But then Maia hears voices. She pokes her head through one of the crumbling stone window openings to see Joanie, Colton, and some girl Maia doesn’t recognize all climbing up the hill together.

“Hey,” Maia says. She’s relieved to see her friends but she wishes it were Shane. Shane is a year older than Maia and he goes to the Antilles School; he’s her crush, and recently he’s become more than just a crush. They have held hands on three separate occasions. Joanie has a crush on Colton, but Colton likes Joanie only as a friend. For now. Both Maia and Joanie are hoping the clubhouse—where they’re going to hang out without any adults watching them—will change this.

“Maia!” Joanie cries out. She runs up the stairs and gives Maia a hug, which seems a little strange since they just saw each other at school the day before, then gives Maia’s hand an extra-hard squeeze. It’s a message of some sort about this unknown girl. Friend or foe?

Colton and the girl follow.

Maia says, “Hey, I’m Maia.” The girl has milky-white skin, long red hair, and a pointy nose. She’s wearing white shorts and a regular pair of beach flip-flops that show off her green-polished toenails and silver toe rings. How did she hike all the way here in flip-flops?

“I’m Lillibet,” she says, shrugging. She peers around the dank inside of Par Force. “I’m in seventh; I go to Antilles. Is Shane here?”

“Not yet,” Maia says. “He had the ortho—”

“Yeah, I know, but he said he’d be here waiting.”

“You know who Lillibet’s sister is, right, Maia?” Colton says. “Dusty. Dusty Beck.”

Maia tries to hide her surprise. Dusty Beck is a bona fide St. Thomas celebrity. Maia—along with twelve million other people—follows Dusty on Instagram. Dusty was on the cover of last year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and Shane has a copy that she signed; he’d said he got it from “a kid in my class.” Which must have been the sister, Lillibet. What is she doing here?

“Cool,” Maia says. Joanie, behind Lillibet, has her arms locked across her chest and is rolling her eyes. Not cool with Joanie. Okay, then, not cool with Maia either. “Shane invited you?” Maia asks.

“Hey!”

They all turn to see Shane and Bright Whittaker racing up the hill. Maia tries to harden her facial expression, form it into some kind of shell. They created this club the night they met on the beach in Frank Bay because Colton was upset about his parents’ divorce. Colton is staying on St. John with his mom, but his dad is moving back to the States—to North Carolina, the Outer Banks—and Colton will see him only half the summer and at Christmas. As they were talking to Colton that night, trying to make him feel better, it came out that they all had stuff to deal with at home and no one to talk to about it. (That was really true for Maia—her mother had died and a new family had appeared out of nowhere!) So they’d decided to form a club and have meetings in person, not online, which felt old-fashioned in a cool way. They weren’t allowed to discuss club business on their phones. They weren’t allowed to take any pictures or post about the club. It would be a secret society, like the kind they had at Harvard and Yale.

Maia didn’t realize they were allowed to invite outsiders to join. She’d thought it was supposed to be just them—Maia, Shane, Joanie, Colton, and Bright. But five is an odd number, so Maia supposes adding another girl makes sense. She had sort of figured they would discuss it first and vote. But this isn’t Congress or Parliament; it’s a bunch of middle-school kids in the Virgin Islands.

Maia decides to give Lillibet the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Shane invited her for a reason—maybe her sister the model is addicted to drugs, or maybe Lillibet is being bullied at school, or maybe Lillibet’s parents ignore her because Dusty is so pretty and famous.

“Shane!” Lillibet screams. She goes flying down the steps in her stupid flip-flops, and forget the benefit of the doubt—Maia wishes for her to fall flat on her face. But she doesn’t. She goes up to Shane and says, “Let me see.”

Shane smiles. His braces are off.

Whaaaa? Maia thinks. She knew Shane had the orthodontist but she didn’t know he was getting his braces off. Unfair! He looks hotter now than he did before by, like, a lot.

Lillibet squeals and gives Shane a side hug and Shane leans into her.

They all head deeper into Par Force and wander through different rooms until they come to what must have been the kitchen—there’s a giant fireplace opening. There are a bunch of piles of bricks that they can sit on.

Shane turns to Maia. “Are you surprised the braces are off? What do you think?”

She shrugs. She isn’t going to fawn all over him like Lillibet.

Lillibet is touching the columns, poking her head through the window openings. “This place is sublime,” she says. “What’s it doing here?”

“This was the main living quarters of the family who owned the sugarcane plantation,” Maia says. She gives an ironic laugh. “So two hundred years ago, someone who looked like me would have been working in this kitchen as a slave.”

Everyone is quiet. Maia has made her friends uncomfortable, but oh, well—the history of the Virgin Islands is uncomfortable.

Lillibet says, “Maybe we should meet somewhere else? Do you want to pick a different place, Maia?” Her voice is concerned without being patronizing, and the benefit of the doubt resurfaces. Is Lillibet nice?

“It doesn’t bother me,” Maia says. “My mom brought me here.” She hopes that mentioning Rosie will lead them into the kind of soulful conversation that they had on Frank Bay, but nobody is paying attention to Maia except Lillibet.

“Shane told me that your mother was killed in that helicopter crash on New Year’s,” Lillibet says. “I felt so bad for you. And honestly, you’re kind of famous at Antilles now. I knew Shane was your friend, so I asked to meet you.”

Lillibet is here because of Maia? This sounds like a compliment, but it also makes Maia feel like a circus sideshow. Famous at Antilles? Because she tragically lost her mother?

“It’s too bad we can’t meet at the villa in Little Cinnamon,” Shane says. He turns to Lillibet. “Maia’s dad…it was your dad, right? Your real dad that nobody knew about? Yeah, he was really rich and owned this huge villa with a two-story pool. Maia gets to hang out there whenever she wants.”

“A two-story pool?” Lillibet says.

Maia feels like her heart is being stung by a swarm of bees. She has confided a lot to Shane, but the things she told him were private, and here he is, telling everyone.

Maia shrugs. She isn’t about to admit that the villa has been seized by the FBI. She can’t afford to be any more “famous” at Antilles than she already is.

Colton and Bright are watching a YouTube video of surfing in Portugal on Bright’s phone, and Joanie joins them. Maia nearly says, I thought we said no phones, but she doesn’t want to sound like a teacher or a parent.

“I have no service,” Maia says—to no one, because Shane is now telling Lillibet the gory details of getting his braces off. Maia could join in and say, That sounds like medieval torture, but she knows three’s a crowd. She takes a minute to study Shane and Lillibet together. They’re just two kids talking, right? Or does Shane like Lillibet? They move on to the topic of their math teacher, then to something that happened at morning meeting the day before, and then Shane relates all the near-death experiences he’s had taking the shuttle to Antilles from the Red Hook ferry. Maia smiles to herself, pretending to be deep in thought. If Lillibet is here because she wanted to meet Maia, then why is she talking only to Shane? Maia doesn’t go to Antilles. She wants to, but her mother said not until ninth grade.