That summer, when Joan was working in Grandpa’s old office, I spent most of my time in Joan’s old studio, watching Grandpa’s lectures while I sorted through his files. Sometimes I took Analemma on hikes nearby, and on the way to the trailhead I passed houses that still had their signs up for marriage equality. I hadn’t noticed them before, but now I seemed to see them everywhere. A VOTE NO ON PROP 8 bumper sticker peeling from the back of a Prius; a rainbow flag flying from a wooden front gate.

When I returned, I’d take a glass of ice water out to the deck, where I’d scroll through my phone waiting for a text that didn’t come. I began to think that maybe my friendship with Mel, and by extension Steph, was over. You’re invited to this summer, period, Mel had said. But I was convinced there was a loophole. Sometimes friendships didn’t get off the ground, even if they had a promising start.

One afternoon I finally brought the Adrienne Rich book outside with me. It had been lying on the nightstand by my bed ever since I found it in the basement, one corner of the photo-booth strip peeking out from the top. I sat down on the lounger in the shade and pulled out the pictures of my parents. I expected it would hurt to see them like that, so young and happy, but the twinge I felt soon dissipated, and then I was studying the images as if they were celebrities or criminals. It didn’t seem possible that I was related to these two people. They had lived in a world I didn’t know, and it unsettled me, making me think about branching universes and whether there was another one where they had stayed together. What kind of person would I be if I had grown up in that world?

I carefully tucked the photo into the rear of the book, hiding my parents’ faces from view. And then, because I didn’t know what to do with the strange uneasiness inside me, I started to flip through the poems. In the titular poem, “Diving into the Wreck,” the narrator puts on scuba gear and dives into the ocean to explore a shipwreck. I saw the ocean that Rich described, colors shading from blue to green to black as the diver descended. I saw the diver with her oxygen tank strapped to her back, poking through the ruins of something that had once been beautiful, taking photographs to record it. I saw the body of the diver morphing, female to male, male to female, the shape of her/him outlined by the shifting light.