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to be juniors in high school. Attitudes were changing. They were changing.
    Devon stopped and turned neatly on her heels, and the other two fell in line next to her. They had walked to their customary turnaround spot opposite the house they all loved, the one on Dune Road that looked as though it had been designed to blend in and move with the sand dunes around it. It was called the Cross House, and the story they had all heard was that Mr. Cross, who was not a member of the Beach Club but was definitely a part of Southampton society, had been suicidal as a younger man. He had come out here and met a girl, and then built the house for her after knowing her for only a day. That girl was now Mrs. Cross, and the two of them still lived in that beautiful, perfect house. Devon thought it was a sweet story, if a little too dramatic to be believable.
    The girls took a minute to look at the house and wonder if a strange man would ever appear out of nowhere and build them a house, and then they looked back to where they had come from. They were a half-mile away from the Beach Club, which was now only a small, brick-red shape in the distance. It could have been just another large house on the edge of the sand.
    They moved a few paces closer to the ocean, where the beach was smoother and easier to walk on, and they began heading back toward the club.
    “Do you think he’ll get weird?” Florin asked, sounding philosophical.
    Devon looked at her. “James? After?”
    “Before. During. After.” Florin shook her head hopelessly. “Anytime. I don’t want him to stop giving me ice cream kisses on my cheek.”
    Nina rolled her eyes. “It’s weird now ,” she said. “You two already act like a married couple. He takes care of those kids basically on his own, and you do little favors for each other like a pair of Secret Santas.”
    Florin laughed at this. “Please,” she said. “I’m not the one constantly bickering and flirting all day long. If anyone’s a married couple here, it’s you and Barnes.”
    Nina shrugged. “I’ll do it with Barnes, if that’s what you want. But only if you do it with James first.”
    Devon put her hands up. “Settle down. We’re not setting up a competition here – ”
    “Away from that rope, you idiot!”
    It was Kenny.
    They stopped talking and looked ahead. The Beach Club was less than a hundred yards away now, and they were coming up to the ocean lifeguard stand. The man who usually sat up on the perch there, a Beach Club veteran named Kenny Vaughn, was down on the sand, jogging toward the water and shouting at the top of his lungs. “ That way,” Kenny barked, jabbing the air with his finger. “ Away from the lines! Christ!”
    Kenny and the other two ocean lifeguards – they rotated duty in shifts, like firefighters or nurses – were unlike any of the other staff at the club, in that they were not courteous at all. Devon had asked her father about this once. About why, when every other person she encountered in this town was so perfectly sweet and helpful, the ocean lifeguards had to be so nasty all the time. Devon’s father sat her down at the huge table in their kitchen and tried to explain. He told her first that the test for becoming an ocean lifeguard was nothing like the one for becoming a pool lifeguard, that swim-team members routinely failed the test over and over, and that Kenny and his group were among the highest paid hourly staff in the club.
    Twelve years old at the time of this conversation, Devon objected out of a sense of fairness. “They just sit there most of the time,” she said. “Soaking up the sun and looking at girls.”
    Peter Hall smiled at his daughter, and he nodded slowly. “But the rest of the time, at maybe two or three critical moments every week, they’re saving somebody’s life.” He reached across the table and took her hand, which he held for a minute, firm and warm. He turned it over once, then nodded and released her. “There’s a good