SEVEN SUMMERS AND ONE QUESTION

The rules were invented on the far dock in about ninety seconds when we were both fourteen.

Last night of camp. One question each. It has to be answered honestly. And you are not allowed to be weird about it afterwards.

We ran that machine seven times.

Neither of us ever once used it for the thing it was built to avoid.

SEVEN SUMMERS AT CAMP NINEMILE

Wren Abasi arrives at fourteen on a bus from Eau Claire, the only person on it who does not know anybody. Theo Lindgard is already at the end of the far dock with a book about volcanoes, on the one stretch of waterfront nobody checks between five and half past.

They get eleven days a year.

Fourteen: the rules get invented, and neither of them asks the question. Fifteen: a photograph from 1977 in the storm cupboard, of two girls on the same dock, one laughing a quarter of a second too late. Sixteen: a boy called Deacon says their names out loud in the craft barn and they both say no in one syllable, at speed, and never mention it again. Seventeen: nine hours re-decking the swimming crib, and an outboard motor that starts four minutes early. Eighteen: the summer he does not come.

Nineteen: four months instead of eleven days, and a nurse from Duluth who works out in four days what neither of them has said in six years.

Twenty: the camp is closing, and there is one last night on the far dock, and he has had four months to think of a way to make her ask it.

WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT

It is not the story of a girl waiting for a boy to notice.

He did not say anything either. Six times. On a dock. Under rules he invented himself.

The rules were good rules - an honest answer, one question, no weirdness afterwards. Every one of them is a kindness, and they are the reason two people who saw each other eleven days a year told each other more than they told anybody in their real lives.

And every one of them was also a wall, and neither of them built it by accident.