Chapter 3

My mom came out onto the porch with an umbrella and a paper plate with a slice of cake on it.

She bent down, picked the box up out of the rain, wiped it on her sleeve and put it back in Chase's hand.

"You're soaked through," she said, perfectly pleasant. "Go home and get in a hot shower. It's late, so I won't keep you tonight."

Chase looked at her. "Mrs. Brooks, I just need five minutes with—"

"She already made her wish," my mom said. "She doesn't need a present." She held the plate out until he took that too. "Drive slow, the road floods by the marina."

He stood there with a wet box in one hand and cake in the other. He'd been coming to our house since he was eight and he had never once rung the doorbell. He walked in, said hi, got a drink out of our fridge.

He opened his mouth. My mom shut the door.

I ate two bites of cake at the counter and went up to my room.

My dad knocked and sat down on the edge of my bed. "You sure about this, Hazie?"

He was the one who used to drive us both to school, so he knew exactly how much of my life had Chase in it.

I opened my nightstand drawer and took out a pair of kids' sunglasses. Blue plastic, scratched all over, the arms too short for my head now. There's a dot of pink nail polish on the left arm, dried into a little bump you can feel with your thumb.

Our families lived four houses apart on the same road. Both dads had boats. When we were little I always spotted the dolphins first, before Chase, before the grown-ups, and he started calling me Hawkeye for it when we were eight.

The Whitakers threw a party on their beach every Fourth of July.

I was ten. Chase took a firework tube out of his dad's box, the big kind, and carried it down the sand toward the older boys so they'd watch him do it.

I grabbed the back of his shirt and told him to put it down.

He shook me off and lit it. The sand was soft and the tube tipped over while the fuse was still going, and the open end came around toward his legs.

I shoved him sideways.

Then there was a white flash and heat on my face, and after that I don't have much.

I woke up in a hospital in Tampa with my eyes wrapped. When they took the bandages off I had light and shapes and nothing else. I stopped talking for four days. My mom kept trying to feed me applesauce.

On the fifth day someone came into my room during visiting hours and climbed up on the bed.

"It's me," Chase said. "Don't tell the nurse."

He put something on my face. Plastic, too tight at the temples.

"They're my sunglasses. The blue ones. You can have them." Then, "Wait, hold on."

I heard him shaking something. It smelled like nail polish.

"Okay, I put a star on this side. Feel it? That's the left. Now you always know which way they go."

He took my hand and hooked my little finger with his.

"From now on I'm your eyes," he said. "Everything I see, I'll tell you. And I'll never lie to you about any of it. Pinky promise."

I finally said something. I asked if he was in trouble.

"No," he said. "Nobody's mad at anybody. And you're still Hawkeye."

I'm the only one who remembers that.

Everyone in Harbor Point thinks a shell from the public show came in off the water. That was the Whitakers' lawyer's idea, and my parents let it stand. They never sued. Chase's dad paid every bill, and Whitaker Construction has built my dad's projects at cost for eight years.

So that part is settled. They paid, and I kept their story for them, and none of it has anything to do with a group chat.

I handed my dad my phone and told him to read the email from Thursday.

Ashford College, Vermont, off the waitlist. A spot in the fall class if I confirmed by midnight on the third.

"You applied there for yourself," my dad said. "Back when you didn't tell anybody about it."

I'd applied because of a photo on their website, a green hill under snow. I've never seen snow. I was born in Florida and I went blind before we ever went anywhere cold.

I took the phone back and hit confirm while he was sitting there.

I thought I'd be up all night. I slept until almost noon.

There were two voice messages waiting for me. The first one was twenty seconds long.

"Stop ignoring me. You're eighteen now, not nine. This is embarrassing."

The second one was longer.

"So you should probably know what you did last night. After you took off, Kenzie posted a story from the roof deck at the club. Just a picture of the water and a caption saying everyone would be better off without her. I drove around until two in the morning looking for her."

There was a pause where he breathed into the phone.

"She's a mess, Hazel. She keeps saying you hate her. So I'm taking her and Tyler and a few people up to Alaska for a week, the glacier thing my dad booked in June. Don't turn it into something it isn't."

Another pause.

"And honestly? If she does something stupid, some of that is on you."