She looks at the starry sky, the dark shimmering sea, and tries to savor the beauty of it all, but she can’t get herself to really feel it. The view from the balcony bleeds together with too many other views on other vacations in other paradises. Which island had the pink sand beach? Which one had those zippy orange birds? Where was it you could wade out a quarter mile from shore before the water deepened? Somewhere she saw a sunset like a bloody sacrifice and a woman tossing white petals into the surf. She is eighteen and beauty already seems such a cheap thing. She can behold it and behold it without feeling a thing.

SHE SLEEPS late, then spends an embarrassing amount of time appraising herself in the mirror in the marble bathroom before making her entrance on the beach. When she finally emerges, her family is already set up, with a row of four chairs with white cushions in the shade of two white umbrellas. These resorts often have an obsession with white. White buildings, white floors, white linens, white uniforms. Like they’re trying to convince you you’ve died and gone to heaven, or like you’ve arrived at some hedonistic sanatorium because you’re afflicted by something and you didn’t even know it but now you will heal.

Her father starts talking at her. Cruise ship, slide, something, something. She pulls one of the lounge chairs into the sun and lies down. She takes out her Walkman and lets “Big Poppa” drown her dad out. A minute later her father hails one of the beach waiter guys like he’s a cab. Awful. But the guy doesn’t seem to notice, or care, or something. She turns up the volume on her Walkman and pulls the headphones down around her neck, hoping he’ll hear what song she’s listening to. He introduces himself. He’s Edwin. He is skinny and super-friendly with her parents, like all his life he’s dreamed of meeting the Thomases of Westchester, who are totally eating it up. Her dad orders her a fruit punch, which … she guesses he can inhabit whatever alternate reality he wants.

When Edwin comes back, he’s hunched under the weight of a tray of excessively garnished cocktails and she wants to disappear, because lying on this chaise lounge while he labors is so uncomfortable. The thing she can’t figure out is, if she is honest with herself, she does not find this arrangement uncomfortable because a person is doing something for her, but because a black person is doing something for a white person. Which doesn’t mean she doesn’t want him to have his job. So what does it mean, exactly?

When he asks if she’ll come play in the volleyball game in the afternoon, she shrugs, tells him maybe.

“More of a sunbather, are we?” he says.

Her entire body flushes. Not me! she wants to tell him. I’m not just some ditzy sun worshipper. But there is no way to convey this without protesting too much and coming off even worse.

He winks at her and continues down the beach.

Her fruit punch, actually, is delicious. The sun on her skin is delicious. Maybe she is wrong to have such a stick up her ass about the whole situation. Maybe she should, as a general thing, just shut up and be grateful. But lately she is beginning to suspect that gratitude (as an emotion, as an action) is a colossal scam. Rich, poor, it doesn’t matter—everyone is expected to be grateful for what they have, whatever that is. Once, in high school, she snuck into the city with her girlfriends to smoke clove cigarettes in Washington Square Park and try to get invited to an NYU party, and on the way downtown from Grand Central they had a taxi driver who’d been a chemical engineer in Pakistan. When she asked if it frustrated him to do what he did now, he said no, just the opposite, he was grateful. It was a familiar story. In my country I was a lawyer, I was a doctor, I was a professor, but I’m grateful to drive this taxi in America, I’m grateful to bus these dishes in America, I’m grateful to clean up the vomit of fraternity brothers in this dormitory at an Ivy League university in America. Meanwhile, Alison is expected to be grateful for her Audi, and for she doesn’t even know how much her parents pay for her college tuition, and for their beautiful vacations and the beautiful teeth she possesses after years of orthodontia. So what is gratitude, really, but reverence for a system that gives and deprives at random? No, not at random. The non-randomness is exactly the point, right?

THAT AFTERNOON when she hears Edwin yelling about the volleyball game, she pushes herself up from her chaise lounge. She will show him who she is.

