I watched Ros and Jess in the water of Lovers’ Lagoon. They kissed, oblivious to everyone who was there, including best friends and celebrities. They splashed. They kissed some more. They swam around. They continued kissing. Jess carried Ros at one point, and Ros wrapped their arms around Jess’s neck. And, oh yes—more kissing.

“Celia? You okay? You look a bit pale,” said Oliver. “What’s the matter?”

The thing was, I couldn’t say. I’d been stunned into silence. For the life of me, I couldn’t find my line.

This may come as a shock given my tendency to ramble on, but as a child, I used to pretend to lose my voice. In part, this was motivated by an obsession with The Little Mermaid, and in part motivated by cough drops, which were all the rage at school, the way limes were the fashion for Amy in Little Women. The preferred cough drops were the sugary kind that came in a little white box, lemon or red or orange, the only food item first graders were allowed to keep in their desks. They were as precious as jewels, those cough drops, a gem in the palm of your hand. If you had a sore throat, they were easier to come by. A perpetual case of laryngitis meant you had every reason to be stocked.

Eventually, though, the cough-drop fad faded and my voice was still nowhere to be found, and so my reluctance to speak landed me in the office of the school psychologist, who didn’t really offer a solution so much as note that it was interesting that, in losing my voice, I was both drawing attention to myself and asking that no one pay attention to me. It was paradoxical, she noted, to want to be invisible and visible at the same time. At home, I looked up paradoxical in the dictionary, and thought about that word for a really long time, and then read the rest of the pars because I was already there.

The other kids said I was a faker, and they weren’t wrong: silent Celia the faker, with her lips stained wild-cherry red and a little notebook that she would write in if she really needed to say something. I had no friends, but I was light-years ahead of everyone in terms of writing and penmanship.