“No,” he said. “I don’t. Go ahead.”

Ann, as usual, caught on quickly. “Oh my God, you don’t know how, do you?” Her reaction might not have been so devastating if she hadn’t dropped his hand when she said it.

Michael had been so anxious about this moment that he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to swim. He never spent his summers in a place like this. He didn’t know anyone who would have bothered to take him to a pool or Lake Michigan and teach him. Besides, he hated water, because it was his mom’s boyfriend’s favorite form of punishment. When he was little and he got in trouble over what seemed like nothing, Marcus would make him sit in an ice-cold bath, or in water so hot it burned his skin.

“It’s OK,” Poppy said. “I can show you how. But you should learn in the ponds, not here, not with the riptide.”

Michael didn’t know what a riptide was, only that it sounded terrifying: rip.

“I’ve never met anyone our age who couldn’t swim,” Ann said.

Michael’s mother had told him that it’s the people who think before they talk that you should worry about. Because she was so confident, Ann usually just said whatever was on her mind. But that afternoon her words hurt him deeply. He wanted to throw up.

Poppy might have been a space cadet, but she could see the pain in Michael’s face. He couldn’t hide anything from her; she was alert when it came to emotions, a human tuning fork. “God, Ann,” she said. “You didn’t have to say it like that.”

“I just meant that he’ll learn. It’s not hard, nothing to be embarrassed about. Even little kids can swim.” Ann pointed off in the distance at a little boy playing in a pool that had formed between a sandbar and the beach.

“Ann!” Poppy said.

“It’s really not a big deal,” Michael said.

That was a lie. It was a big deal. The stakes never felt higher than they did now. He couldn’t make sense of the recent dizzying turn of events. Six months ago, he was hiding out in the storage locker in the basement of the building near the Marquette campus where he and his mother had an apartment until she’d died. He’d showered at school and slept with his shoes on because he was afraid the rats would bite his toes at night.