“I’ve got dibs on the biggest one,” Isabel said, referring to the inner tubes.

“I don’t care,” I said. I knew the one she meant. It was fatter and wider and supported you so well it made you feel like you were floating on a cloud. But I wasn’t going to fight her for it.

As we turned onto Rue Mirador, Isabel pulled a pack of Marlboros from the pocketbook on her lap, shook one partway out of the package and wrapped her lips around it to pull it the rest of the way out. She pushed the cigarette lighter into the dashboard, waiting for it to heat up.

I was stunned. “Did Mom give you permission to smoke?” I asked.

“She smokes herself, so what can she say?” Isabel asked. She held the pack toward me. “Want one?”

I hesitated, then took one of the cigarettes, digging it out of the pack with my fingers in a graceless manner. I put it to my lips.

“I’m not going to light it, though,” I said.

“Then why did you take it?” She laughed, pulling the lighter from the dashboard. She held it to her cigarette, inhaling as the tip turned a bright orange.

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said, but I did know. I just wanted to be with her. To share something with her. To be like her.

“I get the porch bed tonight,” she announced.

“I know,” I said. She and I had been taking turns sleeping on the porch when the weather was good. I still had to stuff my bedspread beneath my covers to placate Lucy. I’m sure she knew what I was doing, but it seemed to give her some comfort nevertheless. As long as I did that and left the light on, she was doing better upstairs alone at night.

“What are you burying in the yard?” Isabel asked, turning the car onto Bridge Avenue.

“What do you mean?” I asked, all innocence.

“I saw you bury something by the corner of the house. What was it?”

Darn. If I didn’t tell her the truth, she would probably dig in the sand by the corner of the house to satisfy her curiosity and discover my clue box anyway.

“It’s my Nancy Drew box,” I said.

“Huh?” She gave me that “what are you talking about” look as she blew smoke from her nostrils. She reminded me of a dragon.

“When I find something that might turn out to be a clue in a mystery, I put it in a box Grandpop buried there for me.”

“A clue in a mystery? What mystery?”

“Well, I don’t know yet,” I explained. “Sometimes you can find things and later on, when a mystery happens, you realize the thing you found might be a clue that would help the police solve it.”

Isabel laughed. “You’re a moron, you know that? You mean you just throw any old thing you find in there, waiting for some deep, dark mystery to occur?”

“Not any old thing,” I said, insulted. I thought of the Ping-Pong ball I’d found in the canal. Maybe I was being indiscriminate, but good clues were hard to find. I did not want her to shoot holes in my theory. Deep down, I knew the wished-for mystery would never happen, but I was having fun pretending it might. Grandpop had understood that.

“You act like such a twelve-year-old, you know it?” Isabel’s voice was tinged with disgust.

“That happens to be my age,” I said, folding my arms across my chest, managing to bend the unlit cigarette in the process. What did she want from me? “When you were twelve you probably did things like that, too,” I said, but I didn’t really think she had. Isabel had always been the sophisticated older sister. I could never catch up to her. I would probably still be reading Nancy Drew and making up wolves-are-loose-in-our-neighborhood stories when I turned seventeen.

We pulled into the gas station and carried the tires over to the air pump. I tossed my cigarette into a nearby trash can. “It’s a secret,” I said, watching her fit the air nozzle onto one of the tires.

“What is?” She looked up at me. I could see my twelve-year old self reflected in her sunglasses.

“The Nancy Drew box.”

She laughed. “Don’t worry, Jules,” she said. “I don’t know of anyone who would be interested in your so-called clues.”

I felt humiliated by her condescension and my throat tightened. I had to swallow hard again and again to keep from crying as we filled the tires in silence. When we got back in the car, “Sealed with a Kiss” was playing on the radio. I thought that was the world’s saddest song, and my heart ached as I sang along with it, turning my face toward the window so my sister wouldn’t see my tears and have another reason to make fun of me.

Once we were on the road, she reached into her pocketbook and pulled out the red-and-purple giraffe.

“I’m going to stop at the beach,” she said, “and I want you to run over to the lifeguard stand and give this to Ned.”

“I already gave it to Ned,” I said. “What’s it doing in your pocketbook?”

“He gave it back to me,” she said, as if that explained everything.

I looked at the plastic giraffe. “You think I’m acting immature,” I said. “Passing a stupid toy back and forth is really dopey.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“It’s my business if I’m the one being the messenger,” I argued.

She snatched the toy from my hand. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll give it to him myself.”

I reconsidered, thinking of how I could get a look at Ned up on the lifeguard stand. Maybe he would accidentally touch my fingers when he took the giraffe from me. “I’ll do it,” I said, reaching toward her for the giraffe.

She handed it to me. “Thank you,” she said.

We pulled into the parking lot next to the beach, the tires of the car crunching on the crushed shells. I hopped out and ran across the sand to the lifeguard stand. It had rained during the night and the sand was damp, flying behind me in clumps as I ran.

I spotted the usual group of teenagers lounging on their blankets around the lifeguard stand. That “Sweet Little Sheila” song was playing on their radios.

“Hey!” Bruno Walker called when I neared them. “Where’s Izzy today?”

I didn’t want to let him or anyone else in on our planned adventure. “She’ll be over later,” I said. Pam Durant was lying next to him on her stomach, eyes closed, and I was shocked to see that her bathing-suit top was unhooked, the straps low on her shoulders. It almost looked as though she was wearing nothing at all on top. I could clearly see the side of her breast. I quickly averted my eyes.

I stepped closer to the lifeguard stand and looked up at Ned.

“Hi, Ned,” I said.

