In that moment, Lily became certain that while she was underwater, something terrible had happened above. The surface had turned against her. Become inhabitable. Oxygenless. Like a balloon sucked clean of all its air. There was no longer anything between the edges. No space to breathe. No space, any longer, for her.

She flailed and churned the water. She pushed against the solid surface with both of her small hands, but it suctioned and held tight. Her thoughts seemed to scream out of her brain—Please, please, please, world, I’ll never take you for granted again, just please come back—right up until her cousins pulled off the heavy pool mat from on top of her, laughing.

She allowed herself two deep, grateful gasps before flipping them off (a gesture she knew was bad because her mother slapped her when she asked what it meant) and stomping to the first-floor bathroom, where she locked the door before she let herself cry. It was the first time Lily felt in her throat that bitter terror that, alone, she was not strong enough to thrive here.

—

WHEN LILY CAME TO, she thought she was a child again, back in her uncle’s pool. As she choked on lake water, she thought, for just a second, she could hear her cousins’ roars of laughter in her ears. Until she felt her hands tied to the boat lift underneath her and realized that the sound she took for laughter was only the sound of the dark water, rising.

She was lucky, she thought as she paced her breath with the gentle lapping of the freshwater tide. It was a weeknight, and a quiet one. If Gavin had strapped her down unconscious on the metal arm of the boat lift on, say, a Saturday afternoon or the Fourth of July, she would have drowned. But it was a weeknight, and the lake breathed easily like all those vacationing around it.

That day in the pool was the day Lily stopped thinking of herself as a solid person. She had traded her dreams for her mother’s, and then attached herself to Silas, looking to him to keep her afloat. And when he couldn’t, she turned to Gavin. Because the world had told her that if she sacrificed as much as she could—if she kept herself small and quiet, swallowed back her questions and angers and fears—she would eventually be light enough for someone else to carry.

Yet there she was, strapped to a boat lift, and somehow, Lily felt solid. And she knew that despite all her effort to silence it, all those holes she drilled into her own solidness, her strength had not forsaken her.