Prologue #2
I stepped closer. Preston was bigger than me. It didn’t matter. “You paid me to find out whether Alison O’Toole was seeing somebody. She isn’t. Transaction complete.”
“Then why the fuck are you telling me to stay away?”
“Because I don’t like you.”
His face tightened. “You liked my money.”
“I still do.”
“Give it back.”
“No.”
“Then fuck off.” He moved to go around me, and I caught the front of his blazer and put him back against the lockers. Not hard. Didn’t need to be. The hallway kept moving around us — people noticed, nobody stopped, that was Edgewood — and I lowered my voice.
“Here’s the part you’re struggling with, Avery.
You can ask Ally out. I can’t physically stop you.
” I let a beat land. “But if you talk about her the way you did yesterday, if you make her uncomfortable, if I hear one fucking thing about you bothering her after she tells you no, I’m going to make your senior year so unpleasant you’ll beg your father to transfer you. ”
His face reddened. “Are you threatening me?”
“Yes.” His eyes flicked toward my hand, and I let go and smoothed the front of his blazer for him. “There. Now you understand.”
“You fucking psycho.”
“Probably.” I smiled. “And Preston? I kept copies of everything from that thing with Madison last year.”
He went pale. That was better. I hadn’t even needed to explain which thing.
“Stay the fuck away from Ally,” I said.
The O’Tooles were already at the lake when we arrived in June. Roman’s SUV sat in their drive, and Dad saw it while he was pulling our bags out of the back of his truck and made the face Mom always accused him of making.
She caught it immediately. “Walter.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I don’t like him.”
“I’m extremely aware.” She held out her hand for the coffee.
Dad handed me a duffel instead. “Roman’s an asshole.”
Mom looked at him. “What?”
“Ryan’s eighteen.”
“That doesn’t mean you need to provide vocabulary lessons.”
“I’ve known the word for a while, Mom,” I said.
“See?” Dad said. “Good parenting.”
She kissed his cheek. “Get the groceries.” And they went inside bickering about who’d forgotten the coffee.
I carried my bag upstairs. That was the Harrington lake house — noise, music from Mom’s phone, Dad opening every cabinet while asking where something was despite it being in the same place for twelve years.
The house next door was quieter. Jane stayed inside most of the time.
Roman came and went. I saw him Saturday morning, walking toward his SUV in slacks and a button-down while Dad and I were hauling fishing gear down toward our dock.
“Harrington,” he said.
“O’Toole.”
That was the entire conversation. Dad waited until Roman’s car disappeared down the road before he said, “Still an asshole,” and I laughed.
I found Ally in the lake later that morning. Tobias was the reason. Of course.
I came down toward our dock with coffee and heard him before I saw either of them. “Right there! Ally, right there!”
“I’m looking,” she said.
“No, you’re not.”
“I am literally standing in a lake for you.”
“He’s getting away!”
“He’s a frog, Tobias. I don’t think he has appointments.”
I stopped. Ally was standing waist-deep beside their dock in a black-and-white gingham bikini, and that registered immediately.
I’d seen Ally in a swimsuit before — our families had owned neighboring lake houses our entire lives — but childhood swimming and an eighteen-year-old Ally O’Toole standing in the morning sun were apparently two very different things.
Her red hair was twisted into a messy knot on top of her head, sunglasses covered her eyes, and water beaded across her shoulders while she crouched with both hands beneath the surface.
Tobias stood a few feet off with his green net.
“Don’t move,” she told him.
“I’m not.”
“You’re moving right now.”
I laughed, and Ally’s head turned. Even behind the sunglasses, I knew the exact second she saw me. “Harrington.”
“O’Toole.”
Tobias spun around. “Ryan!”
“Morning, menace.”
“I found a frog.”
“Looks like you’re doing a great job keeping him.”
“He escaped.”
I walked down the dock. Tobias pointed at the water. “He went under there.”
“Where?”
“By Ally.”
I looked. Then I looked at her. The gingham wasn’t helping my concentration, and her eyebrows rose over the top of the sunglasses.
“Eyes up, Harrington.”
“They were,” I said.
“Liar.”
“Can’t prove it.”
She splashed water at me. It hit my legs, and I looked down, then back at her. “That was hostile.”
“Call the police.”
“Probably will.”
Tobias groaned. “Can you guys stop talking?”
“No,” Ally and I said together, and then we looked at each other, and she smiled. Small.
I stepped into the water. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Saving the frog.”
“From Tobias?”
“Obviously.”
“Ryan!”
I grinned at him. “Where’d he go?” Tobias came closer, and Ally immediately caught his arm.
“Slowly. You’re going to scare him.”
“He already ran away.”
