As their flight continued, Hannah worried more about her daughter’s safety and less about being apprehended. Winded from the switchbacks of the Rockies, they rented a room that led out to a pool in a hotel with clinical depression. The soullessness of these suites—the oily genital smears on the mirrors, the matching TVs, duvets—was an uncanny source of comfort.* In the morning, Lily was missing, her twin bed a maelstrom of blankets. She wasn’t devouring gummy pancakes at the buffet. She wasn’t off taking the car for a joyride. Back in their uncaring accommodations, her sad, middle-aged would-be-felon mom assumed the traditional pose of defeat, cradling her head. Then the baritone hum of the air conditioner switched off, and she heard glass-dulled laughter that she must have tuned out before.

Lily was at the center of a group of teens goofing around by the “out of order” diving platform. Their ease had the quality of established friendships, though Hannah knew they were but the tenuous bonds of chlorine and Coppertone. A boy dipped below the surface and burst forth with Lily on his shoulders. Not pausing to deliberate, an opposing couple did the same. Both boys strutted, enjoying the ruffled crotches against their necks, the spandex cleavage grazing their buzz cuts. They waded nearer and nearer until the girls began to grapple the air like trees come to life in a nightmarish forest, if trees could also be girls. Lily fought viciously and below the belt—yanking braids, ramming shoulders, lunging for bikini tops. She bested team after team until the last girl fell, the thunk of an elbow to the skull and the subsequent splash the signaling bell of defeat.

“She won because she’s a freak,” the loser declared, climbing up the ladder. A scratch crosshatched a string of her suit and blurred with moisture. “Look, I’m bleeding.” Runoff swished onto the deck to the rhythm of her hips like a fluid hula skirt. The rest of the girls joined her, hiving into a clique on reclining chairs and scrunching their hair dry. “Is that it?” Lily challenged them. The boys, unwilling to upset the girls, drifted toward the shallow end.

“Lily saw our relationship differently after that,” Hannah said. Waving grandly for her daughter’s attention and to subvert her ostracism, she yelled, “Lily! Lily!” This move, however, was met with epiphanic mortification on Lily’s part, as if she had been the one to hit the water with a slap. The future had shifted. A glamorous mother like Helen at Lily’s side recontextualized the difference of her features as sexy or mysterious. A mother like Hannah, with a paisley nightgown tucked into her jeans and pressure socks, would make Lily a regular mistake of biology.

Now Lily had questions. What was my mother like growing up?

“She was mean. Helen’s ten years older,” Hannah said, “so when she was roped into babysitting, she raided the liquor cabinets and poured alcohol down my throat. Sometimes she kicked, pinched, or hit me.”