[English] SECOND CHANCE SUMMER

Author: Morgan Matson

Source: books4u.me

I EASED OPEN MY BEDROOM DOOR TO CHECK THAT THE HALLWAY was empty. When I was sure that it was, I shouldered my purse and closed the door behind me quietly, then took the stairs down to the kitchen two at a time. It was nine a.m., we were leaving for the lake house in three hours, and I was running away.
The kitchen counter was covered with my mother’s plentiful to-do lists, bags packed with groceries and supplies, and a box filled with my father’s orange prescription bottles. I tried to ignore these as I headed across the kitchen, aiming for the back door. Though I hadn’t snuck out in years, I had a feeling that it would be just like riding a bicycle—which,e to think of it, I also hadn’t done in years. But I’d woken up that morning in a cold sweat, my heart hammering, and every impulse I had telling me to leave, that things would be better if I were somewhere—anywhere—else.
“Taylor?” I froze, and turned around to see Gelsey, my twelve-year-old sister, standing at the other end of the kitchen. Even though she was still wearing her pajamas, an ancient set decorated with glittery pointe shoes, her hair was up in a perfect bun.
“What?” I asked, taking a step away from the door, trying to look as nonchalant as possible.
She frowned at me, eyes resting on my purse before traveling back to my face. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I said. I leaned against the wall in what I hoped was a casual manner, even though I didn’t think I’d ever leaned against a wall in my life. “What do you want?”
“I can’t find my iPod. Did you take it?”
“No,” I said shortly, resisting the urge to tell her that I wouldn’t have touched her iPod, as it...

Second Chance Summer
Page 1



The Lake House

Chapter one

I EASED OPEN MY BEDROOM DOOR TO CHECK THAT THE HALLWAY was empty. When I was sure that it was, I shouldered my purse and closed the door behind me quietly, then took the stairs down to the kitchen two at a time. It was nine a.m., we were leaving for the lake house in three hours, and I was running away.

The kitchen counter was covered with my mother’s plentiful to-do lists, bags packed with groceries and supplies, and a box filled with my father’s orange prescription bottles. I tried to ignore these as I headed across the kitchen, aiming for the back door. Though I hadn’t snuck out in years, I had a feeling that it would be just like riding a bicycle—which, come to think of it, I also hadn’t done in years. But I’d woken up that morning in a cold sweat, my heart hammering, and every impulse I had telling me to leave, that things would be better if I were somewhere—anywhere—else.

“Taylor?” I froze, and turned around to see Gelsey, my twelve-year-old sister, standing at the other end of the kitchen. Even though she was still wearing her pajamas, an ancient set decorated with glittery pointe shoes, her hair was up in a perfect bun.

“What?” I asked, taking a step away from the door, trying to look as nonchalant as possible.

She frowned at me, eyes resting on my purse before traveling back to my face. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” I said. I leaned against the wall in what I hoped was a casual manner, even though I didn’t think I’d ever leaned against a wall in my life. “What do you want?”

“I can’t find my iPod. Did you take it?”

“No,” I said shortly, resisting the urge to tell her that I wouldn’t have touched her iPod, as it was filled solely with ballet music and the terrible band she was obsessed with, The Bentley Boys, three brothers with perfectly windswept bangs and dubious musical gifts. “Go ask Mom.”

“Okay,” she said slowly, still looking at me suspiciously. Then she pivoted on her toe and stomped out of the kitchen, yelling as she went. “Mom!”

I crossed the rest of the kitchen and had just reached for the back door when it swung open, making me jump back. My older brother, Warren, was struggling through it, laden with a bakery box and a tray of to-go coffees. “Morning,” he said.

“Hi,” I muttered, looking longingly past him to the outside, wishing that I’d tried to make my escape five minutes earlier—or, even better, had just used the front door.

“Mom sent me for coffee and bagels,” he said, as he set both on the counter. “You like sesame, right?”

I hated sesame—in fact, Warren was the only one of us who liked them—but I wasn’t going to point that out now. “Sure,” I said quickly. “Great.”

Warren selected one of the coffees and took a sip. Even though at nineteen he was only two years older than me, he was dressed, as usual, in khakis and a polo shirt, as though he might at any moment be called upon to chair a board meeting or play a round of golf. “Where is everyone?” he asked after a moment.

“No idea,” I said, hoping that he’d go investigate for himself. He nodded and took another sip, as though he had all the time in the world. “I think I heard Mom upstairs,” I said after it became clear that my brother intended to while away the morning sipping coffee and staring into space.

“I’ll tell her I’m back,” he said, setting his coffee down, just as I’d hoped he would. Warren headed toward the door, then stopped and turned back to me. “Is he up yet?”

I shrugged. “Not sure,” I said, trying to keep my voice light, like this was just a routine question. But only few weeks ago, the idea of my father still being asleep at this hour—or for that matter, still home—would have been unthinkable.

Warren nodded again and headed out of the kitchen. As soon as he was gone, I bolted for the door.

I hurried down our driveway and, when I made it to the sidewalk, let out a long breath. Then I started speed-walking down Greenleaf Road as quickly as possible. I probably should have taken a car, but some things were just habit, and the last time I’d snuck out, I’d been years away from getting my license.

I could feel myself start to calm down the farther I walked. The rational part of my brain was telling me that I’d have to go back at some point, but I didn’t want to listen to the rational part of my brain right now. I just wanted to pretend that this day—this whole summer—wasn’t going to have to happen, something that got easier the more distance I put between myself and the house. I’d been walking for a while and had just started to dig in my bag for my sunglasses when I heard a metal jangling sound and looked up.

