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do anything that might change things. And it’s a big deal, right?”
    We all looked at Lisa, the only one who had said it to someone who wasn’t a family member. I braced myself for another
my-relationship-is-beaucoup-mature
lecture, but Lisa just nodded. “It is,” she said softly.
    “And also, what if he doesn’t say it back?” I continued. “I totally understand now why Lisa was freaking out so much.”
    “I wasn’t freaking out—” Lisa started, a little huffily.
    “OMG,” Schuyler said, eyes widening. “If you said it and he didn’t say it back … what then? Is there any way to recover from that? Would you guys have to break up, or something?”
    I felt my stomach clench. “Don’t say that,” I said quickly. There had been a moment, during the planning of Promgate, when I’d had to confront what it might be like to lose Nate. And the idea had shaken me so much that I tried as hard as I could never to think about it.
    “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Ruth said soothingly. “I mean, you guys have only been together three months. There’s no rush to say it.”
    “Right,” I said, trying to smile. But ever since the fact that I loved Nate had taken up residence in my brain, it was getting harder and harder
not
to say it to him. Like every time we were together and I didn’t tell him, it felt like a tiny lie. “But anyway,” I said, trying to change the subject, “maybe I should go say hi to Mark. He’s probably getting lonely.”
    “I’m sure there are other people on the beach who can visit him,” Schuyler said, scrolling through her phone. “Like Jimmy or Liz, or—” Her face turned pale, which was saying something, considering she was already sporting a layer of thick white sunblock. “OMG,” she whispered, and I noticed that the ShyPhone was shaking in her hand.
    “What is it?” Lisa asked, leaning closer to her.
    “Connor,” Schuyler choked out. “He’s at Stubbs.” She looked at us, stricken, and I tried to approximate a suitably horrified expression.
    “How dare he,” I said. “Because that was … um … your special coffee shop?”
    “It’s not that,” Schuyler said. “Roberta Briggs is there, too. And they’ve
aligned
.”
    I felt my expression shift to one of genuine concern. Roberta Briggs had been considered the hottest girl in school since approximately fourth grade. And because of this, most guys were much too intimidated to actually talk to her, so she was consistently, and worryingly, single.
    “But maybe they’re just both there,” Lisa said, trying to take the phone away from Schuyler, who was stillholding a death grip on it. “It doesn’t mean that they’re there together.
Pas du tout
.”
    “But it
might
mean they’re there together,” Schuyler said, still holding on to the ShyPhone as Lisa tugged harder. “It doesn’t
not
mean that!”
    As I watched Schuyler’s stricken, pale face, I realized that this was the problem with Constellation. Because it just gave people’s locations, without any context, it could lead to this kind of jumping to conclusions and worry when it probably didn’t mean anything other than two people happening to be at the same place at the same time.
    “Shy,” I said, and as she looked over at me, Lisa took the opportunity to wrest Schuyler’s phone away from her. “Don’t you think that maybe you should talk to Connor? You clearly miss him….”
    I heard Ruth draw in a breath, and Lisa frowned at me. We had all tacitly agreed not to bring up this possibility anymore, as the last time we’d tried, it had culminated in a crying jag so intense we’d had to make a midnight run to CVS for tissues and Gatorade, to prevent Shy from getting dehydrated.
    “I can’t do that,” Schuyler said, shaking her head hard enough that her braid whacked the side of her face and got stuck in the sunblock for a moment. “You know that, Mad. You know he’d never forgive what … what I did.”
    I felt Lisa’s and Ruth’s