“No,” Serena said. “You sit in yours.” She settled herself in the center chair, the blue one, pulled her sunglasses down from her head and stretched out her legs. The plastic squeaked against her skin. “Olivia will come sit with me,” she said. She opened the picnic basket and took out an enormous bag of Jordan almonds. I went over and sat at her feet.

Janet sat in the yellow chair and Laurel reclined in the red one. Laurel rolled up her shirt, and I was briefly transfixed by the impossible smoothness of her stomach, that soft, unbroken plane, her navel ring a little crown jewel. I wanted it to stay inviolate and clean forever, like a blank page. I also wanted to slash a jagged hole through its center, the way you can’t help but disturb a still pond you find in the forest, make it gulp your heavy rock.

Related: not long ago I read that our impulse to bite cute things is simply a product of cognitive overloading. Our brains are chemically confused by too much cuteness. This is so cute it hurts, we say. In fact, it does hurt: our brains interpret confusion as a threat, and a threat as pain. So an emergency neural signal is sent out: destroy destroy destroy. I’ll eat you up I love you so, etc. Mouths open, jaws and fingers flex, but societal norms generally prevent us from ripping the soft downy heads off other people’s babies, no matter how unbearable they smell, and so we nip and nibble only, hold little toes to mouths, make exclamations of edibleness. This is how we trick our brains into believing the threat has been disabled.

Serena put her hands on my head, and I steeled myself a little. My mother used to make me sit this way when she French-braided my hair, which she used to like to do every Sunday, despite my furious protests. The braiding hurt, because she pulled so hard, because she was not a gentle person, but the braids were soft and smooth, and afterward, admiring myself in the mirror, I was always sorry I had fought her. This fact did not keep us from the same argument a week later, of course. But Serena did not try to braid my hair. She just ran her fingers over my scalp, passed bunches of hair between her hands, making fresh and tingling parts where they had never been before. Even in the heat, her hands were cool. I leaned my head back between her legs, and the yellow fabric of her dress surrounded me, making the bright day even brighter.