My heart sank a little as I saw Connie from the white house across the street, walking her dog and waving at me. She was around my parents’ age, and I’d known her last name at some point, but couldn’t recall it now. I dropped my sunglass case in my bag next to what I now saw was Gelsey’s iPod (whoops), which I must have grabbed thinking it was mine. There was no avoiding Connie without blatantly ignoring her or turning and running into the woods. And I had a feeling either of these options was behavior that might make it back to my mother immediately. I sighed and made myself smile at her as she got closer.

“Taylor, hi!” she called, smiling wide at me. Her dog, a big, dumb-looking golden retriever, strained against his leash toward me, panting, tail wagging. I looked at him and took a small step away. We’d never had a dog, so though I liked them in theory, I hadn’t had all that much experience with them. And even though I watched the reality show Top Dog much more than someone who didn’t actually own a dog should, this didn’t help when confronted with one in the real world.

Second Chance Summer
Page 2



“Hi, Connie,” I said, already starting to edge away, hoping she’d get the hint. “Nice to see you!”

“You too,” she replied automatically, but I saw her smile fade a little as her eyes traveled over my face and outfit. “You’re looking a bit different today,” she said. “Very… relaxed.”

Since Connie normally saw me in my Stanwich Academy uniform—white blouse and itchy plaid skirt—I had no doubt I looked different now, as I’d pretty much just rolled out of bed, not even bothering to brush my hair, and was wearing flip-flops, cutoffs, and a much-washed white T-shirt that read LAKE PHOENIX SWIM TEAM. The shirt technically wasn’t mine, but I’d appropriated it so many years ago that I now just thought of it as my property.

“I guess so,” I said to Connie, making sure to keep a smile on my face. “Well…”

“Any big plans for the summer?” she asked brightly, apparently completely unaware that I was trying to end this conversation. The dog, maybe realizing this was going to take a while, flopped down at her feet, resting his head on his paws.

“Not really,” I said, hoping that might be the end of it. But she continued to look at me, eyebrows raised, so I stifled a sigh and went on. “We’re actually leaving today to spend the summer at our lake house.”

“Oh, wonderful!” she gushed. “That sounds lovely. Whereabouts is it?”

“It’s in the Poconos,” I said. She frowned, as though trying to place the name, and I added, “The Pocono Mountains. In Pennsylvania?”

“Oh, right,” she said, nodding, though I could tell from her expression that she still had no idea what I was talking about, which wasn’t actually that unexpected. Some of my friends’ families had summer houses, but they tended to be in places like Nantucket or Cape Cod. Nobody else I knew had a summer house in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania.

“Well,” Connie said, still smiling brightly. “A lake house! That should be nice.”

I nodded, not really trusting myself to answer, since I didn’t want to go back to Lake Phoenix. I so didn’t want to go back that I had snuck out of the house with practically no plan and no supplies except my sister’s iPod, rather than face going there.

“So,” Connie said, tugging on the dog’s leash, causing him to lumber to his feet, “be sure to say hello to your mother and father for me! I hope they’re both doing well, and—” She stopped suddenly, her eyes widening and cheeks reddening slightly. I recognized the signs immediately, even though I’d only been seeing them for three weeks. She had Remembered.

It was something that I had no idea how to handle, but as an unexpected upside, it was something that seemed to be working in my favor. Somehow, overnight, everyone in school seemed to know, and my teachers had been informed, though why or by whom, I’d never been sure. But it was the only explanation for the fact that I’d aced all my finals, even in classes like Trig, which I’d been dangerously close to getting a C in. And if that wasn’t enough proof, when my English teacher had passed out our exams, she’d set mine down on my desk and rested her hand on it for just a minute, causing me to look up at her.

“I know that studying must be hard for you right now,” she’d murmured, as though the entire class wasn’t listening, ears straining for every syllable. “So just do your best, all right, Taylor?”

And I’d bitten my lip and done the Brave Nod, aware the whole time that I was pretending, acting the way I knew she expected me to act. And sure enough, I’d gotten an A on the test, even though I’d only skimmed the end of The Great Gatsby.

Everything had changed. Or, more accurately, everything was going to change. But nothing had really changed yet. And it made the condolences odd—as if people were saying how sorry they were that my house had burned down when it was still intact but with an ember smoking nearby, waiting.

“I will,” I said quickly, saving Connie from having to stammer through one of the well-meaning speeches I was already sick of hearing—or even worse, telling me about some friend of a friend who had been miraculously cured through acupuncture/me***ation/tofu, and had we considered that? “Thank you.”

“Take care,” she said, putting more meaning in those words than they usually had, as she reached out and patted me on the shoulder. I could see the pity in her eyes, but also the fear—that slight distancing, because if something like this was happening to my family, it could happen to hers.

“You too,” I said, trying to keep a smile on my face until she had waved again and headed down the street, dog leading the way. I continued in the opposite direction, but my escape no longer felt like it was going to make things better. What was the point of trying to run away if people were going to insist on reminding you of what you were running from? Though I hadn’t felt the need to do it for a while now, running away had been something I’d done with real frequency when I was younger. It had all started when I was five, and I had gotten upset that my mother was paying attention only to baby Gelsey, and Warren, as usual, wouldn’t let me play with him. I’d stomped outside, and then had seen the driveway, and the wider world beyond it, beckoning. I had started walking down the street, mostly just wondering how long it would take for someone to realize I was even gone. I was soon found and brought home, of course, but that had begun the pattern, and running away became my preferred method of dealing with anything that upset me. It got to be such a routine that when I used to announce from the doorway, tearfully, that I was leaving home forever and ever, my mother would just nod, barely looking at me, telling me only to make sure to be back in time for dinner.

Second Chance Summer
Page 3



I had just pulled out Gelsey’s iPod—willing *****ffer through even the Bentley Boys if it meant a distraction from my thoughts—when I heard the low rumble of the sports car behind me.

