“Rich,” I said.

  “Huge.”

  “Doctor!”

  After, we ran into the waves and looked back at the big houses along the sea.

  “That’s where I want to live one day,” you said, and pointed to a mansion with dramatic geometric shapes. You liked the modern beach houses. But I didn’t. They didn’t seem to fit at the edge of a majestic bluff.

  “And ocean houses are too much work, anyway,” I said, which was what Dad had said after Grandma’s house had started to grow mold all along the walls and she refused to move. The house is literally killing you, Dad said to her once. But Grandma didn’t care. It was her house. She wanted to die there, she said, and she did.

  “Oh my God, Sally.” You laughed and started to make your way to shore. “I’m not talking about reality. It’s just a dream house.”

  * * *

  On the way home from vacation, Dad always stopped at the gas station in town to fill the car back up. “Girls, go give them forty dollars,” Dad said, which excited me, because that meant we got to buy whatever we wanted with the change.

  We ran inside the mini-mart, all the way to the potato chips in the back. We stood there for a moment, trying to decide between the different flavors, when Billy walked in with a girl I didn’t recognize.

  “Ugh,” you whispered. “Shelby Meyers.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Just some girl in my chem class,” you said.

  I was surprised by how different Billy looked when he was standing in the market with a girl. He looked like he was in some play, cast as Shelby’s husband, reaching out for a can of beans, turning it over and over as if to ask himself, are these the ones that my mom buys? We watched as he walked to the register with his hand in Shelby’s back pocket, and hers in his.

  “Why do they walk like that?” I asked you. “Seems like it would get annoying.”

  “Because they’re in looove,” you said. “When you’re in looove, you have to stick your fingers in each other’s pockets.”

  “Mom and Dad never do that,” I said.

  “Mom and Dad are married,” you said, as if married people couldn’t be in love.

  But when we got back to the car, I felt vindicated. Dad and Mom were kissing. “You caught us!” Mom said, but she clearly wasn’t embarrassed. Just flushed from a week of sun.

  “Gross!” you shouted.

  “Get a room!” I added, because I knew I was supposed to be upset by such a sight. But Dad turned on the car and said, “You get a room! I bought this room. This is my room.”

  “Your father has a point, girls,” Mom said.

  Then, before he started driving, Dad leaned over to kiss Mom again, for dramatic effect. This time, Mom really did blush. Smiled as she turned to look out the window. And I don’t know why this should have felt like a sudden realization, but it did: Mom was Dad’s wife, I thought. And Dad was Mom’s husband. And they loved each other the way we loved Billy Barnes.

  * * *

  At the end of July, it got so hot, the air conditioner broke. “Well, that’s it, folks,” Dad said, patting it with his hand.

  For some reason, Dad left it in the wall and refused to fix it. He walked around in his boxers before work, and Mom put cucumbers in her water as if that made it colder.

  “This isn’t so bad, is it?” Mom said, holding up her glass like it was a cocktail.

  “This is living!” Dad said.

  “I don’t understand why we can’t just have air-conditioning,” you said.

  “Air-conditioning!” Dad said. “Who needs air-conditioning?”

  “People do,” you said.

  “Au contraire,” Dad said. “People do not. Do you think the Egyptians had air-conditioning when they built the great pyramids?”

  Dad did not yell to teach us our lessons; he went to graduate school, he often reminded us. He appealed to the history of other people’s suffering to teach us our lessons.

  “But we’re not Egyptians,” you said.

  That wasn’t Dad’s point.

  “What’s your point?” you asked.

  “The point is, you girls need to toughen up!”

  Then Dad went to work (where there was air-conditioning, you pointed out), and Mom suggested we all get a grip.

  “Your father works very hard,” Mom said. “He deserves air-conditioning.”

  “What does he even do?” I asked.

  I never understood this. Dad’s job was so confusing, even though you had explained it a million times.

  “He’s a safety consultant,” you said. “He keeps people safe.”

