“What are you looking at?” Vienna demanded, even though Abigail wasn’t looking at her.

Abigail shook her head, her body gathering toward the pavement. “Nothing.”

“Do you know how to do that thing,” Vienna asked me, “where you light a fire with a magnifying glass?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t, but I thought if the circumstances were right I could figure it out. If Vienna and I were alone in the woods, the sun baking down on our backs. If we were dependent on me, I could impress her. “You need tinfoil, though.”

“Oh. Can you really kill ants like that?”

Skeptically, I considered a nearby carpenter ant. It was fat and serious-looking, almost as big as my pinkie nail. “Small ones, I think.”

“Do you wanna hear a ghost story?” Abigail asked us.

“No.”

“There was a boy who always killed every bug he saw, and one day he woke up to the ghosts of all the bugs, and they’d become one giant bug and they swallowed him.”

“That’s a kid story,” I told Abigail, because it was, I remembered it. “That’s in the little kids’ book in the library.”

“So what?” said Abigail, and I scoffed.

Vienna arched into a long stretch. She was wearing a T-shirt with part of the neck cut away, showing a pale triangle of her chest, freckles speckled across her collarbone. Sometimes I felt as if there were a cork being pressed down my throat when I saw those freckles, the soft, vulnerable pink of her. “A girl at my school died last year,” she said. Vienna liked to bring stories up the mountain to me. She had told me, last year, about a girl she knew who was twelve, who’d just lost her virginity with a high school boy behind the school. I repeated that story to my dad later, weepy because I’d promised to keep it a secret. I remember he thanked me for telling him. Like there was something he could do about it.

“She had a heart problem,” Vienna went on, “and she asked the coach if she could sit down during laps. He said yes.” Vienna took the cigarette from her teeth, holding it between her fingers, like she would blow smoke out to make a point, if she could. “And when he came back to check on her, she was dead.”

I exhaled mournfully. “Did you know her?”

Vienna shook her head. “I heard it was because she was overweight.”

“Oh.” I glanced down at my body, at the press of my stomach against my T-shirt. That year my friend Ingrid had told me all the girls said behind my back that I had a fat ass, that she told them not to say it, but she just wanted me to know. Vienna’s body did not look like my body. Later, as an older girl, I would think how funny it was to simultaneously want someone’s body and want someone’s body.

“That’s really sad,” Abigail said.

“Are you gonna cry?” I asked her.