It occurred to me that I must have been gone longer than I’d realized as I turned around, knowing what I would see. My father was behind the wheel of his low-slung silver car, smiling at me. “Hi, kid,” he said through the open passenger-side window. “Want a ride?”

Knowing that there was no point in even pretending any longer, I pulled open the passenger side door and got in. My dad looked across at me and raised his eyebrows. “So what’s the news?” he asked, his tra***ional greeting.

I shrugged and looked down at the gray floor mats, still pristine, even though he’d had the car for a year. “I just, you know, felt like a walk.”

My dad nodded. “Of course,” he said, his voice overly serious, as though he completely believed me. But we both knew what I’d really been doing—it had usually been my father who would come and find me. He always seemed to know where I would be, and rather than bringing me right home, if it wasn’t too late, we would go out for ice cream instead, after I’d promise not to tell my mother.

I buckled my seat belt, and to my surprise, my dad didn’t turn the car around, but instead kept driving, turning onto the road that would take us downtown. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“I thought we could use some breakfast,” he said, glancing over at me as he pulled to a stop at a red. “For some reason, all the bagels in the house seem to be sesame.”

I smiled at that, and when we arrived, followed my dad into Stanwich Deli. Since the deli was packed, I hung back and let him order. As my eyes roamed over the shop, I noticed Amy Curry standing toward the front of the line, holding hands with a tall, cute guy wearing a Colorado College T-shirt. I didn’t know her well—she’d moved with her mother and brother down the street from us last summer—but she smiled and waved at me, and I waved back.

When my dad made it to the front of the line, I watched him rattling off our order, saying something that made the counter guy laugh. To look at my father, you wouldn’t be able to tell that anything was truly wrong. He was a little thinner, his skin tone just slightly yellow. But I was trying not to see this as I watched him drop some change into the tip jar. I was trying not to see how tired he looked, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. But most of all, I was trying not to think about the fact that we had been told, by experts who knew these things, that he had approximately three months left to live.

Chapter two

“DO WE HAVE TO LISTEN TO THIS?” GELSEY WHINED FROM THE front seat for what had to be the third time in ten minutes.

“You might learn something,” Warren said from the driver’s side. “Right, Taylor?”

From where I was stretched out in the backseat, I pulled down my sunglasses and turned the volume up on my iPod rather than responding. Lake Phoenix was only a three-hour drive from our house in Stanwich, Connecticut, but it felt like it had been the longest car ride of my life. And since my brother drove like a senior citizen (he’d actually once gotten a ticket for driving too slowly and causing a traffic hazard) it had taken us over four hours to get there—so it was getting close to actually being the longest car ride of my life.

It was just the three of us in the old wood-paneled Land Cruiser that Warren and I shared—my parents had gone on ahead of us, my mom’s car packed full with all the supplies we’d need for an entire summer away. I’d spent most of the trip just trying to ignore my siblings’ squabbling, mostly over what to listen to—Gelsey only wanted to play the Bentley Boys; Warren insisted we listen to his Great Courses CD. Warren had won the final round, and the droning, English accent was telling me more than I ever wanted to know about quantum mechanics.

Even though I hadn’t been back in five years, I had still been able to anticipate every turn on the drive up. My parents had bought the house before I was born, and for years, we spent every summer there, leaving in early June and coming back in late August, my father staying in Connecticut alone during the workweek and coming up on the weekends. Summers used to be the highlight of my year, and all throughout school I would count down until June and everything that a Lake Phoenix summer promised. But the summer I was twelve had ended so disastrously that I had been incredibly relieved that we hadn’t gone back the next year. That was the summer Warren decided that he needed to really start focusing on his transcript and did a pre-college intensive program at Yale. Gelsey had just switched ballet teachers and didn’t want to stop classes for the summer. And I, not wanting to go back to Lake Phoenix and face the mess I’d made up there, had found a summer oceanography camp (there had been a brief period when I’d wanted to be a marine biologist; this had since passed) and begged my parents to let me go. And every year since then, it seemed like there was always something happening to prevent us from spending the summer there. Gelsey started going to sleepaway ballet camps, and Warren and I both started doing the academic-service-summer-program thing (he built a playground in Greece, I spent a summer trying—and failing—to learn Mandarin at a language immersion in Vermont). My mother started renting our house out when it became clear that we were all getting too busy to take the whole summer off and spend it together in Pennsylvania.

And this year was supposed to be no exception—Gelsey was planning on going back to the ballet camp where she was the rising star, Warren had an internship lined up at my father’s law firm, and I had intended to spend a lot of time sunbathing. I was really, really looking forward to the school year ending. My ex-boyfriend, Evan, had broken up with me a month before school ended, and my friends, not wanting to split up the group, had all taken his side. My sudden lack of friends and any semblance of a social life would have made the prospect of heading out of town for the summer really appealing under normal circumstances. But I did not want to go back to Lake Phoenix. I hadn’t even set foot in the state of Pennsylvania in five years. The five of us spending the summer together was something nobody would have even considered until three weeks ago. And yet, that was exactly what was happening.

Second Chance Summer
Page 4



“We’re here!” Warren announced cheerfully as I felt the car slow down.

I opened my eyes, sat up, and looked around. The first thing I saw was green. The trees on both sides of the road were bright green, along with the grass beneath them. And they were densely packed, giving only glimpses of the driveways and houses that lay behind them. I glanced up at the temperature display, and saw it was ten degrees cooler here than it had been in Connecticut. Like it or not, I was back in the mountains.

“Finally,” Gelsey muttered from the front seat.

