I went back out of town the way I came in. By the time I’d made it over the train trestle, I was pretty nearly spent from running. I put my hands on my knees and tried to catch my breath. I hopped down off the rail bed and crouched in the sand under a bare-limbed oak. I needed to think about what to do before I made things worse.
I was a mess. Hannah didn’t care a whit about me. All that stuff on July Fourth and on the beach after didn’t mean anything to her. She was only using me to get into Miss Lil’s. I felt like a fool, of course. And it hurt a lot. I wanted so badly for her to like me, to have feelings for me like I did for her, but I think all along I’d known it was too good to be true. Like her father said, I wasn’t her kind. Or at least that’s what I told myself.
Now he was out t
