“It’s just hormones,” my mother tells Leo, trying to smooth things over between them. “All teenagers are a nightmare. And girls are worse. Wait until Rosemary hits puberty.” He has promised to make an effort. But it’s been worse since we got to the woods. Leo has decided to “put his foot down.” He sends Anna to our cabin if she back-talks, and Mum refuses to interfere. “I’m sorry, but I can’t be constantly refereeing,” she says to Anna. Anna lies on her bed refusing to cry, and yells at me if I try to come in. One morning in July, Anna and Leo were having such a humongous fight at breakfast that Mum threw an egg at the kitchen wall. “I honestly cannot take another minute of this. I’m going next door to see my father and Pamela.” She handed me a banana. “I recommend you find somewhere else to be for the day if you don’t want to go deaf.”
I was walking to the ocean, thinking about how I was going to poison Leo—how I’d have to be the one to save Anna since Mum wouldn’t—when I tripped on a root and tore my flip-flop apart. I sat down on the path to shove the Y back into the buttonhole. Under the low-hanging branches of the trees was a faint trail—probably a deer path. I crawled into the woods and followed the trail until it dwindled and dead-ended in a thicket of catbrier. I was turning back when I noticed the sound of running water. Which made no sense, because everyone knows there’s no running water in this part of the woods. That’s why the Pilgrims kept going to Plymouth after they landed on the Cape. I pulled the brambles aside bunch by bunch with my towel, stepped through the tangle, trying not to scratch my legs too badly, and emerged from the overgrowth into a small clearing. In the center was a freshwater spring, burbling out of the ground into a narrow stream. The looming trees had backed away, leaving a carpet of velvet moss below. I lay down on the bank and closed my eyes. Poison might be too obvious, I thought. Maybe Anna and I should run away from home, move here. We could build a tree house with a platform and a roof made out of branches. We’d have fresh water; we could catch fish on the beach—early, before anyone else was awake; collect cranberries and wild blueberries so we wouldn’t get scurvy. I started to make a list in my head of the supplies we’d need: empty Medaglia d’Oro cans with plastic lids for watertight storage, wooden matches, candles, fishhooks and line, a hammer and nails, a cake of soap, two forks, a change of underwear, sleeping bags, bug spray. Mum was going to be sorry she let Leo punish Anna and never took Anna’s side. Maybe not right away, but eventually she would miss us.
* * *
—
But it’s almost Labor Day now, and the only survival supplies I have managed to collect are two rusty coffee cans, an old pair of pliers and a few candle stubs. High above me, a flock of birds write a V for victory, like a fleeting thought winging its way away across the chipped blue sky. A shadow falls across my face. I freeze. Try to make myself invisible.
“Hello.” A small boy—maybe seven or eight—is looking down at me, his approach so silent I never heard him coming. He has thick black hair that reaches his shoulders. Pale green eyes. He’s barefoot. “I’m Jonas,” he says. “I’m lost.” He doesn’t seem upset or scared.
“Elle,” I say. I’ve seen his family on the beach. His mother is a frizzy-haired woman who yells at us if we leave our apple cores in the sand. They live somewhere in the Back Woods.
“I was following the osprey,” he says, as if that explains everything. He sits down next to me on the mossy bank and looks up at the sky. For a long time, neither of us speaks. I listen to the bristling woods, springwater clipping over rocks. I know Jonas is there, but somehow he makes himself a shadow.
“It’s a window,” he says after a while.
“I know.” I stand up and wipe crumbs of soil off the butt of my jean shorts. “We should get back.”
“Yes,” he says, with a small, serious expression. “My mother will be frantic.”
I want to laugh, but instead I take his hand, walk him down the path, and return him to his mother, who thanks me with what feels like reproach.
12:50 P.M.
“It’s not a lie.”
Finn, Maddy, and Gina have waded out beyond the shoals to the edge of the sandbar, the abrupt drop of the ocean floor. Behind them, Peter splashes forward, dragging his boogie board over the crests. I want to cry.
“Yes. It is. That night at the beach picnic, the very first time I met Gina? You made a huge point of telling me you had fallen in love with Gina and were ‘thankfully’ one hundred percent over me. And that was probably twenty years ago. So.”