"Haven, I can't deal with this," he said, hitting his hands on the steering wheel, suddenly angry. "I don't know what to say to you-"

"You don't have to say anything," I said, surprised to hear him raise his voice, lose patience with me. This wasn't how I remembered him.

"Look, Haven," he said, "what happened with me and Ashley ... well, it wasn't like you remember it. There was a lot involved."

There always is, I wanted to tell him. These were the same things my mother said to me after my father left, trying to convince me it wasn't all the Weather Pet's fault.

"I've got to take you home," he said. The storm clouds were grouped high above us, black and foreboding with a blue sky peeking out behind. It was still sticky and hot, but the breeze was changing, now cooler and heavy, sending gra.s.s clipping swirling by the side of the road.

"I'm not going home," I said again as the clouds slipped over the sun, amazed at how fast the weather can change, a front blowing in a matter of minutes.

He started the engine, ignoring me, and put the car in gear. We slid away from the curb just as big fat drops began to fall, splashing across the windshield and my face. The cars coming towards us were turning their lights on, all at once. I opened my door and jumped out, slamming it behind me as my feet hit ground.

"Haven!" Sumner yelled at me, stopping the car again as I cut across the side of the road to a path, the back way we'd always taken to the mall to buy candy and Slurpees when I was little. "It's getting ready to pour; don't be stupid. Come on, get back in the car."

"No," I said softly, knowing he couldn't hear me. It was really raining now. I kept walking, hearing Sumner yell my name but knowing I couldn't go back to him, that he wasn't what I'd wanted him to be. Maybe he never had been.

As I got farther down the path I couldn't hear the traffic anymore, just the rain and thunder. I cut across a small creek, on a plank stretched across it, and saw the first flash of lightning shining suddenly above and then disappearing. It was followed by a crack of thunder that seemed to come from right behind me, pushing me forwards. The path was different than I remembered it, twisting around trees and rocks I didn't recognize, but then it had been a long time. Everything looks different when you're older, not staring up at the world but down upon it. Another clap of thunder boomed over me. I was sure the path came out in my neighborhood somewhere.

I couldn't see houses or lights, just trees followed by more trees, stretching into the distance. Suddenly I wasn't even sure if I was still on the path at all, and that made me panic and start to run, brushing branches out of my face as the rain pelted my back and dripped into my eyes, slippery and cold. The sky was black above me now and I started to think about tornados, the world swirling around and me with nothing to hold on to but trees, and this pushed me to run faster, the sound of my breathing hoa.r.s.e in my ears. I couldn't see the path anymore in the rain and the dark, and everything was slippery beneath me as I ran harder, towards what had to be a clearing ahead. I thought of the houses on my street with their warm lights and the even, green lawns and all the landmarks, so familiar I could find them in my sleep. I ran to that clearing, sure that I could see it all in front of me-until I reached the last set of branches and pulled them aside to reveal more branches, and leaves dripping with rain, and pushed through with all my strength to burst out into open s.p.a.ce, my heart racing in my chest, and kept running until I hit something, hard, something that moved and jumped back, its own breath hitting my face.

It was Gwendolyn.

She was sopping wet, her hair sticking to her forehead, in a white T-shirt with a red tank top showing through beneath and black running shorts. A pair of headphones hung around her neck, attached to a Walkman clipped to her waist. She was breathing hard, her face flushed and beaded with raindrops, and she was the first person I'd met in a long, long time who stood taller than me and looked down into my eyes. The thunder boomed around us, with another flash of white light, and Gwendolyn Rogers and I, breathing hard, stood still in that clearing, close enough that I could see the goose b.u.mps on her flesh. She stared at me with her big, sad eyes as I stared right back, unflinching even when she raised her hand to my face and brushed her fingers across my cheek as if she wasn't sure I was real.

It seemed like we stood there together forever, Gwendolyn and I, two strangers in a clearing with the rain pounding down, inexplicably brought together in a summer storm. I wanted to talk to her, wanted words to come so I could say something that would make this all real. Something about what we had in common: a neighborhood, a summer, a revelation about a belief once considered sacred. But she only stared at me, her face wistful, a small smile creeping across it as if she knew me, had lost me along the way and only now found me again, here. I think she knew it too in that moment. She knew me.

Then I heard my sister's voice.

"Haven!" A car door slammed, hard, and then again, "Haven! Are you there?"

"I'm here," I said to Gwendolyn, and she pulled back from me, dropping her hand. I turned to look for my sister, who was still calling through the rain and the trees. "I'm here," I said again.

Ashley was coming through the brush now. She was bare-legged, wearing a yellow raincoat like the Morton Salt Girl, pulled tight. The trees were bending overhead, wind whistling through as the rain blew across me. I turned back around: Gwendolyn was already running down the path the way I'd come, a blur of white and black.

