The water never failed to take my breath away.

I gazed at the hazy blue sky meeting the Boston harbor, watching the waves dance under the sun. The iron guardrail was all that stood between me and certain death–I'd never learned how to swim, a perk of living in a landlocked state.

"There you are! Your dad was worried you fell in," my cousin Lola laughed as she crested the hill and practically skipped to me. The corner of my lips crept up in a smile. Another great injustice of living in the Midwest was that, if I was lucky, I only got to see my favorite person a couple of times a year.

"Not yet. I missed this, though, and you!" I said, wrapping her up in a fierce hug before holding her an arm's-width away to look her over. Lola Good was everything I wasn't: long and lean, a blonde-haired, red-lipped, beautiful disaster. Ugh, I wanted to hate her--especially when she oozed sex appeal in her super short cut-off shorts and a cropped top with a leather fringe that hung from the bottom of her shirt and swung out when she spun me around. And then there was me—five feet nothing, red curls, pale skin dotted with hundreds of freckles. Our family was known for its European good looks, but I had inherited my mother's Irish genes.

"You only miss me because you live out in the sticks where no one knows how to have fun," Lola laughed, pulling me back up the hill. My cousin lived for fast, fun things.

"By the way, Dad wanted me to extend the invitation again. You know you're welcome out here. Havershall would be even more amazing this fall with you here," Lola enunciated 'amazing' so that it had extra syllables. I sighed. Yes, I knew I was welcome here in Massachusetts. Our family had lived here practically since the dawn of time. And I'd love nothing more than to start college with Lola, but Havershall was a private college—private, as in, you'd have to take out a second mortgage each semester. It was a far better option than enrolling in the local public university back home, but we'd never be able to afford it, and I wouldn't make my parents tell me that. I couldn't do that to them.

It was a bitter pill to swallow since Dad had graduated from Havershall. But that was before the tension had grown between my dad, Marshall, and his older brother, Macon, Lola's dad—even before my mom was in the picture and long before I was born. Things remain strained between them to this day, but that didn't stop Dad from packing us up twice a year and trekking back to Massachusetts on his dime since Macon controlled the Good family fortune, and Dad saw very little of it.