Out in the sea, bobbing with whitecaps, things got deeper, a swollen tomb of lost secrets buried in the brine. “My parents didn’t want me,” Odilie told Peri. “I came too soon. My mother, she wanted to get her Masters of Education, do more than just teach in a small-town school. They constantly reminded me of the ways in which they tried to forget me.” Accidentally left at home for an hour when she was five, like the Home Alone kid but without all the siblings, while Page was strapped to her mother’s chest.

A dance recital, age nine, Odilie looking out in the audience and seeing everyone’s parents but hers, cameras held high. Afterward, when she was brought home by another parent, her mother lying in bed with a stomach bug, her father out somewhere with colleagues. “Sweetie, your teacher knew we weren’t coming. She should have told you,” her mother said, swallowing another dose of Pepto Bismol.

The words Odilie heard when she was fifteen, sneaking down to the kitchen at night for leftovers from dinner, her parents sitting in the adjoining room with friends. “We don’t really get her. Page is so happy and talented and motivated. Odilie, I couldn’t tell you one passion she has, one thing that makes her tick. She’s a totally blank canvas.” Her father, four beers in.

“Well, she’s a teenager. Isn’t that their whole thing, to be as disenchanted as possible?” This from one of her parents’ friends.

“It’s not her age. She’s always been this way. I almost didn’t know she was my baby in the hospital nursery except for the hair. That gorgeous first name’s wasted on her.” An admission by her mother, followed by a sip of something. “She’ll be fine, though. Being passive and invisible like that can actually help you in life. There are fewer expectations.”

Peri danced in the sea like a siren, seaweed snaked around her neck, her arms, splashing Odilie, who now knelt in the shallow water, trying to cup tiny fish, to bring them to the surface, to watch them struggle to breathe.

Peri told Odilie about the pictures she kept in the big book by her night table, naughty pictures she called them, photos she took with her boyfriend on a self-timing camera. How she would look at them before she went to sleep some nights, when she wasn’t at Odilie’s, and touch herself.

“Sometimes I think I’m meant to be bad,” Peri whispered once to Odilie, the bottom half of her face sinking under water, her lips burbling bubbles just at the surface of the sea.