"Haven?" Ashley was closer now and I turned to the sound of her voice. Her raincoat was dripping wet, shiny and bright among all the green. I could see the headlights of her car now, beaming into the clearing. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," I said. "I got lost on this path."

"We were so worried," she said, coming to stand in front of me and wiping her hair out of her eyes. "Mom's practically hysterical calling everyone, and then Sumner Lee shows up and says you went running off into the woods back here."

"He talked to you?" I asked.

"He was worried too," my sister said, so small and wet in front of me. "We all were. G.o.d, Haven," she said softly, "what happened to you today?"

"I don't know," I said, and I was tired and wet, thinking only of crawling into my warm bed and putting this whole day behind me forever. But I had one more thing to say, to ask her, before I could do that. "Ashley."

"Yeah." She had turned to walk out of the clearing, and I faced the back of her raincoat.

"Why did you dump Sumner?"

She stopped and turned to face me. "What?"

"Sumner. Why did you break up with him that Halloween?"

"I dumped him?" she said. "Is that what he told you?"

"No," I said. "But I saw you do it. That Halloween when he was the mad scientist, remember? I saw you from the window."

"Haven," she said slowly, shaking her head. "I didn't dump Sumner. I mean, I did, but only because he cheated on me. With that girl Laurel Adams; remember her? I walked in on them that night at the party. That's why I broke up with him." She watched me as she said this, her voice even and sad. "All this time you didn't know, did you? G.o.d, Haven. He broke my heart."

I stood there and faced my sister, thinking back to that Halloween when I watched them driving down the street, Sumner in the front seat with Ashley beside him, and Laurel Adams in back with her hair shimmering silver under the streetlight. "That's not true," I said, thinking of Sumner as he held me on the dance floor earlier that afternoon. "It isn't."

"It is true. I loved Sumner and he hurt me badly." She reached up to brush my hair out of my face, an awkward gesture, a try at tenderness. "It's not always so simple, Haven. Sometimes there isn't a good guy and a bad guy. Sometimes even the ones you want to believe turn out to be liars."

"But he was so sad, and he kept coming around," I said, still not wanting to believe it was possible. "He begged for you to come back."

"That didn't change what he did." She shook her head, smiling sadly at me. "Haven, I know you don't like Lewis, but you have to understand how important it is to me to be able to trust someone I love. After Sumner and after Daddy, I was beginning to lose faith in everything. Lewis might not be Sumner, but he would never hurt me. Never. Sometimes things don't turn out the way you want them to, Haven. Sometimes the people you choose to believe are wrong."

"He loved you," I told her. "He still does, I think."

"He doesn't love me," she said, crossing her arms against her chest. "He might still love me as I was at fifteen, when I didn't know any better. When I trusted everyone. I'm not that person anymore." She started walking, holding aside the branches so I could get through. "He's just a boy, Haven. He was the first to really hurt me, but he's just a boy. There were a lot of them."

"Not like him," I said softly, although I knew that after today I'd never see him, or that summer at the beach, the same way.

"Maybe not," she said as we came to the car. "But maybe that isn't so bad. You can't love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It's too hard and it hurts too much when it ends. The first boy is always the hardest to get over, Haven. It's just the way the world works."

She held my door open for me as I climbed in, wet and sticky and tired after a day that was now a blur in my head, stretching back into forever. I watched her come around the front of the car and climb into the driver's seat and shut the door behind her. We didn't talk, me and my sister on the day before her wedding. She drove through the rain down those familiar streets, the houses all shiny and bright, and I thought about Sumner and that first summer, when everything was different. He'd affected both of us in separate but similar ways. He was the first to break her heart, and the first boy to let me down, to take something from me that I'd clung to so closely. A myth. Maybe Ashley was right, for once.

I thought about telling her this in the quiet of the car with only the rain drumming overhead. I looked over at her and thought better of it. Some things you don't have to tell. Some things, between sisters, are understood.

Chapter Thirteen.

"It's time." My mother was standing in my doorway, in a new pink dress with a corsage pinned below her right shoulder, a group of pink zinnias ringed with blue phlox. The entire house smelled like flowers that morning, from the bouquets that were lined up on the kitchen table, each constructed by her own hands.

I turned away from the mirror and she sighed, clasping her hands in front of her. "You look beautiful," she whispered, having broken into sobs so many times that morning that she had Kleenex poking out of her pocket, ready. "The dress is perfect. It looks just right."

Lydia Catrell popped into the doorway and promptly burst into tears. "You are a vision," she said, sniffling, as my mother offered her a damp Kleenex, which she waved away. "Isn't she something?"

"She is," my mother said softly, coming forward to hug me, her corsage pressing against my chest. She took my hand and we started down the stairs, with Lydia chattering ahead of us.

