Christopher’s head lolled, his mouth hanging slackly open, a trickle of pink soda running from lips to chin. Cora cast wildly around until she spotted the distant streak of the shore. It wasn’t so far: maybe fifty yards. She could do that.

“Come on!” she shouted, and swam, rapidly outpacing her companions. That didn’t matter. They didn’t matter. Christopher was the one who was drowning, who had already drowned. Christopher was the one she had to save.

In what felt like the blink of an eye, she was staggering back onto her unwanted legs, carrying Christopher out of the fizzing waves and onto the shore. It was made of brown sugar and cake crumbs, she realized, as she was in the act of throwing him down onto it. Still he didn’t move. She rolled him onto his side, pounding on his back until a gush of pink liquid burst from his mouth, sinking rapidly into the sugary shore. Still he didn’t move.

Cora grimaced, realizing what she had to do, and rolled him onto his back, beginning to go through the steps of CPR. She had taken all the lifeguard courses between ninth and tenth grade, intending to spend the summer sitting by the pool, keeping kids from drowning. Maybe even protecting the shyer, fatter ones from their peers, who would always find reason to make fun.

(She hadn’t been counting on her own peers, who had been even more inclined to make fun than their younger brothers and sisters. She hadn’t counted on the notes stuffed into her locker, crueler and colder than the ones she received at school, where at least the other students were used to her, had had the time to learn to think of her as something other than “the fat girl.” She had never put on her red swimsuit or her whistle. She had done … something else, instead, and when she had woken up to find herself in the Trenches, she had thought the afterlife was surprisingly kind, not realizing that this was still the duringlife, and that life would always find a new way to be cruel.)

She breathed for him. She pushed against his chest until finally, it began moving on its own; until Christopher rolled onto his side again, this time under his own power, and vomited a second gush of fizzing pink liquid onto the sand. He began to cough, and she leaned forward, helping him into a sitting position, rubbing slow, soothing circles on his back.

“Breathe,” she said. “You need to breathe.”

There was a commotion behind her. She didn’t turn. She knew what she would see: two people who didn’t swim enough staggering out of the waves, with a skeleton following close behind. When that had become the new normal, she couldn’t possibly have said.

Christopher coughed again before his head snapped up, eyes widening in alarm. Cora sighed.