“Camp Pickiwicki?”
Violet didn’t register the words at first. She’d moved her chair up as close to the waterline as she could without risking dousing the beach bag at her side. For a while, she’d watched, entranced, as the foam crept closer and closer to her freshly manicured toes. But then she’d been pulled back into her novel. She hadn’t noticed the man walking barefoot in the surf, hadn’t seen him start to pass her and then back up, doing such an obvious double take at her that there really was nothing left to do but speak.
She looked down at her faded mustard yellow T-shirt, then up at the man. He seemed to be about her age, but he was wearing mirrored sunglasses, and she couldn’t see his expression. Like a cop, she thought. No. A narc.
“Camp Pickiwicki,” she said, in a tone of total agreement. You could barely make out the black letters—they’d disintegrated over hundreds of washes—but the circular logo sprawled across her shirt was still recognizable, the way the C tucked into the tree that formed the P.
“You went there?” He sounded more than just disbelieving. Suspicious.
“Picki-picki-wicki-wicki-yay!” she chanted halfheartedly. For two weeks during the summer she’d turned twelve, she and her fellow campers had been cajoled into yelling the rallying cry at daybreak, before meals, after canoe races, when it was time to leave the fire circle and go to bed. If you’d been there once, it was ingrained in your mind forever.
He laughed. “And your T-shirt still fits. Astonishing. I outgrew mine well over a decade ago.”
“Oh—this is my gram’s. My grandmother’s. She volunteered on the special event nights.”
“And do you often wear your grandmother’s clothes to the beach?” He gave her a big white-toothed smile, and Violet could just see the arches of his raised eyebrows peeking out above his sunglasses.
“I do not,” she replied coolly. “But then I thought, what if someone else here went to Camp Pickiwicki? I mean, the place was only open for one summer, and hardly anyone signed up even then, and it’s also in Western Pennsylvania and here we are in beautiful Sunny Isles Beach, conveniently located about a zillion miles south of the campgrounds, so you never know.”
“Indeed. I like to keep an eye out for fellow Pickiwickians everywhere I go.”
“Look out!”
A teenager on an out-of-control skimboard came barreling onto the sand, and the man leaped out of his way, knocking into Violet’s beach umbrella. She grabbed the pole to hold it steady.
“Sorry!”
“Perhaps you should keep an eye out for rogue skimboarders wherever you go,” she suggested.
He laughed. “Not challenging enough. They’re everywhere.”
The man got to his knees in the circle of shade at Violet’s side and started mounding wet sand around the pole to hold it in place. His sunglasses slid down his nose, and he pushed them up on top of his head. It hadn’t been a trick of the mirrored lenses—he was good-looking. Somewhere between rugged and clean-cut, as if he’d be just as comfortable strumming an acoustic guitar as wearing a suit. Hello, handsome stranger. She’d be starting to get nervous right about now if her flight weren’t leaving first thing in the morning. She had a tendency to get tongue-tied and ruin these sorts of things. Not that these sorts of things ever happened to her.
“It really is an odd coincidence, though, isn’t it?” he said, giving the mound of sand a last pat and flopping down beside her chair. “I’ve never met anyone who went there, let alone all these years later and a thousand miles away. I loved that place. That was, like, my favorite summer as a kid. Ever.”
“I know. I wonder if we were there at the same time? I mean, I think I would recognize you…”
He shook his head. “We couldn’t have been. There were no girls during the session my parents signed me up for. Wasn’t supposed to be that way, but that’s how it worked out. Or so I was told. You can imagine my disappointment.”
She laughed. “Well, then, I am sorry to tell you that you did not get the full Camp Pickiwicki experience. No sneaking out after dark to make out down by the docks?”
“Surely not a good girl like you who wears her grandmother’s clothes to the beach.”
“Surely so.”
“Well, then it’s finally clear to me what must have happened. You juvenile delinquents early in the summer ruined it for the rest of us by the time August rolled around. I knew the odds of no coeds enrolling that session were slim!”
She shrugged. “That claim is unsubstantiated.”
“I can’t believe my parents actually lied to me about what happened.”
“About what allegedly happened.”
“I feel as though you owe me an apology.”
“I owe you no such thing.”
“The least you could do is make it up to me after dark tonight.”
Violet flushed, and the man’s face fell.
“That was it, wasn’t it?”
“That was what?”
“The line. I’m always crossing it without meaning to. Please. Forget I said that. I was just trying to be clever.”
“No offense taken. I’d probably still be sore about it too, if I could trace my lingering virginity back to having missed out on my first tongue kiss at summer camp.”
He cocked one eyebrow at her. “I’ve been accused of a lot of things in my adult life, but being a virgin is not one of them.”
“And here you were acting shocked that I was not the Goody Two-shoes little camper you assumed me to be.”
“Well, in my defense, you are wearing your grandmother’s Camp Pickiwicki T-shirt. At the beach. On an adult vacation with … who are you with?”
“Myself.”
“You came on vacation alone?” He looked more impressed than surprised. “Really?”
“My boyfriend unceremoniously dumped me a few weeks ago. I’ve been working an insane amount of overtime at the office. I realized that I’d never spent my tax refund. So, I just booked it.”
“And how’s it been?”
“Honestly?”
He nodded, and she could tell he was waiting for her to say it had been unexpectedly lonely, there were couples everywhere, there were kids everywhere, she didn’t know what she’d been thinking. She’d half expected to feel that way too, before she’d gotten here.