“I’m going to put beetle eggs in your mouth while you sleep.” Vienna stretched out her legs. Her foot brushed against my side, her thigh right next to my cheek. I could smell the lake water on her, feel the damp heat of her skin almost in my mouth. The heat of a fire started in wet leaves. I felt suddenly panic-sick at the prospect of the dry trees, all that hollow, still-standing firewood.

“You’re not,” Abigail said, and I kicked her, lightly, because I could.

* * *

“Vienna’s sleeping over,” I told my grandmother as we all wandered back to our cars.

“Ask her grandparents.” But Vienna’s grandparents didn’t care where she went, and we all knew it, so she just waved over her shoulder as she climbed into the backseat next to me. Everyone’s attention was occupied by Abigail, who was having another coughing fit, bent at a right angle and hacking onto the ground. Still, Chelsea looked up, over the sound of her daughter coughing, and I watched her exchange a nod with my grandmother when Vienna got in our car.

My grandmother put on a CD of children singing hymns that came on car rides for my dubious benefit. My grandfather sat in the passenger seat with his earbuds in and his head lolling against the window, escaped into his audiobook, as the high voices ran through “Kumbaya” and a song called “Oh, You Can’t Get to Heaven.” I was embarrassed to have the hymns playing when Vienna was looking out the window and couldn’t catch my eye roll; she might assume that saccharine enthusiasm was my choice. As soon as she looked at me, while the children on the radio proclaimed that Jesus loved them, I stuck my tongue out.

We passed our lake on the way back to the cabin, and both Vienna and I turned, as if with one body. She pressed herself to the window and I leaned out of my seat, putting my chin on her shoulder and holding the rest of myself a little apart from her. The water was a vivid green, drifting in paint-like swirls, the trees leaking, oily, off the banks and into the current. It looked like a lake in a rain forest, or a portal to another world.

“Oh my God.” Vienna lowered her voice on the word God, because my grandmother was listening.

“Can we—”

“No,” my grandmother said. “It’s poison.”

My grandfather looked back over the shoulder of his seat. “I’ll take you girls for a walk there tomorrow, if you want. We just can’t go in.”

When we got back to the cabin, Vienna and I poured out of the backseat before we were even at a complete stop. We went inside to play Uno on the floor, our swimsuits dampening the carpet. My grandmother bustled between the den and the kitchen, putting jam-and-cream-cheese sandwiches in front of us, turning up Fox News on the television. They talked about global warming there too, or didn’t, and moved loudly around the blanks in the conversation. It was the hottest year on record. The year before had been the hottest year on record too.