While the other girl swats the scary ball away, Alison leaps and spikes and pushes off powerfully from the sand. She can feel eyes on her—Connecticut boy’s, Edwin’s. A vacation is its own world, compressed and powerful, like a planet with stronger gravity. If you play it right, it can teach you things about yourself you can’t learn the other 355 days of the year. It is her first day here and already it is happening. The vacation is finding its promise.

When the game is over, Connecticut boy approaches her. She can smell his sweat. It makes her think of Drew, salty and nice. He tells her about the bar in the white marble lobby where the liquor is watered down but where he’ll be, anyway, tonight, around ten P.M. He touches his hand to her shoulder, then trots off down the sand.

I MIGHT have it all wrong. Maybe Alison did not stand naked on the balcony on our first night on Saint X. Perhaps she did not play volleyball with such vim and vigor in order to impress a boy from Yale, on the one hand, and a local employee, on the other. Perhaps the scar on her stomach was not her most sacred vanity. I’m trying to triangulate the truth, to inhabit my sister’s mind. Impossible tasks, to be sure.

What I can say is this: While the details of this story may be products of my imagination, I trust its broad strokes and core themes. I believe that for my sister, our family vacation coincided with one of those brief, intense intervals of identity formation we all experience from time to time in our lives. She arrived at Indigo Bay at that critical moment when the girl cuts herself on the shards of her own reflection and watches, baffled and thrilled, as the blood begins to flow.

ALISON WEARS her pale pink slip dress. Her “fuck-me, I’m-a-baby” dress, as summarized by her friend Dan, who was in love with her but not something enough for her to consider a viable romantic option.

Connecticut is already there.

“Hey,” she says, exquisitely low-key.

“Hey.”

He is drinking a rum and Coke. He is even cuter than she remembered from earlier. He has one of those old-fashioned faces, the kind you can picture in black-and-white. For a moment she sees him in an army uniform and one of those little caps. The image excites her—a young man in the trenches, the secret personal sufferings of war, but also the part where she takes him and implants him in this scene while he sits here next to her in his button-down and has no idea that in her mind his face is smudged with dirt and he is living on rations of tinned meat.

She orders a tequila shot. She opens her throat and drinks it in one go, and though it burns she does not permit herself to react. She is a girl in a tiny pink dress, downing tequila like a champ.

They talk. In addition to playing cello in the Yale Symphony Orchestra, Connecticut is a German major.

“Why German?” she asks.

“I wanted to be able to read Rilke in the original.” He rolls his eyes at himself, which she recognizes as the correct move. Nobody likes a snob, but everybody likes the discernment that allows for snobbery.

“How do you say, ‘You must change your life,’ in German?” she asks, raising her eyebrows like, Of course I read Rilke. Actually, she doesn’t—she remembers this quote from a paper she wrote freshman year of high school comparing and contrasting Rilke and, for some reason, Keats. She got an A. Mr. Conti put the paper up on the projector as a positive example.

“Du musst dein Leben verwandeln,” Connecticut says. “Or something like that. So what about you? Do you know what you’re going to major in?”

“Probably something that will drive my parents crazy.”

They talk a while longer, letting the thing build. He asks if she wants to go for a walk and she says yes. He charges her drinks to his room, which would be romantic if his parents weren’t obviously paying for it. They leave the bar for the beach. They kick off their shoes. The sand is soft and cool as cream. For a few minutes they walk along the water’s edge, their fingertips brushing against each other’s, letting their banter slow and the force of the night and this thing they are creating together fill them. When they reach a cabana he gestures at it, she nods, and he takes her hand and leads her in. Easiest thing in the world.

She has kissed quite a few boys since Drew, and Connecticut is particularly enjoyable. He does not use his tongue a lot, which she likes, because sometimes in the midst of making out with a boy she will think about what a tongue actually is and feel paralyzed. He kisses her neck a lot and she likes that, too. It is all very, very nice. But there is something about this niceness that doesn’t sit right. She feels it like a cold gel applied to the moment. She is moving through this scenario the way she would work through a math problem she knows she will get right.

