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study. We shouldn’t have come here anyway.”
    “It was your idea,” said Jane. She looked a lot like her mother when she frowned. “I think the boat sounds like fun. We can put it in the water, anyway, see what happens—”
    “I want to study,” I said. “I’m not as good at math as you are, I’ll fail the test.”
    Tad was scowling, but Billy just laughed. “What the fuck, Emma, you’d get straight A’s if you didn’t open a book all year. You didn’t come out here to do algebra, did you?”
    “She’s just scared she’ll sink the boat,” said Tad. “She must weigh double what I do.”
    I felt myself turning red. Jane made a face at Tad, and Billy said, “If she does, it’s ’cause she’s got twice as much brains and manners.”
    Jane grinned. “Tad, you’re a jerk. Emma, don’t mind him. You go back home and study, and I’ll go with them. That’s easy, isn’t it?”
    What was she saying? There were two of them. She’d be outnumbered. “You have to help me,” I said. I remembered the round balloons with their little stubby legs. That was what I looked like; even Jane probably laughed at me behind my back.
    I couldn’t stand the idea of Jane making fun of me, so I thought about the swimming lessons. “Don’t let the racers intimidate you,” my father had said. “You’re not fast, but you’re steady.”
    I had endurance, and I had to keep her from going out in the boat. I took a breath and said, “Please, Jane. You said you’d help me.”
    “No, I didn’t,” she said, and I knew she was talking about the ladder. A breeze had sprung up and her nipples showed under the tank top, and Tad stared at her chest even harder than he had before.
    “I don’t feel well,” I said. My own nipples hurt just watching him look at her. “I want to go back to your house and study now so I can go to bed early. The sun’s not even out anymore.”
    “It went behind a cloud,” Billy said. “A little cloud, Emma, see? Here it comes again. Shazam!” He gestured dramatically at the sky just as the sun reappeared, and Jane giggled. “See, I’m a magician.”
    Go back in, I prayed to the sun. Go back behind a cloud. Catch up to the sun, cloud, and cover it the way Jane should cover her breasts, the way we should all cover ourselves so no one stares at us.
    The sky didn’t listen to me, any more than Jane was listening. “Just for an hour,” she told Billy and Tad, “and then I really have to go home and study. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to, Emma. I’ll help you with math after dinner. You’re still coming over for dinner, right?”
    “Yes,” I said, defeated. But where was I going to go until then? The dock wasn’t safe anymore, and if I went home Mom would find some way to keep me from going to the Hallorans’ to eat. I could go to the library and study, but I knew it wouldn’t work. I hated math; I’d just sit there feeling miserable because I was fat. Or else I’d keep thinking about Ginny and worrying about whether I was crazy.
    I had to find out. Mom wasn’t expecting me home; she wouldn’t hear me if I snuck into the house. I’d creep around and look for the key some more. I’d pretend I was Nancy Drew.
    The plot didn’t make me happy, though, because I’d be doing it by myself and we lived in a big house. I knew I could search for years, dig up all the floorboards and sift through every bit of dust in the attic, and still never find the key. To give myself time to think of new places I took the long way home through the woods, or what was left of them after the ravages of the highway Tom Halloran had helped build, but that didn’t work either. I kept hearing highway noises through the trees and imagining truckers pulling over to the side of the road, crashing through the underbrush to find me; with each flicker of sunlight on leaves, I seemed to see Ginny flitting through the branches, mocking me with her beauty.
    The route would have taken me to our back