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in with giant backpacks and paid for their boiled peanuts and hush puppies with fistfuls of crumpled dollar bills.
    And the only locals who went to the Beach Club were the retirees who lived on the South Shore year-round. Mostly the Beach Club was filled with summer people from Atlanta who wanted to hang out with their country club friends—in a different country club.
    Suddenly, it became clear that almost everything about The Moment was going
badly
. I was a muscle twitch away from just hustling Will out the door with a chipper,
Have fun tonight. Maybe I’ll see you the next time you want some Pineapple Ginger Ale. Unless, of course, you hated it
and
you think I’m drippier than your ice cream cone! Ta!
    But before I had a chance, Will stepped closer to the icecream case. He rested a hand on top of it in a way that was probably supposed to look casual. The only problem with that was Will’s hand was knotted into a white-knuckled fist.
    I felt a prickly wave of heat wash over my face. He was about to say something. Something that mattered. I would have sworn on it.
    “Why don’t you come with me to the party?” Will blurted.
    “Or to the movie, if you want,” he added quickly. “But at a movie, you can’t really talk. And it’d be kind of … nice. To talk. I mean, if you want to … and you don’t mind ditching the, um, swamp?”
    Then
I
was hanging onto the ice cream case for dear life, too. I felt another head-rushy wave, but it didn’t feel at all bad.
    Even so, I wasn’t sure at first what I should say. As cheesy went, Movie on the Beach was a stack of American slices—so bad it was kind of good. But a party at the Beach Club pool was more like stinky French cheese—you could swallow it, but only if you held your nose. I definitely would have preferred pockmarked Harrison Ford to the fusty air-conditioning, horrid wallpaper, and uniformed “staff” of the Beach Club.
    But Will wanted to
talk
.
    Fuzzy though my mind was at that moment, my gut told me this was a good thing.
    It was such a good thing that I sort of wanted to start the conversation right there. That very minute. But one sideways glance reminded me that my dad was still there, fumbling around the cash register and
so
obviously eavesdropping on me as a boy asked me out for the very first time.
    And then there was Will’s brother, Owen. He was stillstationed at the bulletin board but had his head cocked in such a way that it was
just
as obvious that he was listening in too.
    And
then
, the wind chime on the screen door tinkled as a quartet of locals—most of whom I knew of course—came in for their sugar fix.
    I had to make a decision and I had to make it immediately.
    So I said yes to the Beach Club pool party. To a night of eating bad hors d’ouevres among an army of shoobees … and to a date with Will.
    “Meet you there at eight?” I proposed.
    Will grinned and nodded. Then grinned some more and nodded again until finally Owen came over and grabbed his arm, muttering, “I’m gonna save you from yourself, here, mm-kay? Let’s go.”
    They left so fast, I barely had time to squeak out a “See you later.” I was too floored to form complete sentences anyway.
    After that, I nodded my way through four ice cream orders before I realized I hadn’t heard a word the customers had said. After I asked them to repeat themselves, I got half the orders wrong anyway. But I didn’t really care. How could I when all my hopes and dreams (at least, all my hopes and dreams of the past four days) had come true?
    Will and I had had our Moment. Our weird, awkward, yet somehow amazing, Moment. It hadn’t been destiny, but it
had
made me excited about going to the Beach Club of all places. So maybe it actually
had
been magic.
    Time, I thought, looking anxiously at the clock over the screen door, would tell.
    I had an hour and a half left in my shift. If I’d been keeping a log, here’s how it would have read:
    5:05: Went to the walk-in cooler and