He lowered his head to look down at me, his eyes invisible behind his sunglasses, and broke into his gorgeous, whitetoothed grin. My legs felt like they were going to give out under me.

I held up the giraffe. “Isabel wanted me to give this to you,” I said.

He looked toward the parking lot, spotted our car and waved. He had white zinc oxide on his nose and a cigarette in his hand, and he looked so sexy with it. Women didn’t look good with cigarettes, I thought, but a man with a cigarette in his hand was something else again.

I held the giraffe up to him and he reached low for it and maybe one of his fingers touched one of mine, but I could not be sure.

“Thanks, Julie,” he said. “You’re a neat kid.”

“You’re welcome.” I wasn’t ready to leave. “Why are you sending that thing back and forth?” I pointed to the giraffe.

“I don’t think you’d understand,” he said. He looked out at the water, then stood up, blew his whistle and waved an arm, which meant that some kids were swimming out too far and he wanted them to come in closer where he could see them. Where he could protect them. The muscles in his legs were long and lean and covered with curly gold hair that I wanted to reach up and touch.

“Yes, I would. Honest,” I said, once he’d sat down again. I wondered if he would remember where we were in our conversation. He did. He’d been paying good attention.

“Do you have anything that’s really special to you?” he asked me, his eyes still on the water.

I had so many things that were special to me, I didn’t know where to begin. The clue box, of course. And my collection of Nancy Drew books. I also had a music box my girlfriend, Iris, had given me for my ninth birthday. It was oval shaped, and when you opened it up, a girl rode a bicycle around a little track.

“A music box,” I said.

“Ah, okay, then!” He seemed pleased by my answer. “When you get older and you meet someone who’s special to you, you’ll feel like sharing the music box with that person.”

“Oh,” I said. I doubted very much I’d be passing my music box back and forth between some boy and myself, but I pretended to understand. “So, Isabel is your…uh…your special person, huh?”

“You keep that between us, okay?” he said, and I thought I saw him wink behind the sunglasses. “Your old lady would flip her wig if she knew.”

I knew he meant my mother by “old lady,” but it was the first time I’d heard anyone use that term.

“I saw Isabel sneak into your boat the other day,” I said. The words seemed to have a life of their own; I had not even thought about speaking them.

His smile faded. He took off his sunglasses and looked down at me, blue eyes piercing through me to my heart. “You won’t say anything, right?” he asked.

I shook my head. You can trust me with your life, I wanted to say to him, but I kept the melodramatics to myself. “I won’t say anything,” I promised, crossing my heart. I pictured myself inside the confessional booth, the smell of incense in the air. If I withheld information like that from my parents, did that constitute a lie? I wondered.

Ned slipped his sunglasses on again and glanced out at the water to be sure everyone was all right. “How come you and Ethan don’t pal around together anymore?” he asked, then smiled at me again. “Don’t answer that,” he said. “He’s a dufus this summer, I know.”

I wanted to defend Ethan but found I couldn’t. I nodded. “Yeah,” I said.

“You tell Izzy I’ll see her later, okay?” He looked toward the car and waved again.

“Okay,” I said, knowing I’d been dismissed. It had been an incredible conversation, though. We had secrets. We’d talked almost like adults.

I walked back to the car and got in. It smelled of the hot rubber of the tubes.

“What did you talk about for so long?” Isabel sounded suspicious as she turned the key in the ignition.

“About how I saw you get into Ned’s boat in the marina.” I looked out the car window toward the lifeguard stand, nonchalant as you please.

Isabel didn’t speak, and when I looked over at her, I saw that her knuckles had gone white on the steering wheel. “And what did he say?” she asked, her voice tight.

“He asked me not to tell anyone, and I promised I wouldn’t.”

Her grip on the steering wheel relaxed. “Thank you,” she said. Then she held the pack of Marlboros out to me. “Have another cigarette.”

My mother, Isabel and I tossed our inner tubes into the canal, then quickly jumped in after them, laughing as we struggled to climb aboard.

“I’m glad no one’s taking a picture of this,” Isabel said as she struggled to hoist herself onto her oversized tube. Mom and I had already managed to get into position on our tubes, our bottoms, forearms and calves in the cool water.

“Bye!” Mom lifted her arm in a wave to Grandpop, Grandma and Lucy where they stood in our backyard, calling out their wishes for a good trip. The current was swift and our journey was effortless. We used our hands as paddles, staying close to the bulkhead to avoid being run over. Some of the colored fishermen on the other side of the canal waved to us, as did people passing by in their boats. We’d rise and fall on the wakes of the yachts and motorboats. It was glorious.

When we reached the bay, we rolled onto our stomachs and began paddling for real, steering ourselves along the coastline toward our little beach. I spotted Grandpop and Lucy waiting for us on the pier, Lucy holding on tight to my grandfather’s hand. I was impressed that he’d been able to get her out on the pier at all. I wished that my father had been at the shore so that he too could have floated on the tubes. Maybe, I thought, we could do it again on a weekend when he was with us. But we never did.

Lying in bed that night, I felt as though I was still floating toward the bay. What a great feeling it had been to flow with the current! An idea began to form in my head. If the current had been in the direction of the bay this morning, it would be going in that direction again tonight. What if I quietly took the boat out of our dock and let it float down to the bay? No one would know, because the current would carry me and I wouldn’t need to start the motor and wake anyone up. Once I was in the bay, I could start the motor and cruise around for a while. Getting back could be a problem, because I doubted I could stay out there long enough for the current to change direction, but it was only the starting of the engine that would be noisy. Coming back, the boat would just make a gentle putt-putt sound as I pulled into the dock and no one would be any the wiser.