“Thanks,” Bri said, getting into her car. I could already hear her arguing with Toby about something, indignation mixed with laughter, as they pulled out of Palmer’s driveway and headed out, Bri waving out the window as they went.

I shouldered my canvas bag—the slight prickling of my skin letting me know I might have missed a spot or two with the sunscreen—and started to head toward my house, only to find Palmer falling into step next to me. “Come on,” she said, nodding down the road. “I’ll walk you home.”

I looked down at Palmer’s bare feet with their flip-flop tan lines. “Shoes?” Palmer waved this away, and we started walking together, almost in the center of the road.

“About Clark,” Palmer said, after we’d been walking in silence for a moment or two, and I knew suddenly this was the reason she’d wanted to walk me back—apparently she hadn’t actually let me off the hook at all. “Don’t fixate on the fact that he’s leaving.”

“But . . .” We walked in silence for a few more steps. We’d totally passed my house by now, but neither of us had even paused in front of it—we were both aware, without having to talk about it, that this was just a ruse to keep talking. I knew that Palmer would wait until I was ready to speak again, and it gave me the space to get my thoughts together a little more. “What if we take this huge step together, and then . . . ?” I let the sentence trail off. I didn’t even want to think the words required to finish it.

“Just because the summer’s over doesn’t mean you guys have to be,” Palmer pointed out. “Even if he goes back to Colorado, planes do exist. You guys could figure it out.”

I shook my head, not really able to take this in. “I just feel like I should have planned for this.”

“Here’s the thing,” Palmer said. “You’ve been really happy this summer.” I looked over at her, and Palmer went on. “Like, the happiest I’ve ever seen you. And it’s also the first time in forever you’ve had no plan. You’ve been enjoying the right now. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

“I know. But . . .”

“So maybe just keep doing that. After all,” she said, raising an eyebrow at me, “this is a problem for Future Andie to solve.”

I smiled at that. “Well, Future Andie is way smarter than I am.”

“She totally is. She can handle this.”

“I just wish I knew what was going to happen next.”

Palmer nodded, then after a moment, said, “But you never really know. I mean, look at what happened with your dad.”

I nodded, thinking for a second about the summer I’d wanted to have, but almost couldn’t get it to come into focus. A summer at Johns Hopkins would have meant not meeting Clark, which was getting harder and harder to imagine—like trying to picture a world without electricity. “You know some things, though,” I pointed out as we approached the Winthrop statue, and like we’d discussed it before, started to turn around and head back to my house. I thought about my friends, about how through all the crushes and boyfriends and bad kisses and horrible dates we’d had, the four of us had been together, constant and unshakable. “I know you guys are always going to be around.”

“Well, naturally,” Palmer said, bumping me with her hip. “That’s just a given.”

Chapter FOURTEEN

“See?” my dad asked, gesturing to the screen with his bagel. “Not so bad, right?”

I squinted at the TV, where John Wayne was walking across a dusty town square with the loping gait that I was unfortunately getting all too familiar with. “It’s okay,” I said, leaning back against the soft leather of the armchair and picking up my everything bagel with cream cheese. Despite the fact that it was almost two on a Sunday, my dad and I were just now getting around to eating breakfast, while he called in the terms of our scavenger-hunt bet and was making me watch Rio Bravo. “It’s better than Blood Alley, at any rate.”

“Yeah,” my dad acknowledged with a grimace. “That one was probably a mistake.”

I tucked my feet up underneath me. It was an overcast, cloudy day, with occasional showers, which made watching the movie feel somehow much cozier. It was exactly how you should spend a rainy day—though I might have been able to do without the John Wayne aspect of it. But as I watched, I found myself getting more engrossed in the story, almost against my will—Wayne and his newly deputized deputies holed up in a jail cell as a standoff with a militia took shape and the men forced to be in the same room together started telling stories and airing old grievances. At one point, one character sang a song, and then immediately after, another character sang a song, which made me wonder if they were just trying to extend the running time, or if everyone in the fifties knew that this was when you were supposed to take a popcorn break. It helped that the actors were good singers, though it did stretch logic a little—if you could sing that well, would you really be in a dusty jail in Texas? Wouldn’t you have been in vaudeville or something?

“Those guys could really sing,” I said, when the singing portion of the movie appeared to be over and everyone on-screen seemed to suddenly remember that they were actually in mortal danger.

My dad looked over at me from where he was lying on the couch. “Those guys?” he repeated, sounding surprised.