She knows why it is so easy for her, this and so much else. She knows the substance of the reserves inside herself that make the world a comfortable place to navigate. It is her mother and father loving her like crazy. It is the dappled lawn of her childhood home with its soft mown stripes of green and darker green. It is “fantastic insight!” written in a teacher’s delicious cursive in the margin of an essay. It is the gothic magnificence of the Princeton campus, through which she strolled all autumn in mesh shorts and flip-flops and a messy ponytail. It is every witticism she’s ever tossed off in a circle at a party and the impressed faces of the people who heard it. It is the people she knows and their reserves—their happy childhoods, their bright memories, their educations, all the beauty they have seen, out and out like ripples on the glassy surface of a lake in a secret glade they carry collectively within them. They are spinning it together, she and Connecticut, good fortune igniting on itself under the tropical stars. Is there anything more obvious in the entire world?

When he touches her thigh under her dress, she freezes. Not actually freezes. She keeps doing what they’re doing. But inside. She is not very experienced, truth be told. She was with Drew forever, but she’s learned in the past few months that all that experience is actually just one experience. They were babies when they started dating and they figured everything out together, and what if they figured it out weird? She hasn’t had an orgasm with anyone else and she knows it’s because she’s afraid that if she does, the guy will look at her funny because her orgasms are weird and she didn’t know it. She doesn’t want to be here anymore. She wants to take the nice kissing with her and leave.

She presses a finger delicately to his lips. “I should go,” she whispers.

“Are you sure?” He strokes her thigh higher up this time. It is the first thing he does that she doesn’t like. He looks down at his lap, where his boner pushes against his khaki shorts. Her stomach flips. Back in her room with her sleeping sister—that’s where she wants to be.

“I’m sure.” She scrunches her nose, cute as a button.

He wraps his arms around her waist. “But I want to kidnap you,” he says, and buries his face in her hair.

“Not tonight,” she says.

“Tomorrow?”

“We’ll see.”

She stands, smooths her dress. He reaches for her hand, and she holds his for a moment, then lets it slip through her fingers as she turns and walks back toward the lights of the resort.

“TELL ME something,” her father says the next day, as Clive gathers up the french fries he spilled in the sand. “Where do you recommend for some local food? You know, something authentic.”

Alison winces. Her father asks this every year, at every resort, on his bullshit search for some local color, the Real Wherever. She can’t stand how pleased he is with his question, like he expects Clive to be super-impressed by his desire to get off the beaten path. (Does he think Clive wants his favorite local spot to be invaded by hordes of tourists?) Her father wants to be able to say, Now, this is delicious, of the conch creole at some hole-in-the-wall, whether or not it is better than the conch creole served at Indigo Bay. Her mother wants to tell the cook on the way out, You have a beautiful restaurant, with her sweet little smile, when the truth is if she thought folding chairs and ceiling fans instead of AC were so great, she’d eat at places like this back home, too, which of course she doesn’t. Then her father wants to take his mediocre photos of the place and blow them up and hang them on the living room wall so their friends will inquire about them at dinner parties and he can tell them about this amazing little spot he discovered.

That isn’t fair. As parents go, hers aren’t so bad. Isn’t it better at least to have the inclination to leave the bubble? Well, maybe better for them, but shouldn’t the people who live here get to keep some places to themselves? But maybe the people who live here want people like her parents to come to their restaurants; maybe her notion that they’d rather the tourists and their money stay away is just that, a na?ve little notion. She could go around like this forever, trying to decide.

“People like Spicy’s. Their roast crayfish is quite popular,” Clive says.

“Roast crayfish,” her father says. “Fantastic.”

LATER THAT afternoon, Alison finds Edwin standing behind the open-air restaurant. “Hey, Mr. Carnival Sand Castle Champion.”

“Watch out. The girl’s feeling frisky today.”

She snorts.

A cook calls out from the kitchen, “Order up!”