Last one guys! Sorry for the extreme break between chapters, life caught up with me and I couldn't figure out a way to end this. Thanks for all the reviews and support!

In the garage, balanced on the handle of the seed spreader, looking out of place between the lawnmower and the tiller, was a long-stemmed pink rose.

Cook passed me. I called, "Panda left you a gag gift."

He hardly glanced at the rose on his way out the garage door. "Pink isn't my color."

Kieran must have left it as a joke for Dad, then. I should take it into the kitchen before it wilted. Almost wishing it were mine, I ran my finger across a soft petal. My hand found a pink ribbon tied around the stem, then a tag hanging from the ribbon. The tag said in Emily's scrawl, "YES it's for you." I let a little laugh escape even as my eyes filled with tears.

She'd called me a bitch. I wasn't running back to her when she left me one rose. On the other hand, there was no need to stuff it down the garbage disposal. Maybe Emily and I could be friends again after all. Someday. Besides, I adored the scent of roses: perfume and dirt. I put the blossom to my nose, inhaled deeply, grinned, and headed to work.

Another rose lay atop the woodpile.

A third was tied to an oak tree with a hangman's noose fashioned from a kudzu vine.

A fourth stuck out of a broken brick in the seawall.

A fifth lay across the handles of the doors into the marina. They all smelled so lovely, my blood pressure hardly went up when Jenna shrieked at me, "Where have you been?"

She must have freaked out because the marina was already swamped with customers. The Crappy Festivities today were divided among the town swimming park and the three biggest marinas on this section of the lake, including ours. We got the crowning of the Crappy Queen. I wished we got a more interesting event, such as the Crappy Toss. I could have thrown a dead fish as far up the beach as anybody. The Crappy Queen contest was just a bunch of high school girls parading up and down the wharf as Mr. Fitch called their names and announced the weights of the biggest fish they'd caught all year, and what bait they'd used. At least the event did its job of bringing customers in.

Well, if Jenna wanted me there sooner, she should have told me the day before. "Where have I been?" I repeated. "I get asked that a lot for some reason."

She took the roses from me without comment and shoved me into the show room, where a small crowd of people in shorts milled between the displays. "It's been a revolving door in here ever since we opened this morning," she hissed. "People want to buy wakeboards, and they want to buy them from you."

"Wow! Really?" I'd feel a little guilty selling people wakeboards, considering my experience two days before. But after all, my wreck was caused by a brain cloud and a broken heart, not equipment failure. I patted my head to make sure my bangs hung down over my stitches.

"Yes, really!" Jenna said. "Emily's been covering for you, but she just mumbles at customers."

"Where is Emi-," I started to ask. Then I saw her hair, and the door to the warehouse closed behind her. Where she'd stood, a rose protruded from behind a Liquid Force on the wall.

She'd called me a bitch. I wasn't running back to her when she left me six roses. But I did extract the new rose carefully and put it with the others in the vase Jenna set on the counter. Then I found another rolled up in the boat twine, and still another lying across the containers of worms.

In the late morning, as I manned the cash register (after pulling out the rose inside), Dad and Kieran came in. My heart pounded when I saw Kieran. I wanted to vault over the counter and throw my arms around him. Instead, I asked him, "Are you to be my new mother?"

"Naomi!" My dad burst out. Flushing red, he realized he desperately needed a new slalom ski right then, and bolted for the display.

Kieran watched him go. "Very funny," he told me through his teeth. Then he leaned across the counter, kissed me on the forehead, and gave me a grudging smile. "Happy Birthday."

"Thank you."

He reached for my hand. "What a beautiful ring." He moved my finger back and forth so the ring glittered under the fluorescent lights, and smiled at me once again. "Your mother would be proud of you."

"What a pretty robe," I said. "Is it hemp?"

Holding his chin high, he said self-righteously, "It's organic cotton." He took a long whiff of the roses. "You and Emily have gotten yourselves in a mess, I hear. 'Oh what a tangled web we weave, when we first practice to deceive!' Sir Walter Scott."

I patted his hand. "That's nice, dear."

"An honest man's the noblest work of God.' Alexander Pope."

