She used a water bottle to clear the blood away, and tried to see how deep the cut was, but when she peeled back the skin for just a moment, she let out the faintest of gasps. I could see what she saw, too. A dark spot, maybe a piece of dirt—that lake was filthy, after all, hence the broken beer bottle—but it looked more like part of a vein, maybe even an artery, and even though I don’t entirely know the difference between a vein and an artery, or whether there are even arteries in your feet (who knows!), it looked bad, like what you’d imagine cutting an artery would look like. I went pale. The blood kept coming.

“Let’s just call your mom,” Aunt Bonnie said, but I knew what she really meant: “Think about what you’d like to say to your mother before you die.”

I could hear her dialing the phone. By now, my parents would be on their way to the cottage, the car bounding down the highway with bottles of beer rattling in the seat where I would’ve been uncomfortably squished otherwise.

“Hey, Deb,” she said almost calmly when my mother answered. “Are you guys close?”

“Almost,” my mother said. “Why? Is everything OK?” Debbie, always assuming the worst has happened.

“Yep, everything’s good,” Aunt Bonnie said. Even though she really meant, “You left your dainty, fragile piece-of-shit son with me, and now he’s going to die.”

I could tell she didn’t want to get my mother worried, especially not when there was nothing she could do, not from the highway at least. And to be perfectly honest, I was fine with her not knowing. My mother is a notoriously worried woman, and I knew the second she learned I’d nearly cut off my foot, she’d go on and on about how we never should have been allowed near that water without military-grade protective body suits, at least three adult supervisors, and a written permission slip from a medical professional. My mother absolutely insisted that we all wear water shoes, those disgustingly ugly mesh clogs that meld to your feet the second they get wet. I hated water shoes. I hated that they filled with dirt and sand and gave my feet a rash. I hated that they made my feet feel heavy and dull. I hated the hideous colors they were designed in. And I hated knowing that I would now almost certainly never hear the end of it.

Aunt Bonnie looked at me the way you look at a bird that’s flown into a window and broken its wing, the look that says, “You’ll be dead within the hour, you poor idiot.”

“Let’s go to the bathroom and see if we can clean it out,” she said.