It was the dead body that saved her. Later, she would think of this moment and know that nothing else would have stopped Johnson’s hands digging all over her skin and into her brain, implanting the sound of skin on skin that she’d retrieve with shame the rest of her life. Later, standing on the shore, watching water bob around the lifeless woman, only then would she feel a deep sorrow for this body that saved her own.

“I’ll call the cops. About the body,” she said, and Johnson responded, “You crazy? We’re high as fuck. You’re like twelve years old. Shit. Shit.”

“I’m fifteen!” she said.

At their right a locked pile of beach recliners wrapped in metal twine leaned precariously. An empty lifeguard booth cast shadows over its dirty plastic bands.

“Jesus Christ,” Johnson yelled at her. “Jesus Christ. Jail time—that’s what it fucking is.”

Jeanette stared at the tower of beach loungers. She wanted to climb its rungs and go to sleep on top, a disgraced version of the princess and the pea.

“Well, we can’t just leave her here,” she said. “Can we just leave her here?”

Jeanette wasn’t used to a grown man without an answer. The world felt so much more dangerous, so much more uncertain than it had just a day ago. Tendrils of the dead woman’s hair pulsed like jellyfish with the tide. She had hair the color of Jeanette’s, hair the color of her mother’s.

Johnson had cast off his sneakers earlier, and his socked feet left little oval nests in the wet sand along the shore as he paced. Jeanette placed a foot in one of the little foot pools and marveled at the empty space.

“We gotta go,” Johnson said, grabbing her by the arm and pushing her toward his shoes and damp T-shirt that lay in a pile. “Come on. Get yourself together.”

“What about—?”

“They’ll find it. Someone will find the body in the morning.”

Johnson sprinted toward Ocean Drive, holding his pants up and wobbling like a duck. Jeanette followed, thinking their footprints that led up to the body were a bad idea. She wondered if she could call the cops from the car. But how would she explain why they had fled? Why she’d been at the beach after dark in the first place?