he smirked at Jorge before he started. Haven recounts winning prom queen and accepting her tiara and sash after she spilled barbecue sauce on her dress.

In the middle of my second s’more, the fire starts to feel too hot. My face loses its smile. A ringing in my ears replaces the sweet sound of catching up with my best friends. This is the empty feeling that sweeps over me sometimes. It’s always uninvited, but I’ve gotten better at riding it out.

Empty used to be something I craved—schedules, thoughts, bags before beachcombing. Sometimes empty is the fullest a person can be. Now, I’m empty the way that empty things suck—promises, hearts, bags after beachcombing.

I lie back in the beach chair, lift my chin to cool my cheeks. I can’t find the stars past the golden orb of flame, but soon enough, this feeling will pass. It is nice to be back in Piper Island. Even though the same moon spills everywhere, this is the sky I’ve spent the last eight summers with. Piper Island is where Everett is my second moon. Piper Island is where I grew up, in an ideal world where growing is only impacted by what happens in the summer, where life can only be shaped by summer.

Only now, I wish for the opposite.

Everyone else laughs with reckless abandon around the fire. I wish I could be like them instead of slowly nodding and forcing a fake smile. Green envy tugs at me, a monster I’ve gotten to know well.

“What are your plans this summer, Q?” Haven asks.

I shrug, a shallow smile on my face. “I don’t know. Blair didn’t have an itinerary for me today.”

Summer was always a season of turning the mundane into something special, thanks to Blair. I still remember what she once wrote in a book she gifted me a few summers back: This summer, keep doing that living you do. Maybe fall in love while you’re at it? Love, Blair.

But this is our last summer before college, so the six of us are on the precipice of greatness. We’re dangling off a cliff’s edge, jumping over the clock ticking at double speed. I want to stop time and fill it with life again. For me and Blair. Summer at Piper Island is the only way to fall in love with living again.

Holden’s eyes widen. “Let’s make our own. I mean, it’s what we’ve always done.”

“Yeah, go get something to write with,” Haven says.

I run inside and fish Blair’s pink gel pen from the junk drawer Everett and I organized earlier. I grab an old Sunset Scoop receipt that shouldn’t have survived the culling.

Back in the dying heat of the flames, we brainstorm ideas until the early morning officially detaches from the night, speaking the summer’s plans into the cloak of darkness, the stars as our witness.

“Sneak into the waterpark at night.”

“Climb the lighthouse.”

“Party all night.”

“Or until we fall asleep.”

“Eat the whole Hammerhead’s menu.”

“Ew, no.”

“Try all the flavors at Sunset Scoop, but we can share each other’s!”

“And it doesn’t have to be all at one time.”

“What is your obsession with eating everything?”

“Have a spa night.”

“Eat sushi on the beach at night. Just because I’ve always wanted to.”

“Have a kickass July Fourth.”

“Kick Jorge’s ass.”

“Hey! I’ll kick yours instead.”

“Find a perfect lightning whelk.”

“Sleep in.”

“Finally catch a kingfish from the pier.”

“And a blue marlin from the boat!”

“Sneak some beer at Mom’s fiftieth!”

“Dream on.”

I let the moment take me, this slice of living. Far from the golden decks of Kingfish, Everett and I still find each other when there’s nowhere else to look. His knee finds mine again in the darkness. The touch is laced with noxious memories and sweet lullabies I’ve forgotten the notes to.

Even though he can’t see it, the smile on my face doesn’t falter.