The stars were so bright up there, above the light pollution, the milk and spilled sugar of the sky. The barely illuminated corners of Vienna’s face. She had what I would call a cruel mouth.

“Let’s go swimming,” I said, and she said, “Yes,” and put the flashlight down to take off her clothes. We both looked at the lake while we undressed, out over the dark water and not at each other. I was still wearing thin tank tops under my shirt, no bras yet. Vienna’s bra was pink, with a little bow on it, and she turned her back to me to hang it on a tree branch. I was dizzy, in anticipation of the coldness of the water, of that green so vivid it was like one soft mouth. I left my pajama shorts in the dirt, and I started off because I didn’t want to be the one to hesitate.

The water was predictably slimy around my toes, but it felt good, like wading into a field, and once it was high enough we could see the green fairly clearly. It was different than it would have been in the daytime, blacker, but it still moved around us like magic. I thought about frogs that breathed through their skin. I thought about what I could take into my body through my body.

“It’s—” Vienna breathed, and then she kicked her feet off the ground, dropped onto her back, her arms spread at her sides. The algae rippled out from her. Her fingers slid accidentally—probably accidentally—against my ribs. And my throat hurt, and the curl of my fingers hurt, and I tried not to look at her naked body, focused on just her chin jutting above the water, her pale nose like the head of a fish, her cold lips.

I reached for her with both hands, touched her shoulders and nothing more, and imagined her diffusing in the water. The slow creep of green up from her fingers, up from her toes. I imagined her body dissolving into millions of cells of algae, millions of little flowers, floating there separate and together, mixing with my body, indistinguishable, until we and the lake were one thing.

* * *

Abigail woke us the next morning by pounding on the door. The beginning of a rash was itching under my left breast, the skin scaly when I reached under my shirt to touch it. “You have to come see,” Abigail shouted. “You have to come see! Everything’s dead.”

She sounded so excited about it.

We followed her down to the lake. All of us. My grandfather helped my grandmother over the puddles, chivalrous with his extended hand. Vienna strode on ahead of me, shoulder blades prowling under her tank top. Was it my imagination that she could not look at me? Was she thinking of the lake water? Of what we might have taken into ourselves? Abigail’s feet pounded up dust as she led us. I wonder how she ran so fast without coughing. I wonder what she got out of heralding death.