Leslie can get pregnant now, Jessie thinks, a notion that is almost laughable. She’s ready to stop talking about all of this; she wants to go back inside and finish her pizza.

“What’s the second piece of news?” Jessie asks.

“This,” Leslie says, and she produces a flat, square, wrapped present from behind her back. “Happy birthday.”

“Oh,” Jessie says, stunned. Like everyone else with a summer birthday, she has given up hoping that it will ever be properly celebrated by her classmates. She accepts the gift; it is, quite obviously, a record album. “Thank you.” She beams at Leslie, then at Doris, who is still clutching her abdomen against imaginary cramps, and then she rips the wrapping paper off. It’s Clouds, by Joni Mitchell, as Jessie hoped it would be. She is obsessed with the song “Both Sides Now.” It’s the most beautiful song in the world. Jessie could listen to it every single second of every day between now and the time she died and she still wouldn’t be sick of it.

She hugs Leslie, then Doris, who says, “We split the cost.” This statement seems meant to elicit a second thank-you, which Jessie delivers more specifically to Doris. Jessie is happy to hear they actually bought the album because, in the two weeks since school let out, the three of them have engaged in a spate of shoplifting. Leslie stole two pink pencil erasers and one package of crayons from Irving’s, Doris stole a day-old egg bagel from the kosher bakery, and Jessie, under extreme pressure from the other two, stole a Maybelline mascara from the Woolworths in Coolidge Corner, which was a far riskier crime because Woolworths was said to be wired with hidden cameras. Jessie knows that stealing is wrong, but Leslie turned it into a challenge, and Jessie felt her honor was at stake. When Jessie walked into Woolworths on the day of her turn, she had been afraid, indeed terrified, and was already framing the apology to her parents, already deciding to blame her bad decision-making on the stress of her brother’s deployment, but when she walked out of Woolworths with the mascara tucked safely in the pocket of her orange windbreaker, she felt a rush of adrenaline that she thought must be similar to getting high. She felt great! She felt powerful! She had been so intoxicated that she stopped at the gas station near the corner of Beacon and Harvard, went into the ladies’ room, and applied the mascara right then and there in the dingy mirror.

The less thrilling part of the story was that Kate detected the mascara the second Jessie walked into the house, and the Spanish Inquisition had followed. What was on Jessie’s eyes? Was it mascara? Where did she get mascara? Jessie had given Kate the only believable answer: it was Leslie’s. Jessie hoped and prayed that Kate wouldn’t call Leslie’s mother, because if Leslie’s mother asked Leslie about it, it was fifty-fifty whether Leslie would cover for Jessie or not.

All in all, Jessie is relieved not to be receiving a stolen record album. If her mother ever found out about the shoplifting, she would pluck Jessie from Leslie’s sphere of influence permanently.

“When are you coming back?” Leslie asks.

“Labor Day,” Jessie says. It seems like an eternity from now. “Write me. You still have the address, right?”

“Yup,” Doris says. “I already sent you a postcard.”

“You did?” Jessie says. She’s touched by this unexpected act of kindness from grouchy old Doris.

“We’re gonna miss you,” Leslie says.

Jessie hugs the record album to her chest as she waves goodbye and then goes back into the house. She wasn’t the first to get her period, she might not even be the second, but that doesn’t matter. Her friends love her—they bought her something they knew she wanted—and, more important, her brother is still alive. For one brief moment at the tail end of her twelfth year, Jessie Levin is happy.

Early in the morning, there is a light rapping on Jessie’s bedroom door. Her father pokes his head in.

“You up?” he asks.

“No,” she says. She pulls the covers over her head. The floaty feeling from last night has disappeared. Jessie doesn’t want to go to Nantucket. It isn’t even possible to look at both sides now. There is only one side, which is that without her siblings—and, eventually, without her mother—Nantucket is going to stink.

David eases down onto the bed next to her. He’s dressed in his navy summer-weight suit, a white shirt, and a wide orange-and-blue-striped tie. His curly dark hair is tamed, and he smells like work, meaning Old Spice aftershave.

“Hey,” he says, pulling the covers back. “Happy birthday.”

“Can’t I just stay here with you and go on the weekends?” Jessie says.

“Honey.”

“Please?”

“You’ll be fine,” David says. “You’ll be better than fine. Big summer for you. Thirteen years old. You’re finally a teenager, stepping out from the shadow of your siblings…”

“I like their shadow,” Jessie says. The summer before, Kate had enlisted each of Jessie’s siblings to entertain her every third day. Blair always took Jessie to Cliffside Beach. They got hot dogs and frappes at the Galley and then worked diligently on their Coppertone tans while Blair turned the pages of John Updike’s wife-swapping novel Couples, reading the scandalous sections out loud to Jessie. Updike was fond of the word tumescence, and the first time Blair read the word, she eyed Jessie over the pages and said, “You know what that means, right?”

“Right,” Jessie said, though she hadn’t the foggiest.

Blair had lowered the book and said, “There’s no reason to be grossed out by sex. It’s perfectly natural. Angus and I have sex every single day, sometimes twice.”

Jessie had been both intrigued and repulsed by this information, and she hadn’t been able to look at Angus the same way after. He was ten years older than Blair and had dark hair that he never had time to comb because he was too busy thinking. He was always working on math problems and Nonny liked him so much that, while they were staying at All’s Fair, she let him sit in Gramps’s leather chair at Gramps’s antique desk. Angus rarely went to the beach because he hated sand and he burned easily. Jessie didn’t relish the thought of Angus’s voracious sexual appetite. Blair was beautiful and smart enough to have any man she wanted, but she’d married Angus and given up teaching English at Winsor in order to keep house for him. Now she worshipped Julia Child and wore Lilly Pulitzer patio dresses—but on the beach, she was more like a naughty aunt than a matronly older sister. She smoked Kents, lighting up with a silver lighter from Tiffany that was engraved with a love note from Angus’s younger brother, Joey, who had been Blair’s boyfriend before Angus. She reapplied her lipstick every time she came out of the water, and she shamelessly flirted with the Cliffside lifeguard Marco, who hailed from Rio de Janeiro. Blair spoke a few select phrases in Portuguese. She was glamorous.