“Uno,” Vienna said. I looked at the card she’d put down. It was from a different edition of the game, one with extra trick cards and props that had long since been lost.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked. Vienna shrugged, so I drew two and kept going. When we finished Uno and our sandwiches, we switched to Guess Who, which we played impressionistically and with questions we thought were very funny. Did your person used to be a porn star? Does your person look like they ax-murdered their parents? Does your person own a vibrator? Vienna had just told me what that was, and we both blushed, saying the word and giggling helplessly. When Vienna laughed, her mouth became a new animal, this sleek rabbit-pulsed thing taking up residence on her face.

If I were to diagnose something special about that summer, other than the omnipresence of death, I would say it was the last year before language reached all the parts of me, before words started knocking softly on my head, trying to get in. When I think about it, when I think about Vienna, this is where my mind goes more often than not. To naming. The things that it has made less frightening, and the things it has obscured, and what was different, a little, when I had nothing to call it. Even accurate words you don’t live in, the way you don’t live in a photograph of your house.

When Vienna crawled into bed that night, her shirt riding up and her hot side pressed next to mine, she whispered, “What do you think would really happen if we swam in it?”

I considered this, that licking green slipping up our arms, accepting our waists into it. “Do you think we’d get sick?”

“If we didn’t drink it, we’d probably be fine. It’s probably just if little kids drink it.”

Later, I would learn that harmful algal blooms produce something called cyanobacteria, which can be absorbed through the skin, or inhaled, just as easily as it can pass through the mouth. At the time this made sense, though, that there was only the one way to let something into my body, that it couldn’t enter me unless I allowed it. I rolled over so that my face was in Vienna’s short hair. She still smelled like the lake, that light blue-green smell, like disappearing underwater.

* * *

I woke up first the next morning. The room we slept in was on the second floor, a triangular chamber like the top of a church with a small stained-glass window that opened over the living room. It felt like a room for keeping princesses in. I could hear the soft sounds of my grandmother downstairs. Vienna had rolled most of the quilt around herself, the pale ridges of her knuckles curled around the dark green like tree roots. Her face was knotted up. I thought people were supposed to relax in sleep, but Vienna always looked the most worried then, like she only let serious things find her in her dreams. I padded over to the window and pushed it open with the tips of my fingers.