  “But what people?”

  “Telephone people,” you said.

  “What are telephone people?”

  “Those men, you know those men who climb all those cell towers everybody is building now? The ones that go really high up in the sky?”

  No. I didn’t. I didn’t know what a cell tower was. And I had never heard about telephone people before. But you were done explaining.

  “It’s too hot to talk,” you said.

  So Mom suggested the pool. We put on our bathing suits, met in the garage.

  “Can I drive?” you asked.

  You were newly sixteen, with a learner’s permit, and lately Mom had been letting you drive us places.

  “Are you going to finish putting on your clothes?” Mom asked.

  “Why do I need clothes?” you asked. “I’m wearing a bathing suit. We’re just going to the pool.”

  “What if we get in an accident?” Mom asked. “And you’re stuck in your bathing suit all day.”

  “I won’t get in an accident, then,” you said.

  But Mom wouldn’t let you drive until you went upstairs and put on a shirt and jean shorts. You didn’t button them, though, and rolled the waist band over to show off the top of your bathing suit underneath. I prepared myself for the fight to begin again, but Mom didn’t say anything. We just quietly watched as you drove us to the pool, and I became fixated by your hands, how they looked like Mom’s on the steering wheel. Your nails, tipped the same color as hers: Like Linen.

  You parked. “Are you going to finish putting on your shorts?” Mom asked, then locked the doors.

  “They’re on,” you said.

  “You haven’t buttoned them.”

  “Nobody buttons their shorts anymore.”

  “Nobody buttons their shorts anymore?” Mom said. “Is that what you are really saying to me?”

  “Yeah. It’s a trend.”

  “Oh, is that so?” Mom asked. “And what is this trend called exactly?”

  “I don’t know what it’s called,” you said. “Trends don’t have names. Trends just are.”

  “Sally,” Mom said. “Please be honest with me. Is your sister making this up?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.” Because that was the most honest answer I had. You had told me a lot about high school, but you never mentioned whether people were or were not buttoning their shorts, and I had not thought to ask. I looked out the window for the telephone people in the sky, but I didn’t see them. Mom sighed.

  “I refuse to ask my own daughter to button her own pants. That’s supposed to be a given. That’s supposed to be something your child just does.”

  By then, she didn’t even sound like she was talking to us anymore. She sounded as if she was talking to the company who manufactured us.

  “Fine,” you said. “I’ll button them.”

  You seemed annoyed until we opened the gate and walked onto the pool deck and saw him. Billy, at the edge of the high dive, just about to jump. You clutched my arm, pulled me closer to you. You didn’t even have to say his name.

  “Predictable, but perfect,” you said, as if we were watching the Olympics. “What do you say, Sally?”

  “A classic dive,” I said, in my best announcer voice. “Nine for style, ten for technique.”

  * * *

  At the pool, I wanted to swim the way we had in the ocean. I wanted to jump off the high dive like Billy and the other boys, fly through the air, but you didn’t. You were different at the pool where Billy and the rest of the town could see us.

  You wanted to lay out—far away from Mom’s chair, you said—and I didn’t see the point of being anywhere you were not, so I spread my towel next to yours. I sat heavy in my bulky one-piece, while you were sprawled out in your American flag bikini, with one eye always on Billy, who would swim laps so perfect they barely made any sound. When he was done, he floated on an inner tube, listening to his Walkman. And then, when his break was over, he returned to the snack bar, where he sold candies.

  This was our chance.

  “Come on, Sally,” you said.

  We walked up to the window.

  “I’ll have an ice-cream sandwich,” you said to Billy.

  “Sure thing,” Billy said.

  Billy’s face—it had become wider and flatter since I last saw him. It reminded me of a prairie I once saw in my history book at school. It made me imagine building things on top of it.

  “And what do you want?” Billy asked me.

  “A Jolly Rancher,” I said.

  “What flavor?” he asked.

  “Watermelon.”

