My grandfather was stretched on the couch again. From that height, I couldn’t see him breathing, and I knew, from the rustle of my grandmother in the kitchen, from her unconcern, that he must be, but I still went down to check. He smiled at me like the crinkling of a sheet.

“What do you want for breakfast, Julie?” He offered his hand. My grandfather wasn’t the most tactile man, but he liked to hold my hand, so much that I still think of him, sometimes, when someone else does. The prominent blue veins that ridged the back of his knuckles, and the gentle way his wrinkles passed over them. The firmness and faint tremor of his grip. He would hold on for a long time.

I shrugged, because I could smell that my grandmother was already making pancakes.

“Is your friend still sleeping?”

“Yeah.”

“Lazy.” He smiled. I knew without asking that he wasn’t going to take us to the lake this morning, and so didn’t ask. Maybe I could say that I realized his frailty then, but it wasn’t like that. It was a long process of realizing and forgetting, and realizing again.

When Vienna got up, I asked her if one of her grandparents would take us, and she shook her head, pushing the bristles of her bedhead away from her face.

“Why not?” I asked.

She huffed. “They’re busy.”

“What about your aunt?”

“That bitch?”

I blanched. I liked Chelsea. How she was pretty and young-looking, kind to her annoying daughter, and, so far as I could tell, mysteriously husbandless. She was something like what I thought womanhood could be: the confidence, kindness, long hair, and narrow body. I didn’t know Chelsea well, but I wanted her to like me too.

I wanted Vienna to like me more, though, so I said nothing.

Behind our cabin and down the hill, there was a place we called Settler’s Fort, which was actually the long-ago, burned-out remains of someone’s shed or a small cabin. There was no part of it standing except the cement that had been the foundation once, and some chunks of stone that might have been pieces of wall. But you could find bits of colored glass there, warped by the sun. Blue and white and pale green twists of it, which we’d bring home and stack on our windowsills, or carry around in our pockets. Vienna and I walked to Settler’s Fort after pancakes, and Abigail caught up to us on our way down, which we supposed was unavoidable. We spread our sweaters on a fallen log, to discourage the beady carpenter ants that lived there away from our legs, and then we picked through the decaying bark with sticks, or knelt in the dirt, combing it with our fingers. Abigail gathered pieces of white glass and quartz in a little pile on the cement.

Vienna took her stolen cigarette out of her pocket again and put it between her lips. I could tell she’d been chewing on it before, from the faint waterline stain of her spit. We both looked at Abigail, waiting for her to say that Vienna would get cancer, and she sucked on her bottom lip as if trying to restrain her own predictability.