He thought he’d known what to expect. Poppy and Ann had shown him their scrapbooks stuffed with pictures of Wellfleet. The photos made the place seem quiet and peaceful, and he looked forward to going there the way his mother had talked about going to heaven. He hadn’t anticipated the wind ripping in his ears, the ocean roaring like a freight train, and the girls staring at him.

“Don’t you want to swim?” Poppy asked. It was as if she thought the ocean could change him, and she was right. It could. The ocean could change him from hot to cold, change the air in his lungs to water, change him from living to dead.

Michael looked down at his feet to anchor himself but got dizzy watching the small pebbles crash against each other, roll forward, skitter back, forward, back. They were powerless, grinding down to nothing against each other.

The air tasted like salt. Gulls swirled overhead and the wind ripped at his hair. Children misbehaved and their parents in plaid swim trunks and polo shirts scolded them in their strange East Coast accents. Daniel, I tooold you not to put sand in your brotha’s eyes and Whea’s your noodle? They were the kind of people who belonged here, people who set summers aside from the rest of the year, people who had money and families, who knew how to swim and thought nothing of it. People who thought this beach was relaxing.

Ann reached for his hand, and her touch sent a familiar shock through him. “Isn’t it amazing, Michael?”

It was amazing and it was theirs—the roaring ocean, the old vacation home, their nice parents, everything. The girls thought they were sharing it with him, but he felt like they were rubbing their perfect lives in his face, saying, This is ours, ours, ours—we know all about it, we come here every year. You have no history, you know nothing, you have nothing, you are nothing.

Ann’s hand was nestled into his own, warm and soft compared to the cool ocean spray, but just as dangerous.

On the drive out, she sat next to him in the cramped backseat and pressed her thigh against his. It made him crazy, and he had a feeling from her faint smile that she knew it would. He’d tried his best to concentrate on the family game they called “Anibitz.” Ann and Poppy said they’d made it up and played it since they were little. Someone would name an animal, like a sea lion, and someone else would name another one, like a tarantula, and whoever was “it” had to draw a combination of the two and come up with a combined name, like “sealantula.” Or they’d draw a creature and everyone else would try to guess what it was made out of—a roach, a monkey, a polar bear: a “romopobear.”