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been exercising. No grown man would greet a stranger at his own front door if he were sweating, unkempt, and wearing bike shorts. Well, unless the stranger in question was the invisible house cleaner.
    “Megan Kim!” he shouted jovially.
    “Hello, Mr. Roth. How are—”
    “You’ve lived here your whole life, Megan,” he interrupted. “I figured Lily-Ann could benefit from a tour guide. Besides, there’s nothing here to clean. We just moved in two weeks ago. We haven’t had a chance to make a mess yet! Hauggh… ”
    When he laughed, he ended up coughing.
    Is my mom is having an affair with the guy who wants to tear down the boardwalk? But, no. She’d tell me about something that huge. Plus, people don’t laugh when they’re having an affair. They act snippy. That’s why Mom had always laughed, a decadeago, when Jade and I kept trying to set up her and Jade’s father—because it never worked out. In our defense, why wouldn’t we try to set them up? The way Jade and I saw it, we’d be sisters and we’d both have a mom and dad. There’s five-year-old logic for you. So this really must have been about business. But that wasn’t a mood lifter, either. In a way, it was just as bad. Mom was in on the boardwalk plan, whatever it was.
    “So whaddaya say, kids?” Mr. Roth said, ushering Lily-Ann toward the door. She kept texting, but didn’t protest. “Meg? Feel like being a tour guide?”
    “Megan,” I corrected without thinking.
    Mom glowered at me.
    I forced a pained smile. “Sorry…it’s just—only certain people call me Meg.”
    “Well, I like Meg!” Mr. Roth answered. “So, add one more person to the list.”
    As I stood in the doorway, I imagined what it would feel like to grab Lily-Ann’s iPhone and cram it down Mr. Roth’s throat.
    Lily-Ann finally looked up at me. She slipped her iPhone back into her skirt. She cast a long gaze at her father.
    “Thanks for showing me around, Megan ,” she said, emphasizing my name. “It is Megan, isn’t it?”
    I grinned, for real this time. I think she might have smiled at me, too.
    Those wormy red lips were tough to read.

Jade
    M iles’s and my first fight of the summer should be another Seashell Point tradition. It should be like the first tourist scandal (yet to happen), “Clam-Fest” (don’t ask), the Fourth of July fireworks. Every year, right about the same time, Miles and I get into a fight about something stupid.
    Chalk it up to boredom. I sell tickets at the Jupiter Bounce. Yes, because I was fired from my first summer job ever. Yes, because I was caught making out with a tourist named Derek Madison on his rent-a-mansion couch while Megan was upstairs polishing the master bedroom mirrors. In my defense: Derek was truly tall, dark, and handsome; he played guitar; he claimed that he “wrote a song for [me]. It’s called ‘Cleaning Lady.’”
    Yes, he didn’t have much of a brain, but who needs one in Seashell Point? Luckily (or not) his family left town forever after they walked in on us in full-on French-kiss mode, the guitar long forgotten beside us. His parents were too outraged at the scandal to return. But, in fairness, our town’s scandal is best witnessed from a safe distance…another reason I want to be whisked away by a gorgeous rock star. (Derek, sweetie, it won’t be you. When you get a day job, please do NOT quit.)
    Anyway, my boss, Sarah—a portly fiend of indeterminate age with an even worse sense of style than Dad—insists I arrive promptly at nine every morning, “just in case.”
    No child has ever arrived before two in the afternoon.
    Two P.M. is when local day care ends. Either that or the au pairs are too exhausted to spoil their kids any longer. Honestly, I don’t even know. All I know is that’s when the business begins. Pack ‘em in for five minutes at a time, let ‘em shriek and jump and push one another and do backflips and occasionally knock heads or elbows and cry. (Nobody ever really gets hurt; I