“Want to come watch me play, Clairey?”

Her sister’s face lights up at the invitation. Sometimes her power to make her sister happy terrifies her.

She’s nervous when she pulls her tunic up over her head. Though she knows she’s pretty, cute, arguably even sexy in a girl-next-door way, she is always nervous when she reveals her scar to people for the first time. She isn’t insecure about it, exactly; it’s more like the nervousness she feels at a dance recital just before she leaps onto the empty stage.

When her torso is exposed, it happens like it always does. Her teammates stare with the obviousness of cattle. When she catches them at it, they avert their eyes oh-so-politely. She loves catching people looking at her scar, shaming them with a glance.

As the players manage the ball back and forth over the net in sequences of sloppy bumps and sets, she imagines them imagining what happened to her. A wash of dark scenarios projects like a movie montage against the limpid blue sky. She sees herself thrown from a car onto one of those boggy meadows beside the highway, gnashed by a neighbor’s Akita, cut open on a surgeon’s table.

The real story is her favorite, but she guards it closely, not wanting to dull it by too frequent visitation. She was four. It was summer, and her family, which did not yet include Claire, was at a campground on a lake. They went every summer, and she never liked it. The bottom of the lake was soft, like stepping in dead things. It was night. She was sitting around a fire with her parents roasting marshmallows. Her parents turned away for a moment and when they looked back, she was in the fire. Her father dove in and scooped her out—she was in the flames for only a few seconds, just long enough to be marked by them forever. At the hospital, when her parents and the nurses asked her what happened, she just shook her head, unable to explain. As her parents tell the story, it is a mystery: whether she tripped and fell or whether, dazzled by the flames or propelled by some wild impulse, she jumped.

“I could have died,” she told Drew the first time she let him see it. When he touched the smooth, pink surface of the scar gently with his fingertips, as if it might still hurt, she loved him. It’s true—she could have died. In a way, her whole life grows out of that moment. Edwin will begin to see it now: she is a person to whom things have happened.

A woman on her team is talking through the earth-shattering conundrum of whether she and her husband should go on the excursion to the old sugar estate and rum distillery. “I wanted to go, but I’ve heard it’s a drag. Apparently it’s mostly about the history of sugar cultivation on the island, the plantation system and that stuff?”

That stuff, i.e., slavery? Alison purses her lips to indicate to Edwin that she does not approve of the woman’s comment. She hears everything her teammates say twice—once as herself, and once as she imagines he hears it. The woman’s husband, a man with dolphins on his pink swim trunks, serves the ball into the net.

“Almost, honey,” the woman says. “I would just like to have a week here where I don’t have to think about how awful the world is. I’m a defense attorney. I know it’s awful.”

Fair enough? Alison isn’t sure. You don’t get to decide, do you, when to care and when not to care, when to see the big picture and when to zoom in so super-close on your own life that your desire for a massage fills your entire field of vision?

There are a few other college kids playing, and they set about the unavoidable business of identifying the hall mates, teammates, bunkmates that connect them. “Small world,” remarks a boy who initially says he goes to school in Connecticut, and only when prodded lets “Yale” cross his lips, a confession he makes with an irreproachable mix of sheepishness and élan. Small world. Small world. Like it is some crazy cosmic coincidence, rich people overlapping with other rich people. If he weren’t so cute—yellow-haired and tall, with a certain anemic quality she finds appealing—she would be done with him already. Instead, she flirts.

The other girl her age squeals when the ball comes near her. She adjusts her bikini top to maintain just the right revelation of boob. She says, “Did I do good?” in a baby voice when she sets up a spike for one of the guys. Alison doesn’t get it. Okay, fine, she gets it. In a way you can hardly blame the girl, because it works. The boy with the hemp necklace is eating it up. But can someone please explain to her the appeal of a guy who can be reeled in by that kind of thing? What you want is a guy who is a little afraid of you. And you want to be a little afraid of him, too.