Her blonde hair was newly short, gathered up in a stubby paintbrush at the back of her skull. The difference between twelve and thirteen rested on her with a sunlit gravity. The lake? She nodded as she straightened, and I saw, already coiling in her, that restless interest in the forbidden. I was a few months from thirteen, and Vienna was my best friend in a very localized way.
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.
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.
I lived as wild as one could be with the comfort of a warm living room to return to. 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. My body was animal to me. I still thought of it as something made to do what I wanted, belonging to me only. The rest of the year, I had other people, other concerns, other versions of myself. At school, my best friend was a tyrannical girl with the glorious Viking name of Ingrid.
I was occupied with science class and a business I wanted to start building bird houses. I had decided I should become interested in boys. When I returned to these things, my time on the mountain fell away, and with it, Vienna. But she was always there the next summer, and so was the part of me that loved her. Later that evening, my grandmother sat us down to talk about the lake. Vienna was trying to teach me a song.