I stretched out my neck from the awkward position I’d been sleeping in, for once in full agreement with my sister. Warren slowed even more, signaled, and then turned down our gravel driveway. All the driveways in Lake Phoenix were gravel, and ours had always been the way I’d measured the summer. In June, I could barely make it barefoot from the car to the porch, wincing every step as the rocks dug into my tender, pale feet, sheltered by a year of shoe-wearing. But by August, my feet would be toughened and a deep brown, the white of my flip-flop tan lines standing out in sharp relief, and I would be able to run across the driveway barefoot without a second thought.

I unbuckled my seat belt and leaned forward between the front seats to get a better look. And there, right in front of me, was our summer house. The first thing I noticed was that it looked exactly the same—same dark wood, peaked roof, floor-to-ceiling windows, wraparound porch.

The second thing I noticed was the dog.

It was sitting on the porch, right by the door. As the car drew closer, it didn’t get up or run away, but instead starting wagging its tail, as though it had been waiting for us all along.

“What is that?” Gelsey asked as Warren shut off the engine.

“What’s what?” Warren asked. Gelsey pointed, and he squinted through the windshield. “Oh,” he said a moment later, and I noticed that he was making no move to get out of the car. My brother denied it, but he was afraid of dogs, and had been ever since an idiotic babysitter let him watch Cujo when he was seven.

I opened my door and stepped out onto the gravel driveway to get a closer look. This was not the world’s most attractive dog. It was smallish, but not the tiny kind that you could put in your purse or might accidentally step on. It was golden brown with hair that seemed to be standing out from its body, giving it an air of surprise. It looked like a mutt, with biggish, stand-up German Shepherd-y ears, a short nose, and a longish, collie-like tail. I could see it had a collar on with a tag dangling from it, so clearly it wasn’t a stray.

Gelsey got out of the car as well, but Warren stayed put in the front seat and cracked the window as I approached him. “I’ll just, um, stay behind and handle the bags,” he muttered as he passed over the keys.

“Seriously?” I asked, raising my eyebrows at him. Warren flushed red before quickly rolling up his window, as though this small dog was somehow going to launch itself into the front seat of the Land Cruiser.

I crossed the driveway and walked up the three porch steps to the house. I expected the dog to move as soon as I got close, but instead it just wagged its tail harder, making a whapping sound on the wooden deck. “Go on,” I said as I crossed to the door. “Shoo.” But instead of leaving, it trotted over to join me, as though it had every intention of following us inside. “No,” I said firmly, trying to imitate Randolph George, the bespectacled British host of Top Dog. “Go.” I took a step toward it, and the dog finally seemed to get the message, skittering away and then walking down the porch steps and across the driveway with what seemed like, for a dog, a great deal of reluctance.

Once the danger of the rogue canine had passed, Warren opened his door and carefully got out, looking around at the driveway, which was empty of other cars. “Mom and Dad really should have been here by now.”

I pulled my cell out of my shorts pocket and saw that he was right. They had left a few hours ahead of us, and most likely hadn’t driven 40 mph the whole way. “Gelsey, can you call—” I turned to my sister, only to see that she was bent over almost in half, nose to knee. “You okay?” I asked, trying to look at her upside down.

“Fine,” she said, her voice muffled. “Just stretching.” She straightened up slowly, her face bright red. As I watched, her complexion changed back to its normal shade—pale, with freckles that would only increase exponentially as the summer went on. She swept her arms up to meet in a perfect circle above her head, then dropped them and rolled her shoulders back. In case her bun or turned-out walk wasn’t enough to tell the world that she was a ballet dancer, Gelsey had the habit of stretching, and often in public.

“Well, when you’re done with that,” I said, as she was now starting to bend backward at an alarming angle, “can you call Mom?” Without waiting for her response—especially since I had a feeling it was going to be something like Why don’t you do it?—I selected the key from the key ring, turned it in the lock, and stepped inside the house for the first time in five years.

As I looked around, I let out a breath. I had been worried, after summers of renters, that the house would have changed drastically. That the furniture would be moved around, that things would be added, or there would just be the sense—hard to define but palpable—that someone had been in your space. The Three Bears had known it well, and so had I, the year I came back from oceanography camp and could tell immediately that my mother had put some guests in my room when I’d been gone. But as I took everything in, I didn’t get that feeling. It was the summer house, just as I’d remembered it, like it had been waiting for me, this whole time, to finally come back.

Second Chance Summer
Page 5



The downstairs was open-plan, so I could see all the rooms that weren’t bedrooms or bathrooms. The ceiling was high, stretching up to the top of the peaked roof, letting in swaths of sun onto the threadbare throw rugs that covered the wood floors. There was the scratched wooden dining table we never ate on, which always just became the place to dump towels and mail. The kitchen—tiny compared to our large state-of-the-art one in Connecticut—was to my right. The door off the back of it led to our screened-in porch. It looked out on the lake and was where we ate all our meals, except in rare cases of torrential rain. And off the porch was the walkway down to our dock and Lake Phoenix itself, and through the kitchen windows, I could see the glint of late-afternoon sunlight hitting the water.

Past the kitchen was a sitting area with two couches that faced the stone fireplace, the place where my parents had always ended up after dinner, reading and doing work. Beyond that was the family room, with a worn corduroy sofa, where Warren and Gelsey and I usually found ourselves at night. One section of the built-in bookcases was filled with board games and jigsaw puzzles, and we usually had a game or puzzle going throughout the summer, though Risk had been put on the highest shelf, out of easy reach, after the summer when we all had become obsessed, forming secret alliances and basically ceasing to go outside as we circled the board.

Our bedrooms were all off one hallway—my parents slept in the master suite upstairs—which meant that Warren, Gelsey, and I would all have to share the one downstairs bathroom, something I was not looking forward to experiencing again, since I’d gotten used to having my own bathroom in Connecticut. I headed down the hall to my bedroom, peering in at the bathroom as I went. It was smaller than I remembered it being. Much too small, in fact, for the three of us to share without killing one another.