“Because you’ve been chasing him with a net for twenty minutes.”
“That’s how catching works,” Tobias said, and I looked at Ally.
“He has you there.”
The frog surfaced between us, and Tobias gasped. “There!”
Ally lunged, so did Tobias, and the frog jumped — directly toward Ally. She screamed, not loudly, more of a shocked little shriek as she stumbled backward, and I caught her around the waist before she went under.
For one second she was against me — my hand on bare skin, her fingers gripping my shoulder, her sunglasses knocked crooked. We both went still.
Then Tobias screamed, “I GOT HIM!” and Ally pulled away, and I let her.
Tobias held the net above the water like he’d just won state, the frog sitting at the bottom of it. “I got him! Ally, look!”
“I see.”
“Touch him.”
“No.”
“You’re scared.”
“I am not scared of a frog.”
“Then touch him.”
She stared at him. I folded my arms. “This is getting embarrassing.”
Her head turned toward me. “You touch him.”
“I’m not the one claiming I’m fearless.”
“I never claimed that.”
“Toby says you are.”
“I said she’s scared,” Tobias corrected.
“Thank you, Tobias,” Ally said, and glared at both of us. Then she carefully stuck one finger through the net. The frog moved. She jerked back. Tobias dissolved into laughter, and so did I.
“Oh, fuck both of you,” she said.
Tobias gasped. “You said a bad word! So did Ryan yesterday.”
She looked at me. “Really, now?”
“He said fuck when he dropped the fishing box,” Tobias reported. “And then Mr. Harrington said shit because Ryan dropped it on his foot.”
I covered my face. Ally was laughing now, really laughing — head tipped back, one hand over her mouth — and I’d never once heard her laugh like that at school. I looked at her, and she noticed. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re staring.”
“Maybe.”
Her smile faded into something smaller. Not gone. Just aware.
Tobias saved us. “Can I keep him?”
“No,” Ally said immediately.
Tobias started appearing on our side of the shoreline after that.
Not because the families suddenly started spending time together — they didn’t.
Roman was in and out, Dad was in and out, Mom came up when work allowed and left when it didn’t, and Jane stayed inside enough that sometimes I went two days without seeing her.
Tobias didn’t care about any of it. He cared that our dock had frogs, and minnows, and that I’d throw a lacrosse ball with him even though he had absolutely no concept of where it might go after leaving his stick.
Ally came to retrieve him. At first. Then she’d stay ten minutes. Twenty. An hour. Sometimes she brought a book and sat on the end of the dock while Tobias and I attempted whatever terrible idea he’d invented that day.
One afternoon Tobias went inside for lunch and Ally didn’t. She sat with her legs hanging over the edge of my dock, a paperback open across her thighs, while I worked beside her on my laptop. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. I looked at her. She kept reading.
“Your brother left,” I said.
“I noticed.”
Another five minutes went by. “You don’t have to supervise me,” I said.
She turned a page. “I know.”
I smiled and went back to my screen, and she stayed.
After that it happened more often. By July, Tobias wasn’t required. Ally would appear through the trees with a book or a notebook, and sometimes she’d text first — Outside? — and I’d write back No, and thirty seconds later she’d walk onto my dock and find me sitting there.
“You’re a terrible liar,” she said the first time.
“You came over anyway.”
“I knew you were lying.”
“Then why ask?”
“Politeness.”
“You’ve never been polite to me.”
“Correct.” And she sat down beside me.
I liked her. That realization was annoyingly simple.
I liked her dry little comments and the way she got viciously competitive over cards.
I liked that she read constantly and wrote stories she refused to let me see — until one afternoon she silently handed me her notebook and stared at the lake while I read four pages. I read them twice.
When I handed it back, she wouldn’t look at me. “Well?”
“They’re good.”
Her eyes found mine. “Don’t say that because you’re being nice.”
“I don’t do nice.”
“You do sometimes.”
“Name one time.”
“You helped Tobias catch his frog.”
“Self-interest. I wanted the screaming to stop.”
The first time I kissed her, we were on the dock after midnight.
Tobias had been asleep for hours, Roman wasn’t at the lake, Jane’s bedroom light had gone off sometime before eleven, and my parents were inside.
Ally sat beside me with her knees pulled against her chest, and we’d been talking about college.
She didn’t know where she wanted to go. I had a list, and she called the entire list boring.
“Georgetown is not boring,” I said.
“It’s aggressively boring.”
“Columbia?”
“Less boring.”
“Poor Ryan,” She smiled, and I looked at her, and she looked back. The lake was almost black behind her. “You’re staring again,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I could’ve lied. I didn’t. “I want to kiss you.”
She went still. Not afraid — just surprised. “You could’ve.”
“No.”
“Why not?”