Without missing a beat, James shouted over the rest of my line, “AND MY BUTT’S NOT BIG, BUT MY DADDY’S GAY!”

The girls from cabin 11 laughed loud and quick, like they were getting it out of the way. I looked at them hard.

No one started a new rhyme. James didn’t look at me—he got up and started chucking pebbles at the water. Angelica was watching herself wiggle her toes. She’d gotten Jojo to paint her toenails the night before. Pink.

I stood up and walked away, up the long dirt path to our porch, where Aunt Ess poured me a lemonade. Aunt Ess almost never came down to the beach. She and Uncle Frank mostly liked to sit in the big chairs facing the water, and if you stood in the wrong place, Uncle Frank would say, “You’re in my sun,” and that meant move.

I didn’t tell on James. The truth is that my cousins love my dad especially. Dad was the only grown-up who came back from the store with kites for everyone, or a stack of Hershey bars so we could make double-stuffed s’mores. I didn’t know what would happen if I told Dad what James had said, and even though I never sat down and explained it to myself, that was why I didn’t tell. I didn’t want anything to change.

Instead, I drank my lemonade and I scratched. Dad wasn’t there to stop me. I had stupidly put on the smelly suntan lotion that the cabin 11 girls had shared at the beach. I’d wanted to slap it all over my arms and legs like Angelica and Jojo did, and say how good it smelled. Coconut.

“Itchy?”

I had forgotten that Uncle Frank was even there.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I used to wear gloves to bed,” he said. “Your dad ever tell you about that?”

“Yeah.” Dad said that when Uncle Frank was a little kid, his eczema was so bad their mom made him wear cotton gloves at night so he wouldn’t scratch.

“I hated those gloves,” he said.

“Why didn’t you just take them off?” I said.

“Oh, I did. Our secret. Shh.” He closed his eyes.

I sat on the porch and scratched, and I watched James swim out to get that ball.

I Told Miriam

The day after I decided not to tell Dad what James said, I woke up with itchy bumps from that stupid cabin 11 suntan lotion. I had bumps on my arms and my neck and my back, and Dad said I couldn’t swim or even wear my bathing suit for a whole day.

I asked Angelica if she wanted to row over to the general store, and she said nah. I asked her if she wanted to take a bike ride, and she said the girls from cabin 11 had asked her to go swimming.