That night, my cousins and I plotted what we would do with all the extra time we’d have together in the morning. We could go fishing, which amounted to standing at the end of the long, rickety pier that jutted from the shore into the shallow water in front of the cottage and waiting for a fish the size of a baby’s shoe to decide life wasn’t worth living. (I will never understand the thrill of fishing. At its very best, it’s an activity that ends with a vicious struggle to reel in something you can easily buy at a supermarket. And then what? You take a picture with it? So you can make that picture the cover of your dating profile? Nobody is impressed with your ability to catch a fish. Turtles can catch fish. Nobody is trying to fuck a turtle.) Besides fishing, we could also go tubing, but tubing is only fun for about five minutes, until you hit a small wave and are violently catapulted into the air and come crashing down into the water like you’re diving into a plate of frozen steaks, and suddenly there is water in orifices you didn’t know existed. The only real option was to go for an early boat ride, and the only boat we could operate ourselves was the paddleboat, the water version of a bicycle, really just exercise disguised as fun. But still, we could ride it out to the middle of the lake where the water was deepest and jump in without fear of getting grabbed by anything lurking at the bottom.

So that morning, we all got up and threw on our swim trunks. After breakfast, we took the requisite two hours to slather on SPF 1000 sunblock, a ritual that always proved pointless for our pale Anglo skin.

I walked the fifty yards to the lake while I waited for my cousins to finish smearing their pasty bodies, and waded a few feet into the water around the paddleboat. It was a beautiful morning—crisp, you might say, if you used words like that to describe the air and not a potato chip. The water felt brisk and refreshing, like swimming in a cold glass of lemonade, if that’s your thing. It was the type of morning that made coming to this mess of a place worth it.

And then I took a single step into the water and the beauty of the morning came rupturing to a close. I felt a shooting pain in the bottom of my foot—once again, stepping had proven to be my greatest weakness; if only I owned a pair of shoes—and when I lifted my foot from the water to look, there was a slice, almost two inches in length, along my heel. I’d stepped directly onto a shard of glass and cut my heel almost wide open.