I squinted across the showroom. "I think I have a customer."

My dad recovered and decided he could put off that slalom ski purchase after all. He came to the counter, put his hand on Kieran's back, and asked him, "Is Naomi giving you lip?"

"She's making fun of me!" Kieran exclaimed in mock astonishment. "I'm offering her aphorisms and she's making fun of me!"

"They do that." Dad turned to me and said, "We're going to wish James luck before the show. Aren't you at least riding in the boat with the boys?

"Ha! I'd rather go shopping." Snort.

As Kieran pushed open the door into the sunshine, he said something in Russian. Something long that he was determined to get out in full. Dad stood in the doorway and waited for him with a look of pure love when he finished.

I didn't need any sage advice on honesty and I definitely didn't need any from Dostoyevsky. "Do svidanya," I muttered. Then I realized the customer from across the showroom was approaching the counter. "May I help-" It was Panda.

She slid a candy bar onto the counter. "Hook me up, would you? Now that I have a boyfriend, I'm trying to maintain my girlish figure."

As I scanned the candy into the register, I looked over my shoulder to see whether Jenna was listening from the office. I'd told customers off before when Jenna wasn't around, if they really pissed me off. Panda was Cook's girlfriend. I didn't want to be the annoying sister she dreaded seeing when she came over to our house. But fuck if she was going to follow me around and taunt me! She could have bought a candy bar somewhere else.

She must have seen I was gearing up to tell her off. She knew me better than I'd thought. Either that or she recognized the fixed killer stare I got before I served an ace. For whatever reason, she said in a hurry, "What draws me to Cook as a boyfriend is the same thing that draws me to you as a friend. You're both so honest, to the point of being clueless. After years of being stuck at tennis tournaments with Mini and Grace, it's refreshing."

"You're not helping yourself here."

"And if I wanted honesty, I should have been more honest myself. When you left the party, I told Cook what I did to you. He didn't un-ask me out, but I could tell he was disappointed."

Cook would never un-ask a girl out. Even if he hated her guts, he'd keep his promise and act like a gentleman about it. I didn't tell Panda this because she was genuinely concerned about what he thought of her now. It was sort of sweet. "If it makes you feel better," I told her, "he dreamed about you last night."

"He did?" Her face glowed in the sunlight streaming through the showroom windows. Then she quirked her eyebrows at me. "He tells you about his dreams?"

I nodded. "Me and Dad, every morning at breakfast. Are you going to pay for that?"

She dug in her pocket, peered at the change in her palm, and picked out some coins. She had the same purse-carrying issues I had. "Anyway," she said, "I'm sorry for using you. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. I didn't give it a thought. But I should have."

"Maybe I'd like to be used by a girl." As she passed me the change, I said, "I'd like to be good enough friends with a girl that we use each other without asking, and help each other without question. I'd like to know a girl always had my back." I tossed the coins in the register and slammed the drawer shut. The nickels had slid into the dime compartment, which would drive Jenna insane.

Panda nodded. "We'll work on it. So, the wakeboarding show's starting soon. You want to go watch it with me?"

"Can't," I said, gesturing to the crowded showroom that was my responsibility. Wait a minute - it had emptied when I wasn't watching.

Jenna popped her head out the door of the office. She gazed suspiciously at the cash register drawer, like she just knew something was amiss in there. "Naomi, why don't you take a few hours off? You should go outside and watch Cook and the girls."

"I don't want to go outside and watch them." Actually I did. More than anything. I'd never missed a show before. And I'd never missed Emily so much. But I wanted to watch them from the roof or a tree or somewhere else Emily wouldn't see me watching them. She'd called me a bitch. I wasn't running back to her when she left me nine roses.

Jenna folded her arms. "Go outside anyway."

I folded my arms too. "I don't want to go outside."

"Well, I don't want you to work."

"I want to work."

She pointed at me and screamed like I imagined real mothers did when their daughter turned out too much like them. "You're fired!"

"All right!" I threw my register key onto the counter and stomped outside.

