I left the table and climbed up to my sleeping bag, feeling seasick and thinking about how I was the only kid at the table with no brother and no sister, the only one whose mother was nowhere near Minnesota. Did anyone ever think about that? And, I thought, that’s worse than a stutter, which everyone knows you can just outgrow.

—

After it rains at the lake, it’s really quiet. And then the birds start calling out—first it’s just one bird talking, then two or three, and then suddenly they’re all calling back and forth and up and down, in their different voices.

It was like that at the cabin after the horrible bits and coin dinner. First no one talked, and then Aunt Ess said something and someone answered, and then James got the Boggle game and shook it and yelled, “Who’s playing?” And after that it almost sounded like normal.

I listened from the loft until Dad came up.

What a feeling feels like: When my mom is mad at me, my stomach hurts like a mouse is hitting it from the inside with a mouse-sized hammer. When my dad is mad at me, it’s the same thing, except there are ten mice and ten little hammers.

It took him a long time to come. He sat on the very edge of the loft next to my sleeping bag and said, “It’s dark up here. Don’t you want to turn on your light?” Each of us had one of those battery lanterns near our pillows. But I shook my head. I didn’t want to see his face, and I didn’t want him to see mine.

He rubbed the tops of his legs and said, “Sorry I left you here so long. I was seeing red for a while.”

“Seeing red” means your feelings are so worked up that you can’t think straight.

“I don’t care,” I told Dad. “I like it up here. It’s better than being down there with a lot of jerks.” And then I burst into tears. Except when it was over, I was still there.

Dad put his hand on my hair. “Bea. Did something happen?”

I didn’t tell him. Not about Angelica hurting my feelings all day, and not about what James said, either.

Angelica and I ignored each other in the loft that night.

The next morning, I apologized to Angelica at the breakfast table with everyone there, which Dad said I had to do. A family apology, he said. At least the girls from cabin 11 weren’t there. Dad and I had figured out the words together:

“Angelica, I’m very sorry for what I said at dinner last night. It was hurtful and wrong, and it won’t happen again.”