"I just know I'm going to bawl," she said loudly, the waterworks having pa.s.sed. "I always cry at weddings, don't you?"

"I do," my mother said, squeezing my hand. "But Haven will be the strong one. Lucky for her she didn't inherit her mother's emotional tendency."

"Oh, there's nothing like a wedding for a good cry," Lydia said, clomping down the steps in her huge white slingbacks. "Everyone needs a good cry now and then."

My mother was still holding my hand as we walked through the hallway and out the door to the car. When I'd come home with Ashley she'd only hugged me so tight it hurt before letting me go upstairs for a shower and a long nap, skipping the rehearsal dinner altogether. When I woke up I found her and Ashley at the kitchen table, drinking wine and laughing, their voices drifting up like music. I sat in my nightgown and drank ginger ale with them, and we talked about the old times: when Ashley was ten and almost burnt the house down with her Easy-Bake oven, and when I was six and decided to run away, packing my red patent-leather suitcase with nothing but washcloths and underwear. My mother was laughing, her face flushed pink like it always was when she drank, telling the stories that for so long had remained in the no-man's land of the divorce, uncomfortable for what they no longer represented. Now we laughed about my father's hair and about Ashley's boyfriends, the timeline of boys, each with a quirk we remembered better than his name. And we laughed while it rained and the air smelled sweet blowing in the back door, like the flowers that bloomed just outside. The kitchen was warm and bright and I knew I would remember this night, in the same misty way I'd remembered all the good things, as a time when things were as perfect as they could be. Another summer to reach back to, that week in Virginia Beach now tucked away with the other, older memories. Later, when Ashley was gone and my mother and I tried to fill this house ourselves, I'd look back to that night and remember every detail, from Ashley's ring glittering as she sipped her wine to my mother's bare feet beside me on the chair, flecked with gra.s.s clippings. It would be a good place to start over.

I held my mother's hand as we walked to the car, knowing that things would be different now. My mother and I would have to start our own memories, maybe in a new setting. She'd go to Europe, because I'd make her, and I'd get another job, away from the mall, and start again with the fall and my junior year. My sister would be with Lewis and I would know that she was happy, there in her new apartment, without me on the other side of the wall. I'd have to let her go. And I would start my own timeline now, with the faces of my own boys marking the days and months and years.

I kept wanting to find Ashley, to tell her these things, but at the church it was crowded and crazy, with everyone running around and Ashley always behind a closed door or being whisked past in a blur of white. I stood in line with the other bridesmaids, Carol Cliffordson nowhere in sight, symmetry be d.a.m.ned. I held my bouquet and said I was fine, really, it was just a twenty-four-hour bug. I'd been a bridesmaid before: I knew what to do. And when the music started I stepped forward and followed the girl before me to the end of the aisle, past Casey and her parents and Lorna Queen and finally my mother and Lydia, all the while wishing I'd had time to say something to Ashley. Something about the day before, and how I was sorry. About how I would miss her and that I understood now about Sumner, and how he had brought us back together and given us something in common again. The night before, we'd been so caught up in the past that I couldn't make myself think ahead to this day and what came next, for either of us. I'd gone to bed and listened to her in the room beside me just as I had every other night of my life, not realizing that the next morning would be too late.

The organist started "Here Comes the Bride" and we all turned to the back of the church, expectant, and there she was. My father was grinning, his arm linked with hers as they took the first step together. Everyone was oohing and aahing because she was beautiful, white and gliding and perfect, and I watched her come towards me, a small smile on her face. I saw Lewis blushing and my mother dabbing her eyes and I thought about all we'd been through, my sister and I, the fights and the good times and every day we'd had that led up to this one and suddenly I was crying. I knew my mascara was running and I was the only one up there in front so close to bawling, but still the tears came, rolling down my cheeks as she got closer and her own eyes met mine from beneath her veil. I wanted to say it all then, but before I could speak she stepped away from my father and put her arms around me, hugging me tightly, her bouquet against my neck. I smelled flowers, my mother's garden, as I held her and knew I didn't have to say anything. My sister was wiser than I ever gave her credit for. She held me and whispered she loved me before pulling back, wiping her own eyes.

I knew it then. For me and Ashley, there wasn't any time left to think back to that summer and the beach and a boy who charmed us and disappointed us. There was only what stretched out ahead, years full of new summers and promise, with all the time in the world left to start again. My sister, who never understood most of the things I wanted her to, might have been able to understand what had happened to me in this summer of weddings and beginnings. And she was right. The first boy was always the hardest.

NOVELS BY SARAH DESSEN.

That Summer

Someone Like You

Keeping the Moon

Dreamland

This Lullaby

The Truth About Forever