Then turned right back around, smacked into Panda, stepped inside, and took the roses Jenna held out to me wrapped in a paper towel. Her lips were pressed together, just like Emily's expression when she was trying not to laugh.

I stalked down the sidewalk outside. Panda scampered to keep up with me. "Are you really fired?"

"Of course not," I sighed. "She fires me about once a week in the summers. I guess I'll take the rest of the day off, though. What's all this for?" I slowed to a stop at the edge of the enormous crowd. The air smelled like hamburgers and funnel cakes. People stood or sat together on towels, picnicking. I could hardly see a bare patch of grass or wharf, but it wasn't quite time for the wakeboarding show.

"They're crowning the Crappie Queen!" Panda said.

"If you're going to hang around here, you need to use the correct pronunciation. It's Crappy Queen."

"It's Mandy."

Sure enough, down on the wharf, Mr. Fitch was calling Mandy forward as the new Crappy Queen. There was some justice in the world.

And then I changed my mind. Instead of the evening gown I'd seen at Crappy Festivals past, Mandy skipped onto the wharf in cutoff jeans pulled over her bathing suit, and bare feet. She grinned while the outgoing Crappy Queen pinned a tiara in the shape of a fish into her hair. Maybe old Mandy was all right after all.

"Pardon," Cook said right behind me. He shoved me off the sidewalk. I shoved him back, then realized that when he pushed me, he'd tucked another rose into my bouquet. Walking backward down the hill, he blew a kiss at Panda. Panda giggled and blew him a kiss back.

Another voice behind me said. "A-choo!" SOMETHING FLEW INTO MY BOUQUET. I almost dropped my beautiful roses to avoid further contact with nastiness. But it was only Effy, pretending to sneeze another rose at me.

"Racking up, aren't you?" Panda asked, and I had to grin.

Right after Effy came Katie. Her nose was only a little blue. I could hardly tell it had bled the night before. Katie was like that. And she held a rose between her teeth.

I smirked at her. "Don't tell me. You want me to come and get it."

"Oh, no," she said through a mouthful of stem, holding up her hands in warning. "Emily would kill me." She handed me the (spitty) rose. "Did Dad crown Mandy the Crappy Queen yet?"

"Yes," Panda and I said together.

Katie's face fell. "Oh!" She ran down the sidewalk. At the bottom of the hill, she caught Mandy by the arm and talked to her for a few seconds. Her face fell further, and Mandy shook her head. She walked away after the others, toward the wakeboarding boat. I almost felt sorry for her.

"I'm going to congratulate Mandy on her coronation," I said to Panda.

"You aw?" Panda said with her mouth full of candy bar. "Uhhhhh-"

"Come with me, because you're my friend and help me without question. I may need someone to call 911 if she breaks my arm."

"I'w be wight behiwd woo."

I maneuvered down the hill through the crowd, using the roses to clear the way in front of me. Now Mandy talked with an elderly couple, which might make her less likely to deck me. "Mandy!" I squealed, jumping up and down, spilling petals, "Congratulations!"

She stared at me like a fish out of water, but the elderly couple thanked me in the manner of clueless grandparents, which got us out of that embarrassing little moment.

"I need to tell you a couple things," I said, hugging the roses to my chest and putting my other arm around her.

"Come this way," Panda said, moving along the seawall. Mandy looked back to signal the elderly couple to save her, but I moved in, blocking her view. What a team Panda and I made. Beyond the crowd, Panda sat on the seawall with her legs hanging over. I did the same, and Mandy sat between us.

"It wasn't my idea to enter," Mandy spoke up defensively. "I caught a two pounder, and my granddad said we could not let the mayor's daughter win again this year with only a one-pounder and a plastic minnow."

Mandy rose further in my opinion.

"I didn't need to tell you how bizarre that is," I said. "Obviously you have a sixth sense about these things." I nodded toward Katie cranking the boat and backing it away from the wharf. Cook was in the bow, Effy sat further back, and Emily was bent below the side of the boat, gathering something. "I needed to tell you Katie is really in love with you."

