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was the part that had been flourishing while I neglected it. Or maybe I couldn’t think about what I’d always wanted to be because then I’d actually have to start thinking about what I wanted to do next.
    I could feel a little cloud of anxiety starting to rise through the center of my chest, so I changed the subject. “Okay,” I said. “Getting back to structure. I was thinking maybe we could commit to walking at the same time every day….”
    “Isn’t that what we’re doing?” Rosie said.
    “Well, yeah,” I said. “But what if there were a prize at the end? You know, a certain number of hours walked or pounds lost by a certain time.”
    “Not another diet,” Tess said. “I am so over diets. You starve yourself, lose ten pounds, enjoy it for a week, then gain back twenty-two. I rebel against the whole concept. And I’m never going to have plastic surgery either, so don’t even bring that up. Somebody has to look old, you know?”
    “No offense,” Rosie said. “But I have to say I agree.”
    “Fine,” I said. I bent down to pick up a piece of sea glass and let the other two walk ahead.
    Tess turned around. “Don’t pout,” she said. “It’s not becoming.”
    I stood up. “I’m not pouting. I just wanted something to look forward to.”
    Tess and Rosie stopped walking. I threw the sea glass, and it disappeared into the water.
    “I could use something to look forward to,” Rosie said.
    “At school,” Tess said, “the P.E. teachers give us these big maps for our classroom wall. The kids keep track of their mileage with these little tokens they earn and wear on their sneaker laces, and we plot the classroom mileage totals and pretend to travel across the country. Math skills, geography skills, history tie-ins, plus it really gets them moving.”
    “That’s a great idea,” I said. “Okay, what if we say that whatever mileage the three of us can accumulate in one month, we get to go somewhere that’s the same distance away for real.”
    We started walking again. “What do the tokens look like?” Rosie asked.
    “Young,” Tess said. “Okay, here’s the problem. Say we each walk five miles a day, seven days a week.” Her voice clicked into teacher mode. “Thirty-five miles times three would be….”
    I closed my eyes to do the math.
    “A hundred and five,” Rosie said.
    Tess nodded. “Good job. And times four weeks…”
    “Four hundred and twenty,” I said as fast as I could. Not to be competitive, but I completely blew Rosie out of the water on that one.
    “Great,” Tess said. “Which would probably get us to, where, East Wesipisipp? I think if we’re going to do this, we need to up the ante.”
    “Is there really an East Wesipisipp?” I asked. Maybe I would have had better luck there than in Marshbury.
    “Of course, there is,” Tess said. “It has the biggest population of golden retrievers per square acre in the state.”
    “And don’t forget that tennis tournament,” Rosie said. “The Wesipisipp Cup.”
    “Good one,” Tess said.
    “Thanks,” Rosie said. “You, too.”
    We reached the far end of the beach and started crossing the parking lot to get back out to the road. Just the thought of upping the ante had caused us to pick up speed.
    “Moving on,” Rosie said. “What if we made it six months?” Every so often Rosie had to take a little hop and a skip to keep up with our longer legs.
    “I don’t know,” Tess said. “I’m not sure delayed gratification is the way to go. I’d kind of like to get out of here as soon as possible. Plus, summer’s the best time for me to go away.”
    “Maybe,” I said, “we can count other things, like strength training, or even gardening. Come up with a formula to convert them to miles.”
    “As long as we don’t count calories,” Tess said. “I’m fine with eating healthy, but I’m not keeping a food diary, and I am so not giving up wine.”
    “We could recruit people to donate miles to us,” Rosie