They hardly swam at all, though. I could see them from our porch, where I was stuck making stretchy-band pot holders with Jojo. Angelica and the girls were lying on their towels practically all day, putting on more and more of that smelly lotion.

Then Angelica invited the girls from cabin 11 to stay for dinner, and one of them sat in my regular chair. Dinner was bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches and corn on the cob, which made me think about Natalie the pig. The summer before, I had visited Natalie in her pen behind the general store, and now she was bacon.

My stomach itched.

Aunt Ess was sitting next to me. That was another thing; I had ended up on the grown-up end of the table. Aunt Ess kept saying, “Mmm, nothing like bits and coin!” Everyone in our family calls that dinner “bits and coin” because that’s what James called it when he was little. BLTs and corn is his official favorite dinner, and this was the second time in ten days that we were having it.

Seven people eating bacon, two times, plus two guests, equals sixteen servings of bacon. James basically killed Natalie.

I glared down the table at him, but he wasn’t looking.

—

Miriam says that sometimes, when we don’t want to “look hard at our behavior,” we look hard at everything else instead, and that was probably why I was telling her all about bits and coin and Natalie the pig. Because what happened at dinner was that Angelica had a long, long stutter.

She got stuck on the first W:

“W-w-w-”

Her face was red from lying in the sun all day, but now she got really red, I think especially because those girls were there.

“W-w-w-”

Aunt Ess smiled at her and said, “Try another word, sweetie.”

That’s when I said, “Wh-wh-wh-what if she doesn’t know any other words?”

Everyone looked at me like I had just kicked a kitten. Dad reached across, took my plate, and said, “Bea, leave the table. Now.”

Angelica burst into tears.

“Burst into tears” is what people say. Usually they just mean that the person started crying. But “burst into tears” always makes me see a story in my head, like a really short cartoon: a person goes “poof” into a cloud of tears, and then the tears fall on the floor and make a puddle, and the person is gone. That’s almost what happened with Angelica. She started crying, knocked over her water, and ran out to the porch. Aunt Ess and Jojo both ran after her.