Now she looked toward the boat puttering across the inlet. "How do you know? You can just tell, right? You can tell by the way she acts? After the last couple of weeks, I'll never be able to trust that again." She tried to sound tough, but her delivery was stilted, and her eyes rolled for emphasis at the wrong place. I'd never actually talked to her before -I'd only watched her from afar - or I would have noticed this. She came off as a lot younger and more unsure of herself than I'd expected. Which made me like her even better.

"I know because she told me," I said. The boat pointed in our direction, almost like it was heading for us rather than the open water. "I also needed to tell you your wakeboard bindings came in at the showroom this morning."

"Oooh, I forgot Katie gave you a wakeboard!" Panda said. "I wish I could learn."

"It's fun," I said. Maybe Cook could take Panda out wakeboarding. Maybe Katie could invite Mandy again and hope she would show up this time. Of course, both Katie and Cook would have to fight the girls every step of the way. We were good together, but it would be nice to wakeboard with other people once in awhile, without a freaking outcry and rumors of mutiny.

"Hey," I said suddenly. "I have a boat." There it was, tied on the side of the dock in front of my house. We hardly ever used it because we were always in the Fitch's boat. I nudged Panda. "If you want, come over after I get off work tomorrow, and I'll teach you to wakeboard." I turned to Mandy. "You too, Miss Crappy." Of course, they probably didn't have boaters' licenses, which meant I'd have to drive. They'd be learning to wakeboard, so I'd just take them around in slow circles. Surely I couldn't mess that up. They wouldn't suspect a thing.

"That would be great!" Panda exclaimed. She touched Mandy's bare toes with her toes. "I'll pick you up, Your Crappiness"

In case Panda got the wrong idea, I warned her, "Cook won't be with us. He'll be with the others. This will be an us trip."

"I know," she said, as if she did really know and wasn't trying to get out of it.

"But we could cruise by the warehouse very slowly like we need to borrow another tow rope," I said. "I have become an expert at seduction."

Mandy snorted, then gave up suppressing it and proceeded to laugh her ass off. The Crapy Crown detangled itself from her hair and would have fallen in the lake if I hadn't caught it for her. Finally she calmed enough to cough out, "I don't know. I'm not very graceful."

"Who am I," I asked, "Michelle Kwan?"

"Not hardly," Panda said at the same time Mandy said, "I see your point." But neither of them was looking at me. They watched the wakeboarding boat float right in front of us, full of girl.

Specifically, full of Emily. She stood in the bow, one arm cradling a bouquet of roses, she held her other hand out to me.

Cook leaned over the bow, too, and caught the seawall, holding the boat there so it didn't scrape against the wall and didn't drift away. The boys had planned ahead. For once.

Ninety-nine percent of me leaped up immediately and knocked Emily over, hugging her. One percent was still bitter about the bitch comment, and angry that I'd been tricked into coming out here to wait like some airhead flirt for Emily to happen by. This one percent was heavier than the rest combined and anchored me to the seawall. I elbowed Panda. "Traitor."

"I was helping you without question," she said.

"And your mum!" I yelled to Emily. "Did you ask your mum to get me out here?"

"I told her to fire you if she had to," she called. "Did she fire you?"

"Mama Fitch has some feminine wiles!" I exclaimed.

Emily laughed. "She's got maybe one more feminine wile than you, and you've got maybe three fourths of a wile." She tilted her head and wiggled the fingers of her outstretched hand. "Come with us. We want you to close the show. Right, Katie?"

"Right!" Katie said with fake enthusiasm. From the back of the boat, Effy waved my wakeboard at me to show me, again, that they'd thought ahead.

"I'm not supposed to get my stitches wet," I reasoned.

"Don't fall," Emily reasoned right back.

I wanted to go. I couldn't quite detach the heavy one percent. "You called me a bitch. I'm not running back to you when you leave me a dozen roses."

"Four more." she waved her smaller bouquet at me. "Sixteen total. Birthday or what?"

Mandy shoved me forward - which, since I was sitting down, didn't push me into the boat. It only folded me over like a movie theater seat.

"You can think about it," Emily said. "The four of us can take our turns, and we'll come back to see if you've changed your mind. But I want you to come with us now." In a singsong voice she coaxed, "I'll let you drive."

