“Getting mad never fixes anything,” he says.

“Neither does moping.”

“I’m not moping. I just like sad music.”

Looking at him, I have to believe it. Minus a few rough days and one tense phone call I overheard through his bedroom door, Miles has seemed more or less totally fine, even cheery since the breakup. Whereas I’ve been living in a low-grade state of constant misery.

He turns off the road, toward the fluorescent glow of a drive-in burger joint.

On either side of the squat building, a row of parking slots nose up against menus mounted to speakers. Between the two rows, a handful of blue metal picnic tables are arranged in the cement courtyard. The place is hopping with suntanned, beach-waved teenagers, sitting atop tables and queuing at the optional walk-up window.

None of the food runners carrying the red plastic trays looks a day older than seventeen. I wonder if Peter and Scott and Petra hung out here in high school. The place has a distinctly fifties look, everything faded to suggest it’s always been here, the meeting point for the hungry, drunk, and horny since time immemorial.

Miles cranks his window down. “What do you want?”

“I’m a tourist here,” I say. “What do you recommend?”

“Chocolate-cherry milkshake and Petoskey fries,” he says.

I nod approval, and when the very crackly voice comes over the speaker, he orders the same thing for each of us.

“So what happened with the drunk guy at the bar,” I ask him.

He studies me for a few seconds. “Oh. Him,” he says when it clicks. “He was just trying to order another flight, despite no longer being able to stand. Happens all the time. Just needed to defuse it.”

“And how did you do that?” I ask.

“Told him if he got into the cab we’d called for him, we’d comp his last two drinks, and not ban him from the premises.”

“Wooow,” I say.

“Wow what?”

“You laid down the law,” I say, “without your smile ever cracking.”

“Things go smoother if you don’t let people get a rise out of you,” he says. “If you give them control over how you feel, they’ll always use it.”

“Finally, I see your cynical side,” I say.

He smiles, but his jaw is tight, and the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “It’s not cynical. If you don’t give other people responsibility for your feelings, you can have a decent relationship with most of them.”

Honestly, that’s not far off from thoughts I’ve had. Only for me, it’s never been about controlling the feelings themselves. I wouldn’t know where to begin with that. It’s more, controlling the expectations you have for certain people.

If a person lets you down, it’s time to reconsider what you’re asking of them.

In the dining courtyard, the rowdy teenagers start gathering their things, shaking their trays into the trash before piling too many people into a couple of junkers parked side by side. A minute later, a girl in denim cutoffs and an EAT AT BIG LOUIE’S shirt comes out of the burger shack with a paper bag and two paper cups, little teal outlines of Michigan printed in a patterned row around them.

Miles watches my reaction to the first sip. After the initial hit of brain freeze, the taste registers and I let out a little moan. Only then does Miles take his own sip and stuff his milkshake into the cupholder. “You know what we should do?”

“I don’t want to sob to Bridget Jones together,” I say.

“At most, it was a slow trickle of tears,” he objects. “And that’s not what I was going to say, but if you’re going to just shut me down like that—”

“No, no!” I grab his elbow. “I’m sorry. Let’s hear it. What should we do?”

“We should go to the beach,” he says.

“Isn’t the beach closed after dark?” I say.

He squints. “Which beaches have you been going to?”

I shrug. “The one across from the library? With the food trucks and the ice cream pavilion and the sand volleyball courts.”

“That tiny little beach all the fudgies go to?” he says. “With the teal Adirondack chairs? That sand’s probably not even local. Bet it’s trucked in from Florida.”

“What’s a fudgie?” I ask.

“Daphne,” he tuts. “Daphne, Daphne, Daphne.”

“Let me guess: I’m a clueless fool,” I say.

He starts the car. “No, just a sweet, naive, beautiful little innocent, raised in captivity by a man who loves wheatgrass.”

“So the beach doesn’t close after dark?” I say.

He backs out of the craggy parking space. “Not any of the good ones.”

OceanofPDF.com

9

A fudgie, apparently, is an out-of-towner. A person who cruises north in the summer to buy fudge and use subpar beaches, then flees before autumn. It seems strange that Peter never introduced me to the term, but Miles points out that the Collinses are former fudgies themselves, having moved to their favorite vacation spot when Peter was in second grade.

We drive twenty minutes through the dark before Miles pulls to the dusty shoulder of a country lane, behind two parked SUVs. There’s no sign of a lot, a sign, or a trailhead, just the cars and the woods.

“Is this private property?” I ask, hopping out to follow him into the moonlit forest, bag of fries in one hand and my milkshake in the other.

“It’s national lakeshore,” he replies. “Preserved federal land. There are better-known stretches of beach around here that get crowded, but the best spots are the ones you have to be told about to find.”

“Oh, so it’s exclusive,” I joke.

“Northern Michigan’s hottest club.” He offers me his hand as he steps over a tree that’s fallen across the makeshift path.

“Cherry Hill must be close behind it.” I release my grip on him as I hop to the far side of the log. “That place was packed.”

“We do pretty well all summer,” he says. “We’re still figuring the winters out.” He casts a meaningful sidelong look at me. “So I take a lot of side jobs in the off season.”

I feel myself blush, stop short in a puddle of moonlight.

He stills too.

“That was snobby,” I say. “The comment about the odd jobs.”

He shrugs. “You didn’t mean anything by it.”

I didn’t. But Peter, I can now admit, definitely had.

We start walking again in silence.

“You don’t need to justify what you do for work,” I clarify, after a beat. “I guess I just wanted to believe Peter had good reasons to think you weren’t good for Petra. Because if you were, like, some freeloading jerk, then Peter probably was just looking out for a friend. Instead of, you know . . .”

“In love with her?” Miles says evenly.

“Yeah.” My own voice wobbles. It’s cooler here, in the shadowed woods so close to shore. For some reason, it makes me feel all the more delicate talking about this, too exposed now that it’s just the two of us.

“Hey.” He bumps into me. “Good riddance, right?”

“I just,” I say, “feel really stupid.”

Miles stops walking. “You’re not stupid.”

I look at my feet, and his free hand closes over my elbow, sliding up and down my arm, rubbing warmth into it.

“He told you to trust him, and that’s what you did,” he insists. “That’s what you’re supposed to be able to do with people you love. They just don’t always live up to it.”