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At school, my best friend was a tyrannical girl with the glorious Viking name of Ingrid. The rest of the year, I had other people, other concerns, other versions of myself. I still thought of it as something made to do what I wanted, belonging to me only. I swam in the lake in my dirty clothes and lay on the granite with the undersides of my legs sticky-hot, scratching up the lichen with my fingernails. I didn’t brush my hair until it tangled in clots on my shoulders, avoided showers until my grandmother said “Julie, you stink,” and pushed me in the direction of the bathroom. I lived as wild as one could be with the comfort of a warm living room to return to. We spent our summers in the Sierras combing up and down thickly wooded hillsides, poking at spiders that lived under the shutters, and burning little curls of our hair at campfires. Our families owned neighboring cabins on the mountain, both of us benefitting from the generosity of grandparents, both of us disappearing from our regular lives a few weeks out of the year. I was a few months from thirteen, and Vienna was my best friend in a very localized way.
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She nodded as she straightened, and I saw, already coiling in her, that restless interest in the forbidden. “I missed you,” I said, and then worried that she would not also have missed me. “There’s an algal bloom in the lake,” she said, bending down to pull a burr off her sock, “and my grandpa said it spits out poison.
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Vienna had a sleek runner’s body that I would never have. The difference between twelve and thirteen rested on her with a sunlit gravity. Her blonde hair was newly short, gathered up in a stubby paintbrush at the back of her skull. She was much taller, the year since we’d seen each other having stretched her out into a cornstalk leanness. When I said “What?” she stepped back, and scraped her eyes over me, instead of answering, a clear appraisal.
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I remember the first thing Vienna said to me, after she ran up the driveway to our cabin, was “The water is full of poison.”