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Cumberland, Maryland?”
    His grin broadened. “Well, I have lived here a week longer than you.”
    “True.”
    Justin dropped his board and sprawled out in the sand. “The waves were amazing. You should’ve come with us.”
    I pursed my lips, thinking of my first and only day out with Justin and Chase. At youth group, I’d always felt stupid doing stuff like balloon soccer and amoeba races, but the shame of playing those games was nothing compared to my lack of talent for surfing. I couldn’t stand on the board. I could barely even hang on when a wave came. And let me just say that whoever designed my adorable black-and-white two-piece didn’t have surfing in mind.
    “I’d like to see my nineteenth birthday, thank you very much.” I lay back on the sand as well. I might regret it later, but at the moment I didn’t care about getting grit in my hair. “Any big wipeouts?”
    “None I want to admit.” Justin blinked at the vast blue sky. “I so don’t want to go to work. I should’ve moved somewhere rainy and depressing.”
    I dug my toes into the warm sand and thought about thunderstorms. I liked thunderstorms. Did they have them in Hawaii?
    “You won’t stay forever,” Madison had told me when I said good-bye. “You need seasons.”
    Did I? Would endless days of sunshine and warm, salty breezes eventually drive me crazy?
    “You think you’ll miss seasons?” I asked Justin.
    He turned to me, squinting. “The day I complain about missing winter, I give you permission to shoot me.”
    I smiled. “Yeah, me too. Although I like fall. And it’s fun to see everything coming back to life in the spring.”
    “Sadly, you have to have winter to have spring.”
    A memory came unbidden. January—Connor and I freezing on the bleachers of the baseball field where we’d first met. My hands had tingled with cold, and I kept flexing my toes to make sure they hadn’t fallen off. But then Connor had told me how beautiful I’d become inside, and it had warmed me through.
    “You okay?”
    “Yeah.” I propped myself up and dusted the sand from my back. “Just thinking about home.”
    “I did too my first week,” Justin said. “A lot. About my parents, my little church, my”—he swallowed—“ex-girlfriend. But now . . .” He shrugged as best he could lying down. “This feels more like home and less like vacation. This is my real life.”
    And it could be mine too. If that’s what I wanted.
    “I’ve gotta get to work.” He didn’t move a muscle.
    “That’ll involve standing.”
    “Right.” Justin eased himself off the sand. It coated his wetsuit but brushed off easily. “You around tonight?”
    My heart fluttered—was he about to ask me out? “Guess so.”
    “Maybe I’ll see you. Later.”
    “Later,” I muttered, hating the way tears sprang to my eyes.
    It’s not like I was into Justin, but I could really use a distraction of some sort. As eager as I’d been to get to Hawaii, it never dawned on me that I didn’t really have anything to do here. Other than sit around and think about life back in Kansas, the life I wanted to escape. How long would it be before I could go even five minutes without thinking of stupid Connor?

    When I returned to Grammy and Papa’s house almost a half hour later, I found Abbie on the scraggly front lawn. She’d donned her sunglasses and blue bikini and stretched out on a blanket in the sun. She’d spread part of it in the shade as well, where Owen lay on his back, appearing to soak in the world around him.
    She propped herself up as I approached. “Justin just left for work.”
    “I saw him down at the beach.” I dropped next to Owen. He grinned at me and pumped his legs. “Hi, pal.”
    “I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised by all this,” Abbie said in an airy voice as she settled back onto the blanket. “You’ve always made friends quickly with guys.”
    “What am I supposed to do? Ignore him?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Then what? He lives