  You didn’t say anything as Billy handed you the goods. Your hand did not shake and you did not fidget with your ice-cream sandwich, and this steadiness surprised me. Reminded me of how calm you were before you sang the National Anthem, how you simply moved the hair off your shoulder and began.

  “Hey, thanks,” you said.

  “No sweat,” Billy said. “It’s my job.”

  Billy tapped his thumb against the counter. He was listening to music on a boom box just loud enough so he could hear, but softly enough so he wouldn’t get fired: Nirvana and then Ace of Base. Our favorite bands.

  “Well, you’re very good at it,” you said.

  He laughed. “I know. So talented,” he said. He opened the register, and then dropped each quarter dramatically into your open palm. “Someone should give me an award.”

  “Not everybody can make change like that,” you said.

  Then we walked back to our towels, where you sat down and became yourself again.

  “Sally, did you see that?” you asked.

  “See what?”

  “When Billy handed me the money, he winked at me.”

  I didn’t see it. I had been very busy trying to unwrap my Jolly Rancher—notoriously difficult. Sometimes the plastic melted into the candy or the candy melted into the plastic. I couldn’t tell, which Mom said was a reason I should not be eating it—you shouldn’t be eating something that cannot be distinguished from plastic. But I ate it, because Dad said we were already doomed—our bodies were practically half-plastic now.

  “But why would he wink at you?” I asked. I felt the sweet burst of candy in my mouth.

  “My question exactly,” you said.

  I had never seen anybody wink before in real life, except Grandpa, but Grandpa only ever winked at our cat, the one we called Doctor, and only in those few months before Grandpa died, and Grandpa winking at Doctor was even more confusing than Billy winking at you, because it made me think that Doctor knew something about Grandpa’s looming death, that maybe Doctor was Death, and for years, I was too spooked to look Doctor in the eye, as if she would take me, too. But Doctor never did, of course—Doctor died. We found her curled up under the deck one day, and I felt so bad as Dad removed her. Cried for days until Mom said, “Sally, it’s just a cat,” which was exactly why I was crying. That whole time, it had just been a cat.

  “Do people in high school wink a lot?” I asked.

  “No,” you said. “It’s simply not done.”

  You explained that normally when a boy wanted a girl’s attention in high school, he would nod in her general direction or make an obscene gesture with his hands or maybe just say “Wassup” and then completely ignore her response. It was important, you said, for boys to act like giant assholes.

  But Billy winked at you. And no boy had ever dared wink at you before. It was nice, you said. Old-fashioned.

  “What do you think it means?” I asked.

  You licked the ice cream around the edges of your sandwich before you answered. You started doing this in high school a lot—made me wait for your big conclusion.

  “I think it means he likes me,” you said.

  “But what about Shelby?”

  “Oh, they broke up.”

  You had heard from Priscilla’s brother that Billy had dumped Shelby last week. Billy wasn’t ready for a serious relationship. Billy was just a boy and wanted to be a boy forever, or something like that. But Shelby was distraught, cried for nearly a week and dyed her hair blonder than her mother’s and wrote terrible things about Billy in chat rooms online.

  “I need a napkin,” you said.

  You were determined to get Billy’s attention that day. You stood up and walked back to the snack bar window without waiting for me. I put on the hat you were wearing and cloaked my body in a giant T-shirt and started to run after you, but I tripped. Stubbed my toe. By the time I caught up with you, it was too late. You were leaning over the bar into the window, laughing at something Billy said, and you looked so different to me. Something to do with your hair, how long it had gotten, and your breasts, which had started to look like Mom’s breasts, and I know that’s a thing you told me never to say again, but it’s true. It all gave me the same strange feeling I got after Billy jumped off the school roof, as if you were someone I didn’t know. As if you had drowned the real Kathy—sticks and stones for bones—somewhere in the ocean in Rhode Island.