I reached my room, with the ancient TAYLOR’S PLACE sign on it that I’d totally forgotten about, and pushed open the door, bracing myself to confront the room I’d last seen five years ago, and all its attendant memories.

But when I stepped inside, I wasn’t confronted by anything except a pleasant, somewhat generic room. My bed was still the same, with its old brass frame and red-and-white patterned quilt, the trundle bed tucked beneath it. The wooden dresser and wood-framed mirror were the same, along with the old chest at the foot of the bed that had always held extra blankets for the cold nights you got in the mountains, even in the summer. But there was nothing in the room that was me any longer. The embarrassing posters of the teen actor I’d been obsessed with back then (he’d since had several well-publicized stints in rehab) had been removed from above my bed. My swim team ribbons (mostly third place) were gone, along with the collection of lip glosses that I’d been curating for several years. Which was probably a good thing, I tried to tell myself, as they all surely would have gone bad by now. But still. I dropped my purse and sat down on my bed, looking from the empty closet to the bare dresser, searching for some evidence of the fact that I had lived here for twelve summers, but not seeing any.

“Gelsey, what are you doing?”

The sound of my brother’s voice was enough to pull me out of these thoughts and make me go investigate what was happening. I walked down the hallway and saw my sister chucking stuffed animals out of her room and into the hall. I dodged an airborne elephant and stood next to Warren, who was eyeing with alarm the small pile of them that was accumulating in front of his door. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“They turned my room into a baby’s room,” Gelsey said, her voice heavy with scorn as she flung another animal—this time a purple horse that I vaguely recognized—out the door. Sure enough, her room had been redecorated. There was now a crib in the corner, and a changing table, and her twin bed had been piled high with the offending stuffed animals.

“The renters probably had a baby,” I said, leaning to the side to avoid being beaned by a fuzzy yellow duck. “Why don’t you just wait until Mom gets here?”

Gelsey rolled her eyes, a language she’d become fluent in this year. She could express a wide variety of emotion with every eye roll, maybe because she practiced constantly. And right now, she was indicating how behind-the-times I was. “Mom’s not going to be here for another hour,” she said. She looked down at the animal in her hands, a small kangaroo, and turned it over a few times. “I just talked to her. She and Daddy had to go to Stroudsburg to meet with his new oncologist.” She pronounced the last word carefully, the way we all did. It was a word I hadn’t been aware of a few weeks ago. This was when I’d thought my father was just having minor, easily fixed back pains. At that point, I wasn’t even entirely sure what the pancreas was, and I definitely didn’t know pancreatic cancer was almost always fatal, or that “stage four” were words you never wanted to hear.

My father’s doctors in Connecticut had given him permission to spend the summer in Lake Phoenix under the con***ion that he see an oncologist twice a month to check his progress, and when the time came, that he bring in nursing care if he didn’t want to go into hospice. The cancer had been found late enough that there apparently wasn’t anything that could be done. I hadn’t been able to get my head around it at first. In all the medical dramas I’d ever seen, there was always some solution, some last-minute, miraculously undiscovered remedy. Nobody ever just gave up on a patient. But it seemed like in real life, they did.

I met Gelsey’s eye for a moment before looking down at the floor and the jumbled pile of toys that had landed there. None of us said anything about the hospital, and what that meant, but I wasn’t expecting us to. We hadn’t talked about what was happening with our dad. We tended to avoid discussing emotional things in our family, and sometimes hanging around with my friends, and seeing the way they interacted with their families—hugging, talking about their feelings—I would feel not so much envious as uncomfortable.

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And the three of us had never been close. It probably didn’t help that we were so different. Warren had been brilliant from preschool, and it had come as a surprise to no one that he’d been the class valedictorian. My five-year age gap with Gelsey—not to mention the fact that she was capable of being the world’s biggest brat—meant we didn’t have one of those superclose sister relationships. Gelsey also spent as much time as possible dancing, which I had no interest in. And it wasn’t like Warren and Gelsey were close with each other either. We had just never been a unit. I might have once wished things were different, especially when I was younger and had just read the Narnia series, or The Boxcar Children, where the brothers and sisters are all best friends and look out for one another. But I’d long since accepted that this wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t necessarily bad—just the way things were, and something that wasn’t going to change.

Just like it wasn’t going to change that I was the unexceptional one in the family. It had been that way as long as I could remember—Warren was smart and Gelsey was talented, and I was just Taylor, not particularly skilled at anything.

Gelsey went back to throwing the stuffed animals into the hallway, and I was about to go into my own room, feeling like I’d spent far too much time as it was with my siblings that day, when a flash of orange caught my eye.

“Hey,” I said, bending down to pick up a stuffed animal I thought I recognized. “I think that’s mine.” In fact, it was a stuffed animal I knew very well: a small plush penguin, wearing an orange-and-white-striped scarf. It wasn’t the finest stuffed animal ever constructed—I could tell now that the felt was fairly cheap, and the stuffing was threatening to come out in several places. But the night of the carnival when I was twelve, the night I’d gotten my first kiss, the night Henry Crosby had won it for me, I’d thought it was the most wonderful thing in the world.

“I remember that,” Warren said, a look coming into his eyes that I didn’t like one bit. “Wasn’t that the one you got at the carnival?” My brother had a photographic memory, but usually used it to memorize obscure facts, and not to torment me.

“Yeah,” I muttered, starting to take a step away.

“Wasn’t it the one Henry won for you?” Warren put a special spin on his name. I had a feeling that I was being punished for making fun of Warren’s fear of small, harmless dogs. I glared at my brother. Gelsey was looking between the two of us, interested.

“Henry who?” she asked.

“You know,” Warren said, a small smile starting to take form on his face. “Henry Crosby. He had a little brother, Derek or something. Henry was Taylor’s boyfriend.”

