The next morning finds Kirby up early and one of the first women at breakfast, which is porridge with fresh blueberries, brown sugar, and milk as well as a platter of brown bread with butter and apricot preserves. Kirby isn’t usually a breakfast person and she certainly isn’t a porridge-and-brown-bread person but she decides that, since the food is free, she will eat, and eat lavishly.

When all of the women are assembled around the table, Kirby sees that she chose a good seat. The only person who looks even remotely promising is the woman sitting next to her. She’s plump with a pretty face, big blue eyes, long dark hair, rosy lips, and a cheerful attitude.

“Patricia O’Callahan,” she says, offering a hand. “Call me Patty.”

“Katharine Foley,” Kirby says. “Call me Kirby.”

“You took the attic room?” Patty asks.

“Yes, I love it,” Kirby says.

A thin-lipped girl across the table snorts. “It’s hot,” she says. “And there’s a mouse.”

“I kept the fan on,” Kirby says. “And I’m not scared of anything.”

“So there, Barb,” Patty says.

Barb scowls at Kirby, and Kirby regrets her display of bravado. The fact is, she is scared of certain things—hitchhiking, for one, and the prospect of unemployment for another. She lied to her parents, Dr. Frazier, and Evan O’Rourke when she said she had a job. The woman she’d spoken to at the Shiretown Inn had said only that they had openings for chambermaids. She couldn’t offer Kirby a job without an in-person interview.

During breakfast, Patty talks about herself: She’s the youngest of nine children, her parents live in South Boston, and she came to the Vineyard because her brother Tommy is the manager of the Strand movie theater and he got Patty a job working the ticket window for matinees and some evening shows. Patty wants to be an actress; she applied to the Lee Strasberg school for acting in New York but was rejected, and she doesn’t have the money to attend Yale. She figures if she sees as many movies as possible, she might learn by osmosis. Plus she gets free popcorn.

“My brother lives with two other guys out in Chilmark,” Patty says. “I’ll introduce you.”

“Do you have a car?” Kirby asks hopefully.

“Bike,” Patty says. She casts a longing look at the butter and apricot preserves. “My goal is to lose twenty-five pounds this summer.”

After breakfast, Patty shows Kirby her room. She’s on the first floor to the left of the front entrance (which is good, she says, because it makes it easy to sneak out after curfew) and she has to share the downstairs bathroom with only one other person—Barb, who traded the attic for the broom closet. Barb is odious, Patty confides. She’s always sullen and she was judgmental when Patty slept through church this past Sunday.

“Church?” Kirby says. “No one goes to church in the summertime.”

“You must be Episcopalian,” Patty says.

“Guilty as charged,” Kirby says. The Episcopal church on Nantucket, St. Paul’s, is located on Fair Street a scant block and a half from Exalta’s house, but she and the family normally go only once a summer, usually for an evensong service. Although they might attend more often this year, with Tiger overseas. Kirby wonders if she should go to Mass with Patty so she can light a candle for her brother.

“The other three girls live on the second floor and they’re Irish, from County Cork. I call them the Ms, for Miranda, Maureen, and Michaela. They’re square—don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t sleep around.”

Kirby decides then and there that she loves Patty. “How dull,” she says.

On Patty’s advice, Kirby dresses in a knee-length skirt and a proper blouse for her interview at the Shiretown Inn. She brushes her hair, collects it in a ponytail, then coils that ponytail into a bun. Then she walks to Seaview Avenue and sticks out her thumb.

A bunch of vehicles pass her by, including a laundry-service truck and an open-top Jeep filled with college boys. One of the boys whistles and another one holds up two fingers in a peace sign, but the Jeep doesn’t slow down and there’s no room for Kirby anyway. Kirby walks along the water. It’s serene and seems completely safe, but she still wonders what her mother and—God forbid—her grandmother would think if they saw her hitchhiking. They would think she had a death wish. Why else would she get into a car with a complete stranger? Anything could happen—abduction, dismemberment, rape, murder.

A cherry-red Chevy Corvair slows down, and Kirby sees that the driver is black. She knows this shouldn’t influence her decision about whether or not to accept the ride; how can she claim to be a progressive if she displays the very prejudice she’s seeking to change? The car stops and a young man cranks down the window. He’s good-looking, she notes. He wears a spotless white T-shirt and Ray-Ban Wayfarers. “Where you headed?” he asks.

“Edgartown?” she says. “The Shiretown Inn?”

“Know it well,” he says. “Hop in.”

Kirby hesitates, but only for a second. This is how hitchhiking works, right? When someone offers you a ride, you take it.

Kirby hurries around and hops in the passenger side. The car is clean—there’s no trash, no dust, and no sand. Kirby feels a pang for the International Harvester Scout that she drives on Nantucket. She was almost proud of how, by Labor Day weekend, the Scout contained the souvenirs of a summer well spent: her Bing Pintail surfboard, a handful of bikini bottoms, sand dollars and slipper shells, wadded-up takeout wrappers from the Seagull in Madaket, half a dozen damp beach towels, a few crushed Schlitz cans, the random horseshoe crab carapace, a swollen, rippled paperback of Valley of the Dolls, and approximately half a ton of sand.

This car looks like it just came from the dealer.

“I’m going to a job interview,” she says.

“Nice,” he says. “Did you just arrive for the summer?”

“Yesterday,” Kirby says. “I go to Simmons, in Boston.”

The guy laughs. “I go to Harvard,” he says. “In Cambridge.”

“Wait a minute,” Kirby says. “Are you…Darren?”

“I am,” he says. He shifts his Ray-Ban Wayfarers to the top of his head, then breaks into a truly radiant smile and snaps his fingers a few times. “You must be Rajani’s friend. Is it…Kathy? Kitty?”