  But then he gave you the napkin, and we walked back to the towels, and there was another girl at the window. The lifeguard—she kept blowing her whistle for Adult Swim and then leaned against the counter to talk to Billy for much longer than it took to order fries. Each time Billy spoke, she laughed, held her stomach, like it was all just too funny.

  “Ugh, Lisa Halloway,” you said.

  “Who is she?”

  “According to legend, a slut.”

  I flinched. I had never heard you call anybody that before, and it didn’t sound right coming from you. “But she’s the lifeguard.”

  “So?” you said. “You can be a slut and a lifeguard at the same time. Do you even know what a slut is?”

  I shrugged. I had heard the word before, but never understood what it really meant since the boys used it to describe everybody they came in contact with at school—the librarian, who taught us how to use the Dewey decimal system. The bus driver, who gave us snap bracelets as we walked off the bus. Slut, Rick Stevenson said, as she drove away.

  “How can you be so smart and not know what a slut is?” you asked.

  “It wasn’t on any of my vocab tests.”

  This was a joke, but you didn’t laugh.

  “Well, if you want to know, a slut is a girl who tries to sleep with anybody, even someone else’s boyfriend,” you said.

  “But Billy isn’t your boyfriend,” I said.

  You ignored my comment. You pulled out one of Mom’s beauty magazines and we did a personality quiz that determined whether we were Yellow People, Green People, or Red People. I didn’t know these were kinds of people, I said. But you acted like it was science. You scored our answers and then announced the results.

  “You’re a Red Person,” you said.

  Even before you read the description, I knew it was not good. A Red Person liked symmetrical shapes, place mats, and feedback. A Red Person was rational, sensible, reliable.

  “What are you?”

  “A Green Person,” you said. A Green Person was chill. A Green Person was ready for anything. A Green Person liked dreams, open seas, and crystals. A Green Person wore a string bikini to the pool and said things like, “Nudity is what you make of it, you know. In Europe, people are naked all of the time and nobody cares.”

  And a Red Person felt upset by this. “They are?”

  That couldn’t be. An entire continent of naked people? But then again, Europeans were often naked in the paintings and sculptures we studied at school and our teachers acted like it was no big deal, pointed to their genitals with their fingers, and said, “What Michelangelo is doing here is celebrating the beauty of the human form.”

  “I just mean, Americans are such puritans,” you said.

  “You’re American,” I said.

  “I know.”

  I sat there and felt the fuzz covering my legs, two hairs almost out of every follicle, which was an outrage to me, but apparently my fate, according to Mom. “You’re half-Italian, half-German,” Mom always said. “This is what life is going to be like for you, Sally.” And yet she still wouldn’t let me shave. Mom hid the razors on the top shelf, and then dragged me to the salon every six weeks, and I didn’t understand—why did I have to keep my leg hair but was not allowed to keep the hair on my head?

  You kept turning over, kept looking over at Billy to see if he was noticing you. But he wasn’t. He was talking to Lisa the lifeguard and she was laughing, playfully swatting him away from her body.

  “Lisa’s not even pretty,” you said. “Everybody just thinks she’s pretty because she’s the lifeguard.”

  I nodded.

  “And Billy’s not really that attractive, either,” you said.

  This made no sense. All summer, you had talked about how handsome Billy had become.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “He’s too handsome,” you said. “He looks exactly like he’s supposed to look.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “Only a Red Person would say that,” you said, and put your head on the towel and closed your eyes.

  But I couldn’t just lie there. I was too upset to nap. I felt deeply flawed. Ruined for life. I was a Red Person. I was boring. I knew it. Why did I worry about how much work it would be to take care of a dream house? Why couldn’t I see the flaws in Billy’s absolute perfection? Why did I like it so much when Mom cut my sandwich in neat symmetrical halves? Why did I, as a toddler, try to clean the backyard? I would go outside and separate the rocks from the twigs. Put the leaves in little piles. And then cry when the wind blew. You and Mom and Dad all laughed, like it was the funniest thing about me, but it wasn’t. It was evidence that I was doomed.