Vienna tipped her head toward me. “Well, why wouldn’t she cry? It’s sad.”

I blanched, but Abigail started coughing again then, as if her rib cage were trying to push part of her body out, and Vienna’s temporary alliance with her disappeared under this weakness. Vienna became what she was again, older than us and prettier and more powerful. She raised her hands to her mouth and coughed, mimicking Abigail, coughed like she was dying.

“Did you drink the lake water?” I said with a laugh between the rough sounds of their choking, watching for Vienna’s eyes between her fingers. “Maybe you drank the lake water, Abby.”

Abigail finished her coughing. She straightened. She drew in a long breath that I could hear rasping all the way down her throat. “Why are you so mean?” she said, and she sounded just astonished by it.

Vienna dropped her still-whole cigarette in the dirt, scraping her foot over it as if stomping out a light. “Don’t be a little bitch.”

Abigail stared, the pale O of her bafflement, her parted lips shivering like butterfly wings. “You can’t say that.”

“Bitch,” Vienna said. “Bitch, whore, dyke, slut.”

Horrified, I giggled into the heel of my palm. We were in middle school, and it felt good to be liked by someone who didn’t like many people.

“You’re both so mean,” Abigail repeated. “You’re both so horrible and so mean to me.”

* * *

Vienna woke me up in the middle of the night by putting her hand on my stomach. Being mostly asleep has always felt to me like floating in my own body, a thin film of myself spreading across the room. When she touched me, I coalesced, coming all together under her hand, entirely conscious of her before I even opened my eyes.

Before we’d gone back to my grandparents’ cabin, Chelsea had found us. She was not angry, I remember. Vienna avoided her eyes with the sleek-bodied elusiveness of a ferret. “Vienna,” Chelsea said, and I felt barely there, barely included even in this scolding. “Can you even tell me why you wanted to say those things?” Vienna scraped her foot back and forth in the dirt, sucked at the inside of her cheek, kept silent.

Now, in the night, she was catlike. Her dark outline, her dark pupils. “Do you want to go see it?”

“Yes.”

We crept down the stairs, pulled our sneakers on over our bare feet. We held very still as I eased the door open. Vienna had to step back in to get a flashlight. We hadn’t expected how dark the night would really be.

Once we were off the porch, though, on the road, we barely needed it. Our bodies knew the way. When Vienna’s feet slid in the dirt, she held on to my elbow. This alone would have been worthwhile, her careful balancing against me, the way it almost knocked me over.

I don’t know why we thought we’d be able to see it in the dark. I think I’d imagined it would glow. We picked our way down to the lake, and, when we came to the shore through the trees, turned to each other as we realized. Vienna extended her hand, shone the beam of the flashlight onto a circle of green water.