As June wore on, the days stretched longer and longer, until the light seemed reluctant to leave the sky at all, and the sisters talked, in passing, about the year ahead. They talked about it while washing dishes, while walking to the centre, while sitting on the front steps in the evening, never all at once, but in pieces, the way people talk about something large and coming. Tess wondered aloud about what she might paint next, and whether she would want another public piece, or something smaller and quieter. Mara wondered about the team, and about training, and about how to be a senior without becoming someone she did not recognise. They did not have answers, and they did not pretend to. What they had was the habit of listening to each other, and the knowledge, earned over a difficult spring, that protection did not mean taking over, and that holding the ladder was its own kind of strength.
On the evening of the summer solstice, the sisters sat on the harbour wall with their feet dangling over the water, talking about senior year as if it were a tide they could already hear coming in.
Senior year began with new timetables, new lockers, and the strange feeling that Greyhaven High had somehow grown smaller over the summer. The corridors Mara and Tess had walked since they were fourteen seemed narrower now, as if the building itself had settled a little closer around them, and the lockers they had been assigned stood in a different wing, beside windows that looked out over the car park instead of the playing fields. Mara ran a hand along the cool metal of her locker door and laughed at how unfamiliar the combination felt, while Tess tucked her sketchbook into the top shelf with a care that suggested she was already deciding what this year would hold and what it would not. Their timetables no longer matched the way they once had. Mara had early-morning training and a free period she spent mostly on the sidelines with a clipboard, and Tess had a double art period on Tuesdays and a science block that left her smelling faintly of salt water by lunchtime. They still found each other between classes, still traded the small, ordinary news of a school day, but the rhythm was different now, looser and less constant, like a tide that had begun to pull in two directions at once without pulling them apart.
In the first weeks, Greyhaven High felt both familiar and newly strange. The same noticeboards were crowded with sign-up sheets, the same bell cut through the same hallways, and Ms. Alvarez still kept her art room door open so that the smell of paint drifted out into the corridor. Yet the seniors moved through the building with a different kind of confidence, as if they had finally learned which staircases to avoid at busy times and which teachers would let a question run a little long. Mara noticed it in the way younger students stepped aside for her on the hockey pitch, and Tess noticed it in the way she no longer hurried past the art room as though she were afraid of being seen carrying her portfolio. They were not the girls they had been the previous autumn, and the school, for all its sameness, seemed to recognise that. Even the light through the high windows felt thinner and more golden, the particular light of September in Maine, when the days are still long enough for practice after school but the evenings begin to ask for a jacket.
Tess's work at the Greyhaven marine centre had changed, too, in a way that surprised her more than anyone else. She had started the year as a volunteer who mostly cleaned tanks and handed out leaflets, but by late September Ms. Okafor, who coordinated the youth programmes, asked her to lead a small Saturday activity for younger children. It was not a grand responsibility, only a table by the touch tank and a group of eight children with clipboards, but Tess took it seriously in the quiet, thorough way she took everything seriously. She planned the session the way she planned a painting, thinking first about what the children would notice, then about what they might ask, then about how to leave room for them to discover something on their own. She brought a set of her own tide-pool sketches, not the ones that had once been passed around the school, but new ones, drawn that summer, with careful notes in the margins about where each creature had been found.