Kimmy said, “So, after me and Rae sucked all the milk out of them, they shrank.”

“Exactly,” Lisa said. She patted the cutlet beneath her shirt.

Rae had forgotten about this exchange and the existence of the cutlets entirely until a few weeks before this vacation, when Lisa finally agreed to purchase a few training bras for Rae, who was a late bloomer. Rae was dying to know what it would look like when she grew breasts of her own, and folded-up socks didn’t quite lie right under the training bra, so she decided to give the cutlets a try. She retrieved them from her mother’s drawer and went to the full-length mirror. She tested out a few different poses, not realizing, of course, that Kimmy had been watching all this. God, that little weasel, that sneaky little spying snake. Rae should have known that without locking her bedroom door, she ought to assume that everything she did was under Kimmy’s sneaky spying eyes.

Even so, Rae thought now, still staring at her sister in outraged disbelief, the sun white and terrible in her eyes, Kimmy should have the good and decent sense not to bring this up in front of Ryan. First the thing with the pee in the pool, and now this?

“Kimmy, you’re a liar and an idiot,” Rae said in a tone laced with venom.

Kimmy’s happy laughter ceased immediately, and she looked like she had been slapped.

Ryan started to hum and he walked slowly toward the water, clearly wishing to avoid any further involvement with this conflict.

Kimmy withdrew the jellyfish from her swimsuit and placed them at her feet. There were tears in her eyes when she straightened back up.

“Rae?” she said.

“I can’t even look at you.”

“What did I do?” Kimmy murmured.

Rae said, “You are such an embarrassment.” But even as she said this, she was losing steam. Witnessing Kimmy’s genuine confusion softened her. Kimmy wasn’t a bad girl or a bad sister, she was just a dumb one.

Rae sighed, looking out at the water, then at Ryan, then at her little sister. She said, “You just don’t talk about things like that.”

“Why? I didn’t know.”

“Now you know,” Rae said. “You just don’t.” She forced herself to extend a hand to gently pat Kimmy’s wet head.

On their way back, Kimmy ran ahead once again, darting in and out of the shallows and bending for shells.

Rae was quiet for a long while, mired in indecision over whether or not she should acknowledge the cutlet conversation with Ryan.

Her thoughts were interrupted when her eyes fell on a girl who was walking toward them from the opposite direction. The girl looked about Ryan’s age, maybe a few years older, but regardless, she was fully developed where it mattered. She was very pretty, with a tanned, athletic body and long black curls that tangled around the strings of her white bikini. Rae instantly despised the girl. The confidence with which Rae had walked with Ryan on the way to see the moon jellyfish twenty minutes earlier, the certainty with which she regarded their mutual attraction, had all but faded since the cutlet conversation. And Rae could only imagine what was going through Ryan’s head as this perfect-looking girl approached, this person who definitely did not require cutlets to fill out the cups of her bikini. Rae felt deeply ashamed of her own existence.