After Dad explained about being gay to everyone at the lake cabin, he asked if anyone had questions. No one did. Then Dad and Uncle Frank walked down to the dock and sat with their feet in the water. I watched from the porch, where I was sitting on the edge of Uncle Frank’s favorite chair. After a while, they stood up and jumped in the lake. They were splashing each other like little kids, laughing. I remember being surprised, because Uncle Frank never swims. He always says the water in that lake is too cold. Most of the time, he just sits on the porch, in his chair, in the sun.

“So, you live with your mom now?” my cousin James asked me that night in the sleeping loft. James is four years older than I am. I was eight that first summer without Mom, so he was twelve.

I explained to him about the days of the week. When I was done, we got into our beds, and Angelica tickled my arm for a while. (Usually, I tickled her arm, and then she would say she was too tired to do mine.)

Right around then, James started calling me “Ping-Pong.”

He had really weird nicknames for his little sisters—he called Angelica “BD,” which was for “bottom drawer,” because she’d once stepped into an open dresser drawer to reach something on a shelf and fallen over, cutting her lip. And James called Jojo “Speaker,” short for “speakerphone,” because when she was a baby she used to cry if she heard Uncle Frank’s voice but couldn’t see him anywhere. The names were kind of mean, but I had secretly wanted a James nickname for a long time.

I couldn’t remember doing anything Ping-Pong-related that James might be making fun of me for, but I didn’t care. I actually liked the name Ping-Pong, until Aunt Ess heard him down at our dock and told him to march himself up to the porch so they could “have a chat.”

“Aunt Ess, I don’t mind it!” I called after them. But she ignored me.

“You mean you like being a Ping-Pong ball?” Angelica said. Angelica is a year and a half older than me. We were trying to teach Jojo, even though she was only five, to play volleyball on the little beach where we kept the boats pulled up next to our dock. Now Angelica was tapping the dirty volleyball with the tips of her fingers. She had it trapped between a hip and an elbow.

“What?” I felt my eyes narrowing. I hated it when I didn’t understand something right away.

“You go back and forth, right? From your mom’s to your dad’s? Like a Ping-Pong ball.” She smiled.

I was on top of her in three steps. First, I yanked her ponytail, and then I smacked that ball off her hip, down to the dirt.