Chapter 1
The afternoon I flew back to Michigan after my freshman year at Harvard, no one was there to pick me up from the airport.
It’s not as though I expected a shower of confetti to welcome me home, but having a friendly face to greet me would’ve been a comfort, which was something I hadn’t had much of lately. This past week alone, (a) I found out my financial aid was in serious danger of being stripped away, and (b) I was forced to give up my spot on a once-in-a-lifetime field study trip to Europe.
Not exactly how I expected my school year to end.
Or how I wanted my summer to start.
Jazmine Neely, I said to myself, staring at our recent texts as I slid into the back seat of a rideshare outside Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan.What’s the real reason you didn’t pick me up?I’d sweated in baggage claim for half an hour before she texted apologies for why she couldn’t make it, blaming a vague work emergency. Jaz and I hadn’t seen each other since I flew east to Massachusetts for college last fall, and I wasalmostpositive she was lying about the work emergency. But, even though I was supposed to be the big brain of our childhood friend group, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why.
“Hi there.” A cheerful, ginger-haired rideshare driver smiled at me from the front seat of his sedan, unaware that he was my second choice for the hour-plus drive from Grand Rapids to my small hometown on the shore of Lake Michigan. “It’s Paige, right?”
“That’s me,” I assured him from the back seat while zipping an outer pocket on my carry-on.
“And today we’re going all the way to Lake Michigan, huh? Haven Beach?”
“Yep.”
Eyes in the rearview mirror scanned me from top to bottom. My dark hair was wound into a messy bun, and I’d made a rash decision the previous night to cut my own bangs in my dorm—I wanted a change before flying home. I followed an online tutorial, but they were fringier than I wanted and a little too long, which made me briefly self-conscious under the driver’s gaze. But it wasn’t just that. My academically challenged skin hadn’t seen much sun lately. Arm and leg muscles, once toned from swimming and dock-jumping into the lake, had weakened. I felt like a hermit emerging from a cave after months of solitude.
I wasnotsummer-ready.
The driver’s roving gaze finally stopped on my crimson Harvard T-shirt before he pulled away from the airport curb, merging with other cars. “Harvard, huh? You an Ivy League girl?”
I nodded.
“Cool. That’s out in Massachusetts, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, Cambridge.”
“Is this your first time here, or... ?”
“No, I just go to college out east,” I told him. “Haven Beach is my hometown.”
The car curved around an exit ramp as we left the airport.
“Cool, okay. That’s one sweet strip of sand. At least, in the summer.”
“Definitely better than anything I saw out east.”
“Nice,” he confirmed. “You do a lot of boating in Haven?”
My family hadn’t owned a boat since my father ditched us. “Paddleboarding.”
He glanced at me in the mirror again as if he were trying to picture me on a board. “For real? That’s dope.”
It was the one thing I was looking forward to doing while I was home.
The driver’s phone buzzed, and he excused himself to take a personal phone call. I popped in earbuds, lazily slouching in the back seat, and watched through my window as the glass-and-steel buildings of Grand Rapids changed to highway and flat green land. The one-hour drive to the coast seemed to take longer than my flight from Boston, especially with late-afternoon sun making me feel sleepy. I tried not to think about Jazmine avoiding me, or the daunting task that I needed to brave this summer: facing my estranged father for the first time in several years.
Talk about annoyances. My father was Public Annoyance Number One.
If it weren’t for him, I’d be with the rest of my small academic department, who were all getting ready to fly to Italy for a special summer “excursion seminar,” touring museums and studying art masterworks. Being the all-around overachiever that I am—Jazmine’s words, not mine—I was pursuing a concentration in history of art and architecture. I’d always loved history, and my nana was a painter, so I grew up surrounded by art. Getting into Harvard’s art history program was a dream come true ... until the person who both inspired the dream and raised me died unexpectedly last summer, just a few weeks before my first semester in Cambridge was due to begin.
In fact, it was Nana Malone’s beach cottage where I was heading right now, where I’d lived since I was six, after my mother died. Nana raised me by herself—my father was already long gone by that time—and she left me the cottage in her will.
She didn’t leave me much else.
