* * *

Later that evening, my grandmother sat us down to talk about the lake. We’d been lounging on the porch steps, watching the sun go down over the treetops and twisting up cobwebs on the ends of sticks. Vienna was trying to teach me a song. One of those joke songs about sex or overblown violence that are eternally, inescapably popular among middle schoolers. I can’t remember what it was now, but I remember the bawdiness, and how proud of herself Vienna looked. She told me her aunt had yelled at her for singing that song back at her cabin, because her cousin Abigail was a tattler. She lowered her voice when my grandmother called us in for dinner, but kept humming, like she was still saying the filthy things behind her teeth.

At dinner, my grandmother folded her soft hands and told us not to go near the lake at all. She included both of us in the prohibition, wisely, because the same rules that applied to me had to be extended to Vienna, or else I would disobey and claim that it had not really been a violation, because Vienna was allowed. She wasn’t able to explain to our satisfaction, told us only that it was a warm year, that the algae was overgrown, and that was dangerous. What part of it was dangerous? we wanted to know. Wasn’t there always algae in the lake? It wasn’t like we drank that water. In retrospect, I’m not sure my grandmother understood it herself. “Doesn’t usually happen this high up,” my grandfather said, paused in the process of finishing his soup, and my grandmother wrung one of her red-dyed ringlets around her finger and repeated, “Are you listening to me, girls? Are you listening to me? That water could make you very sick.”

How could we be anything but fascinated? “I can do whatever I want,” Vienna told me the next afternoon.” Laughing, with both of us stretched on the hot flank of a granite slab. “For real, I go to bed whenever, I eat whatever. I went down to the lakeshore store this morning, and I stole a cigarette.” She showed me, flicking it between her thumb and middle finger.

“Are you going to smoke it?” I was fearfully impressed.

Vienna dragged her bottom lip between her teeth. “I could if I wanted to.”

Vienna’s grandparents were disinclined to involve themselves in her activities. Parents were far away in the summer, their voices heard on occasional phone calls. I missed my own but didn’t think of them much. My relative lawlessness in the Sierra was an anomaly for me, a vacation from my usually supervised life.

Maybe the same was true for Vienna. I don’t know, because I never thought to ask her.

That was the last summer I would come up without my parents, before entertaining a teenager in the wilderness became too much for my grandparents. Trips in later years were restricted to weekends, and I lost track of Vienna. When I saw her high school graduation pictures I was shocked. Her hair long and shining, the planes of her body softened, a new solemnity and attentiveness in her expression; it all felt like it had been sprung on me too abruptly. Like she should have stayed thirteen while I grew.