Davy, I silently corrected Warren. I could feel my cheeks get hot, which was ridiculous, and I found myself looking for an escape. If there was a way that I could have walked away from the conversation without it being totally obvious that I was uncomfortable, I would have.

“Oh, yeah,” Gelsey said slowly. “I think I remember him. He was nice to me. And he used to know the names of all the trees.”

“And—” Warren started, but I interrupted him before he could continue, not sure I could take any more.

“Anyway, you should get that cleaned up before Mom gets here,” I said loudly, knowing even as I said it that it was highly unlikely my mother would yell at Gelsey for anything. But I tried to pretend it was true as I left with all the dignity one can muster while holding a stuffed penguin, and went to the kitchen for no reason whatsoever.

Henry Crosby. The name reverberated in my head as I put the penguin on the kitchen counter and opened and shut one of the cabinet doors. He was someone I had consciously tried not to think about too much over the years. He’d become reduced, shortened to a slumber-party anecdote when the inevitable question—Who was your first boyfriend?—would arise. I had the Henry story down perfectly now, so that I barely had to even think about it:

Oh, that was Henry. We’d been friends, up at my summer house. And the summer we were twelve, we started going out. He gave me my first kiss at the summer carnival…. This was when everyone would sigh, and if someone asked me what happened, I would just smile and shrug and say something along the lines of “Well, we were twelve, so it became pretty clear there weren’t exactly long-term prospects there.” And everyone would laugh and I would nod and smile, but really I would be turning over what I’d just said. Because it wasn’t that any of those facts had been technically incorrect. But none of them—especially about why it hadn’t worked out—had been the truth. And I would push thoughts of that summer out of my head and rejoin the conversation, relegating what had happened—with Henry, and Lucy, and what I’d done—back to the anecdote that I pretended was all it was.

Warren came into the kitchen a moment later and beelined for a large cardboard box sitting on the counter. “Sorry,” he said after a moment, opening the top. “I was just kidding around.”

I shrugged, as though I couldn’t have cared less. “It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s ancient history.” Which was true. But as soon as we’d crossed the line that separated Lake Phoenix from the rest of the world, Henry had been circling around in my thoughts, even as I’d tried to turn up the volume on my iPod to drown them out. I’d even found myself watching for his house. And I had seen, to my surprise, the house that had been a soft white was now painted a bright blue, and the sign out front that had always read CAMP CROSBY now read MARYANNE’S HAPPY HOURS, decorated with a silhouette of a martini glass—all proof that new owners had taken over. That Henry wasn’t there any longer. I had kept my eyes on the house even as it faded from view, realizing that I might really never see him again, which the presence of Maryanne, whoever she was, seemed to cement. This realization caused a strange mix of feelings—nostalgia coupled with disappointment. But mostly I had felt the cool, heart-pounding sensation of relief that comes when you know you’ve gotten away with something.

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Warren began unpacking his box, lining up row after row of plastic ketchup squeeze bottles on the counter in perfectly straight lines, as though there might be some sort of epic condiment battle looming on the horizon.

I stared at them. “Is Pennsylvania having some sort of ketchup shortage that I’m not aware of?”

Warren shook his head without looking up from his unpacking. “I’m just taking precautions,” he said. “You remember what happened last time.”

In fact, I did. My brother wasn’t at all picky about food, unlike Gelsey, who seemed to live on pasta and pizza and refused to eat anything moderately spicy—but his one exception was ketchup. Warren put it on almost everything, would eat only Heinz, and preferred it chilled, not room temperature. He claimed he could tell the difference between the brands, something that he’d proved once at a mall food court when we were younger and extremely bored. So he had been traumatized five years ago, when we first arrived in Lake Phoenix and the store had had a run on Heinz and was down to the generic brand. Warren had refused to even try it and had used my father’s corporate card to have a case of Heinz shipped overnight to him, something my father—not to mention the company accountant—had not been too happy to find out about.

Now, fortified against such tragedy, Warren placed two bottles in the nearly-empty fridge and started transferring the rest into the cupboard. “Do you want me to tell you how ketchup was invented?” he asked, with an expression that I, unfortunately, knew all too well. Warren was very into facts, and had been since he was little and some probably well-meaning, but now much-despised, relative gave him Discovered by Accident!—a book on famous inventions that had been discovered by accident. After that, you couldn’t have a conversation with Warren without him dropping some fact or another into it. This quest for useless knowledge (thanks to his equally fun obscure-vocabulary-word kick, I knew this was also called “arcana”) had only grown with time. Finally, we’d complained so much that Warren no longer told us the facts, but now just told us he could tell us the facts, which wasn’t, in my opinion, all that much better.

“Maybe later,” I said, even though I was admittedly slightly curious as to the accidental origin of ketchup, and hoping it wasn’t something terribly disgusting or disturbing—like Coca-Cola, which, it turned out, had been the result of a failed attempt to make aspirin. I looked around for an escape and saw the lake through the kitchen window. And, suddenly, I knew that it was the only place I wanted to be.

I pushed through to our screened-in porch, then out the side door, heading for our dock. As I stepped outside, I turned my face up to the sun. Five wooden steps led down to a small grassy hill, and below that, the dock. Even though it was directly behind our house, we had always shared it with the houses on either side of us. The dock wasn’t particularly long or impressive, but had always seemed to me to be the perfect length for getting a running start to cannonball into the lake, and the water was deep enough that you didn’t have to worry about hitting the bottom.

There were some kayaks and a canoe stacked on the grass by the side of the dock, but I barely noticed them as I got closer. You weren’t allowed to have any motorized watercraft on the lake, so there was no roar of engines disturbing the late afternoon quiet, just a lone kayaker paddling past in the distance. Lake Phoenix was big, with three small islands scattered across it, and surrounded on all sides by pine trees. Despite the size of the rest of the lake, our dock occupied one side of a narrow passage, the other side close enough that you could see the docks across the water and the people on them.