Cook and Effy stared at Emily, eyes wide with fear. Katie coughed, "Bullshit."

"I'll let you drive when I'm wakeboarding anyway," Emily said.

"It's love," Cook said, motioning with his head for me to get in the boat. "Let Panda hold your roses so they don't go bald in the wind."

Cook's blessing was the final push I needed. I held out my arms for the extra roses from Emily and inhaled one last long sniff before handing off he whole huge bouquet to Panda. Then I took Emily's hand and let her help me in. Cook shoved the bow away from the seawall and walked into the back of the boat, muttering, "Fucking femme fatale."

As we puttered out of the idle zone, I gave Mandy and Panda a pageant wave. They waved back and clapped for me. The boat reached the open water and sped up. The motor and Nickelback drowned out the clapping. Emily grabbed my waving hand, and we did the secret handshake.

As we sank to the bow seat, I touched her skull and crossbones pendant on a new leather string. "They still have these in the bubblegum machine?"

"Katie went under the dock and found it for me."

I nodded. "She was the best choice to rescue it for you. She has no fear of bryozoa." Squinting into the sun behind Emily, I looked up into her eyes. "One day on the boat when we were kids, did you tell me you wanted me to be your girlfriend when we were old enough?"

She slid her hand down a lock of my hair and twisted it around her fingers. "I don't remember saying that, but I wouldn't be surprised. I wasn't lying that day in the truck. I really have loved you forever. Why else would I wear a skull and crossbones necklace you bought me from a bubblegum machine? It turned my skin green."

"It didn't." To make sure, I moved the pendant aside and peered at her chest, which looked the normal scrumptious tan to me. "It didn't," I repeated with more confidence.

"It did when you first gave it to me. Any metal coating that might have been clinging to it wore off on my chest years ago."

Come to think of it, the pendant was a funny colour not found in nature. I'd probably given her lead poisoning, which was why she acted like that. I ran my fingertips down the bones, and poked the skull in the eyes. "You know, you could have told me you loved me a long time ago, before things got so crazy."

"No, I couldn't. I like to take chances. I'd blow a chance on anything but you. You didn't love me."

Didn't I? It was hard to believe I'd called her little dolphin just two weeks before. "I didn't think about you that way. Clearly I was capable of it. Because I love you now."

She grinned and took my hand. "We should add another step to the secret handshake."

"Then we couldn't do it in public." I turned her hand over and ran my fingertip lightly over her palm until she shivered. "When Katie came up to your mom because a fish had mouthed her toe, and my mom said said I should just wait until I was sixteen... That wasn't Katie. That was you. Right?"

She put her head close to mine, watching my finger trace valentines in her open hand.

"I didn't want you to like me because you thought you were supposed to. I wanted you to like me for me." Her breathing sounded funny. She was about to cry - which was going to cause her a world of trouble with the girls. She could live her first time down owing to the shock of seeing me crash into a very large, very stationary object. But if she cried again, she was toast.

I knew one way to stop her. I hollered above the motor, "Oh my God, Emily, are you about to cry?"

"Oh my God!" Katie echoed. Effy squealed, "Emily don't cry!" Cook called, "No crying on the boat."

Emily laughs with tears in her eyes and kissed me softly on the forehead, the side away from the stitches. And suddenly, to my complete horror, I was the one crying, sobbing into her chest. I was happy, but that wasn't why I was crying. I was relieved. Relieved of a weight I couldn't even name.

She held me more tightly and kissed my forehead several more times, then made her way down my cheek, dangerously close to my ear. I giggled at the same time I cried. If she didn't stop, she was going to give me hiccups - which would be so incredibly sexy, on top of messing up my timing for wakeboarding jumps.

She kissed my lips. "What do you want to do tonight?" she whispered.

What a question!

"Put our names back on the bridge," I said. "Only, you hold the sailboat this time, and I'll take care of the handwriting." I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, enjoying the warmth of Emily's arms around me against the wind. We sat back and watched the other boats and the crowded banks of the lake spin by. When the show started, we spotted for the others while they took their turns. Then it was Emily's turn, and mine.