THEY ARRIVE AT SUNSET, slipping beneath pastel clouds as the sun slips into the sea. For a moment it seems to Alison that the plane, too, will slip into the sea, but the tarmac rushes beneath them just in time. As the plane brakes down the runway, a ghostly whoosh fills the cabin. The minute it subsides, her parents and the majority of the white passengers unbuckle their seat belts and stand to retrieve their things from the overhead compartments: carry-ons, rackets, straw hats. Her dad edges out another dad in the aisle. A third dad edges out her dad. The pilot comes on the intercom and requests that everyone remain seated, but he is ignored. Heaven forbid their vacations start thirty seconds later. Once the plane door opens and people begin to move, her dad looks back at the black woman he had been seated beside on the flight; “Welcome home,” he says to her, before hurrying along. When they get to baggage claim, the carousel is empty and motionless. Everyone prowls around it, staking out the most strategic position. Ten minutes pass. A guy with a winter coat unzipped to reveal a Hawaiian shirt walks past her muttering, “Unbelievable.” She smiles. Let these dopes wait.

“You know that woman next to me on the plane was a lawyer?” her dad says to her mom on the walk to the arrival gate, once their luggage finally arrives. “She’s from here. She was just in New York on vacation.”

“Huh,” her mom says.

“Imagine that, Dad. They have lawyers here,” Alison says.

The shuttle to the resort is late, too. Alison’s family stands on the curb with two other families, next to a white sign with gold letters that say INDIGO BAY, for quite some time. Everybody grouses and makes small talk. The other families are from the Upper East Side and Bedford Hills. The irony of traveling over a thousand miles to spend the week talking to other people from the New York metropolitan area does not seem to be dawning on anyone. The moms talk to the moms. The dads talk to the dads.

“How old are you?” Alison’s mom asks a girl who must have changed out of her winter clothes in the airport bathroom—she is wearing bike shorts and a cropped T-shirt with a rhinestone heart.

“Twelve,” the girl says wearily.

“She’s on a birthday trip!” her mother says.

“Mom, why are we waiting?” the girl asks.

“I don’t know, sweetie. Daddy booked this vacation.”

When at last the shuttle arrives, the driver begins to load their suitcases.

“Is all of this going to fit in there?” a dad says, looking skeptically into the back of the van.

“Not a chance,” Alison’s dad contributes.

They are wrong, everything fits, and soon they are pulling away from the airport. On the drive to the resort, the small talk continues, but Alison doesn’t hear it. Her face is pressed to the window. She sees scruffy dogs and houses with rebar sticking up out of the roofs. Three goats bite at the dirt outside of a small white building with a shingle out front: CENTRE FOR DENTAL AESTHETICS. Everywhere she sees piles of … stuff. Rubble? Junk? There are houses with porches but no railings. A white concrete staircase that ascends out of the scrub, the top step touching only air. As she watches the world pass by, she is filled with disquiet at her inability to parse the things she sees. Are the diminutive chickens pecking at the side of the road malnourished, or are they some breed of chicken she has never seen before, or is this what a chicken is supposed to look like? Do they belong to someone or no one? Is this place in the process of being built or unbuilt or rebuilt or none of these—maybe something is happening here that she lacks the experience to comprehend.

The van trundles past a girl standing in a yard along the road; she wears a purple T-shirt and yellow cotton shorts. When they drive by, she runs into the road and chases after them. Then she plants herself in the middle of the road, puts her hands on her hips, and thrusts out her tongue. The shuttle judders on over the uneven road and the girl disappears into the haze of dust and twilight.

Alison is mortified to be in an air-conditioned van with her family and her fellow resort guests driving past it all. In her Global Justice class, she learned that two billion people, more than a third of the humans on earth, live on less than two dollars a day. (Are the people on this island those people? Are the things out the van window poverty, or just people living their lives? She doesn’t know how she would even begin to know.) Anyway, it’s not like she didn’t know people were poor before—she isn’t a complete idiot. In high school she volunteered at a soup kitchen. But her lasting memory of that experience is not of bearing witness to poverty, or of any good she did; it’s of the men … looking at her, calling her pretty with their ruined mouths. “You’re coming home with me, little girl,” a man in a giant tan parka told her one night. He pointed his index finger at her, then curled it toward himself and laughed madly. She felt afraid, though she was pretty sure he was messing with her, making himself into a caricature to mock her—like, Boo! The acrid smell of male bodies and the simultaneous unease and pleasure she felt in their gaze—this is what she has kept.

So the things she sees out the window do not raise her awareness, or whatever. They just mortify her. An old woman limping down the road. The accusation of that little girl’s sharp pink tongue. That girl is really millions of girls. You cannot permit yourself to forget that. How is she supposed to square millions of these girls with her own life? And how, in turn, to square millions of girls with a trillion trillion stars? She has been born on the one temperate, unhostile planet in the universe, in the richest country on that planet, into a family whose wealth places them at the tippy top of that country. It is a disgusting amount of luck. You could never be forgiven for such good fortune. Sometimes, when she thinks of her teeny-weeny life and how obsessed she is with it, she feels physically sick.

She is also mortified that she will spend the next week days darkening her skin on a chaise lounge alongside other oil-slathered tourists, while people whose skin is darker than hers will ever be (and darker than she wants hers to be) bring her beverages and fresh towels. And she is mortified that her parents see nothing wrong with the whole arrangement. No, that isn’t exactly right. They do see something wrong with it, but they think something along the lines of, We’re fortunate, they’re unfortunate, and it’s neither our fault nor theirs because we are all part of something that is beyond any of us, and we just as easily could have been born them and they just as easily could have been born us, but we weren’t, so here we are. Welcome to paradise. Honestly? She doesn’t even want to be here.

HER FIRST night at Indigo Bay, after her sister is asleep, she walks out onto the balcony to look at the stars. The warm breeze ripples against her skin. Venus burns a cold, clear blue. She unzips her dress. Just because she can. You can stand on a balcony and have an utterly ordinary moment, or you can let your dress fall to the cool terra-cotta tiles, unhook your bra, and offer yourself up to the night. Possibilities are everywhere, hidden in the fist of each moment, yet most people don’t see them, or they see them but leave them untouched.

She wishes she could see the picture she makes with the white curtains billowing behind her, hair fluttering in the wind, breasts lit by a fingernail of moon. She surveys the resort grounds below her. No one. This pleases her, not because she would be embarrassed to be seen, but because it means this is a secret moment. Hers alone, then, poof! Gone. When she thinks of all the secret moments locked within this instant—of all the people on earth doing things no one will ever know—her heart feels so full it could crack.