I looked across the lake to the dock opposite ours, which had always been the Marino family’s. Lucy Marino had been my best friend in Lake Phoenix for twelve summers, and there had been a time when I’d known her house as well as my own. We’d slept over at each other’s houses almost every night, alternating, our families so used to it that my mother started stocking Lucy’s favorite cereal. I usually tried not to think about Lucy, but it hadn’t escaped my notice, especially recently, that she had been my last tell-everything-to friend. Nobody at school seemed to know how to react to the news about my father, and overnight, it was like I didn’t know how to talk to anyone about it. And since I’d been thoroughly cast out of my old group of friends, I found myself, as the school year ended and preparations for our summer up here began, pretty much alone, without anyone to talk to. But at one time, I had told everything to Lucy, until we, like everything else, had fallen apart that last summer.

Out of habit, I found myself looking to the leg of her dock. Over the years, Lucy and I had developed a very intricate system of communication from our respective docks that involved flashlights and our own version of Morse code if it was dark, and a very imprecise semaphore flag system if it was light. And if one of us needed to talk to the other desperately, we would tie one of the pair of pink bandannas we both had to the leg of our docks. Admittedly, this had not been the most efficient method of communication, and we’d usually end up talking on the phone before we happened to see the lights, or flags, or bandannas. But, of course, the leg of her dock was now bandanna-free.

I kicked off my flip-flops and walked across the sun-warmed planks of our dock barefoot. The dock had been walked on so much over the years that you never had to worry about splinters, like you sometimes did on our front porch. I started walking faster, almost running, wanting to get to the end, to breathe in the scent of water and pine trees, and curl my toes around the edge.

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But when I was almost to the end, I stopped short. There was movement at the base of the dock. The kayak I had seen earlier was now tied up and bobbing in the water, and I could see the person who’d been in it—a guy—climbing up the ladder using one hand, holding the kayak paddle in the other. The sun was glancing off the water so that the glare was blocking his face as he stepped on to the dock, but I figured this was probably just a neighbor. He walked forward, out of the glare, then stopped abruptly, staring at me. I blinked in surprise, and found myself staring back.

Standing across from me, five years older, all grown up, and much cuter than I remembered him being, was Henry Crosby.

Chapter three

I FELT MY JAW DROP, WHICH I HADN’T REALIZED UNTIL THAT moment was something that actually happened in real life. I closed it quickly, then blinked at him again, trying to regroup as my brain struggled to comprehend what all-grown-up Henry was doing standing in front of me.

He dropped the paddle on the dock, then took a small step forward and folded his arms across his chest. “Taylor Edwards,” he said. He didn’t phrase it as a question.

“Henry?” I asked, a little faintly, even though of course it was him. For one thing, he had known me, which some random kayaker probably wouldn’t have. And for another, he looked the same—except much, much better.

He was tall, and broad-shouldered, with the same brown hair, so dark it almost looked black, and cut short. I could no longer see the freckles he’d had when we were younger, but his eyes were still the same hazel, though they looked more green than brown now. His jaw also somehow seemed more defined, and his arms were muscular. I couldn’t make this fit with the last time I’d seen him, when he’d been shorter than me, and skinny, with scraped-up elbows and knees. All in all, Henry looked very cute. And very not happy to see me.

“Hi,” I said, just to say something to try and mask the fact that I had been staring.

“Hello,” he said, his voice cold. His voice was also deeper, and no longer cracking every other word, like it had been the last time I’d heard it. His eyes met mine, and I wondered suddenly what changes he could see in me, and what he thought of the way I looked now. Unfortunately, I’d looked pretty much the same since childhood, with blue eyes and straight, fine hair that fell somewhere between blond and brown. I was medium height, with a wiry build, and I certainly hadn’t gained many of the curves I’d been so desperately hoping for when I was twelve. I now wished I’d taken the time to do anything with my appearance that morning, as opposed to just rolling out of bed. Henry’s eyes traveled down to my outfit, and when I realized what I was wearing, I inwardly cursed myself. Not only was I running into someone who clearly hated me, but I was doing in it a T-shirt I’d stolen from him.

“So,” he said, and then a silence fell. My heart was pounding hard, and I suddenly wanted nothing more than to just turn and leave, get in the car and not stop driving until I got back to Connecticut. “What are you doing here?” he finally asked, a hard edge in his voice.

“I could ask you the same question,” I said, thinking back to only a few minutes earlier, when I’d told Warren so confidently that Henry was ancient history, sure that I’d never see him again. “I thought you’d left.”

“You thought I’d left?” he asked, with a short, humorless laugh. “Really.”

“Yes,” I said, a little testily. “We passed your house today, and it was all different. And apparently owned by some lush named Maryanne.”

“Well, a lot’s changed in five years, Taylor,” he said, and I realized it was the second time he used my whole name. Before, Henry had only called me Taylor when he was mad at me—most of the time, he had called me Edwards, or Tay. “We’ve moved, for one.” He pointed to the house next to mine, the one so close that I could see a line of pots on the windowsill. “Right there.”

I just stared where he was pointing for a moment. That was the Morrisons’ house, and I’d just assumed they were still there, Mr. and Mrs. Morrison and their mean poodle. “You live next door to me?”

“We have for a few years now,” he said. “But since there were always renters at your place, I didn’t think you were ever coming back.”

“Me neither,” I admitted, “if you want to know the truth.”

“So what happened?” he asked, looking right at me and startling me with the greenness of his eyes. “Why are you back, all of a sudden?”

