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ground. Just as Maggie had suspected, he blushed easily, pink creeping up his cheeks. Pauline, apparently oblivious, wrapped her shirt around herself like it was a small towel and jumped up and down to warm herself. Liam was only a year older, but he gave off the feeling of being much older than Pauline. It was like they’d grown up beside each other but at different speeds. For one, he couldn’t seem to make his eyes stay away from her, while Pauline seemed to have the lack of modesty and self-consciousness of a child.
    For a split second, Maggie wished someone would look at her like that. She’d gotten the nickname Saint Margaret back in Chicago because she’d barely even kissed anyone. But Maggie was no saint—it was just that her friends pretended sex wasn’t complicated. Maggie wasn’t ever going to walk into anything with her eyes closed, even if all her friends were jumping in with both feet. Still, she wanted things other people wanted. She just carefully wanted them.
    They packed up and canoed home just as the sun was starting to set. The air was getting cooler each night, and goose bumps prickled along Maggie’s arms and legs. Liam must have noticed, because he threw her the flannel shirt that was balled up in his lap. Once they were on dry land, they put the canoe in the boathouse. “Hey, I wanna show you guys something,” Liam said, leading them up into the yard.
    Pauline glanced back at them. “Can’t. My mom and I have a date to watch Friday Night Lights on Netflix.” She sighed. “I wish she’d go on a real date and let me off the hook.” She threw her arms around Maggie and then Liam and jogged up to her back deck. She waved over her shoulder before she disappeared into the big, white house.
    “Well, I can still show you ,” Liam said, obviously disappointed but putting on a kind face. Maggie was wet and cold, but she was curious. They made a diagonal into the woods and toward the water, walking past Liam’s property and farther on. They seemed to be turning away from the water when the trees opened up and they were looking at a little inlet, almost as round as a pond, surrounded by trees and bathed in the early moonlight. What startled her were the brown-and-white-speckled shapes. There had to be about a hundred of them, swirling around the water and perched on the banks. Canada geese. Many of them sleeping, some of them preening themselves or each other.
    “They rest here on their way south from Canada,” Liam said. “Every year. Same time.”
    A flock of geese wasn’t something Maggie would have paid attention to back home. But there was something magical about the sight of their white tail feathers rustling in the twilight. It seemed weird to her that, all the years she’d lived in the city, every fall the geese had been here—not so far away—inhabiting a whole different, quieter world. She and Liam hunkered back against an old tree stump, and the few geese that had seemed suspicious began to settle in. A couple of them even swam up to the edge, then waddled out of the water, shaking their feathers. They came right up to Liam.
    “Sorry, guys, nothing for you this time.” He reached out his hand slowly and gently, and one of the geese examined his empty palm.
    “I usually bring food. A lot of them are the same ones from other years—they always come back to the same spot. So they know me.” He wriggled his fingers and turned his palm downward, and the goose lost interest and waddled away. “Pauline loves them, but she never remembers that they’re coming back, so I usually can surprise her. Actually she tried to get me to catch her a goose once, when we were ten. It didn’t go very well. I ended up in the lake.”
    “Do you do whatever Pauline asks you?” Maggie asked, teasing, a little touched by his devotion. It seemed old-fashioned—not like the way modern boys were.
    Liam frowned thoughtfully. “I can’t help it. My dad taught me that’s what guys are supposed to