I felt my breath catch as the reason—never far from my thoughts—crashed into the front of my mind, seeming to dim the afternoon light a little. “Well,” I said slowly, looking away from him and out to the water, trying to think about how to explain it. It wasn’t even like it was that complicated. All I had to say was something along the lines of My dad’s sick. So we’re spending the summer together up here. That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part came with the follow-up questions. How sick? With what? Is it serious? And then the inevitable reaction when people realized how serious it actually was. And that what I meant, but hadn’t said, was that we were spending our last summer together.

I didn’t have a practiced explanation because I had assiduously avoided having this conversation. Word had spread around school pretty quickly, preventing me from having to explain the situation. And if I was with my mother, and we happened to run into an acquaintance in the grocery store who asked after my father, I left the task of breaking the news to her. I would look pointedly in the other direction, or wander a few steps away, as though yielding to the inexorable pull of the cereal aisle, pretending that the difficult conversation she was having had nothing whatsoever to do with me. I wasn’t entirely sure I could say the words out loud—or handle the follow-up questions—without losing it. I hadn’t really cried yet, and I didn’t want to risk this happening in front of Henry Crosby.

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“It’s kind of a long story,” I finally said, keeping my eyes on the calm surface of the lake.

“Yeah,” Henry said, sarcastically. “I’m sure.”

I blinked at his tone. Henry had never talked to me like that before. When we’d fought, it had been the kid version of fighting—arm punches, name calling, pranking—anything to get the fight over with so that we could go back to being friends. Hearing him now—and the way we were sniping at each other—felt like speaking a foreign language with someone you’d only ever spoken English to.

“So why did you move?” I asked, a little more aggressively than I meant to, as I turned to him, folding my arms across my chest. Moves within Lake Phoenix were fairly rare—on the drive up, I’d seen signs I recognized in front of house after house, the same owners still there.

Expecting an immediate answer, I was surprised to see Henry flush slightly and stick his hands in the pockets of his shorts, which had always been his tell when he didn’t know what to say. “It’s a long story,” he echoed, looking down. For a moment, the only sound was the faint thunk thunk of the plastic kayak bumping up against the wooden leg of the dock. “Anyway,” he said after a pause, “we live there now.”

“Right,” I said, feeling like we’d already established this. “I got that.”

“I mean, we live there year-round,” he clarified. He looked back at me and I tried to cover my expression of surprise. Though you could live in Lake Phoenix full-time, very few people did—it was primarily a summer community. And five years ago, Henry had lived in Maryland. His father had done something in finance in D.C., coming up to Lake Phoenix with the rest of the fathers on the weekends, and staying in the city to work the rest of the time.

“Oh,” I said, nodding like I understood. I had no idea what that meant in terms of the rest of his life, but he didn’t seem like he was about to give me a detailed explanation, and I didn’t feel like I had the right to ask for more information. All of a sudden, I realized there was a much bigger distance between Henry and me than just the few feet that separated us.

“Yeah,” Henry said, and I wondered if he was feeling the same thing that I was—like he was standing on the dock with a stranger. “I should go,” he said shortly, as he turned to leave.

It felt wrong to end this on such an unsettled note, so, mostly just wanting to be polite, as he passed me, I said, “Good to see you again.”

He stopped, just a few feet from me, closer than ever, close enough that I could see that there was still a scattering of freckles across his cheeks, but so faint I could almost see each one, and connect them, like constellations. I could feel my pulse beating harder at the base of my throat, and I suddenly had a flashback to one of our early, tentative make-out sessions five years earlier—one that had, in fact, taken place on this very dock. I’ve kissed you flashed through my mind before I could stop it.

I looked at Henry, still so close, wondering if maybe he was remembering the same thing. But he was looking at me with a flat, skeptical expression, and as he started to walk away again, I realized that he had deliberately not returned my “good to see you” sentiment.

Maybe, on a different day, I would have left it at that. But I was cranky and tired and had just spent four hours listening to boy bands and facts about the energy of light, and I could feel my temper start to flare. “Look, it’s not like I wanted to come back,” I said, hearing my voice get louder and a little more shrill.

“Then why are you here?” Henry asked, his voice rising as well.

“I didn’t have any choice in the matter,” I snapped, knowing that I was about to go too far, but also knowing that I wasn’t going to be able to stop myself. “I never wanted to come back here ever again.”

For a second, I thought I saw a flash of hurt pass over his face, but then it was gone, and the same stony expression had returned. “Well,” he said. “Maybe you’re not the only one who wanted that.”

I tried not to flinch, even though I knew I deserved it. We stared at each other, in a momentary standoff, and I realized that one of the main problems with having an argument on a dock is that there’s really nowhere to go if the other person is standing between you and dry land.

“So,” I said finally, breaking our eye contact and folding my arms over my chest, trying to indicate with my tone of voice how little I cared. “See you around.”

Henry slung the kayak paddle over one shoulder like an ax. “I think that’s inevitable, Taylor,” he said ruefully. He looked at me for a moment longer before turning and walking away and, not wanting to watch him go, I strode to the end of the dock.

I looked out at the water, and the sun that was just starting to think about setting, and let out a long breath. So Henry was living next door to me. It would be fine. I could deal with it. I would just spend the entire summer indoors. Suddenly exhausted by the thought of all of it, I sat down and let my feet skim the surface of the water. Just then, I caught sight of something at the very corner of the dock.

HENRY

+

TAYLOR

4EVER

We had carved it together, in the center of a crooked heart, five years ago. I couldn’t believe that it was still here after all this time. I ran my fingers over the plus sign, wondering why, at twelve, I thought I’d had any concept of forever.

From somewhere behind me, I could hear the sound of tires crunching on gravel, then car doors slamming, and I knew my parents had finally arrived. I pushed myself up and trudged across the dock, wondering just how I’d gotten here.