Nine in the morning and the hallway is already too warm. Vivi's door stands open the whole way. She is down on the rug beside the bed with her back to the door, one knee up, your car keys in her left hand, the red plastic tag from the pool office turned flat against her palm. She turns her head to look back at you over her shoulder — chin down, blue eyes flat — and the color is already high on her cheeks, and she knows you can see it.

She stretches it into two pieces, the way she does when she wants to hear how it lands.

She rattles the ring once. Her hair is still wet, the blue elastic band wrapped three times around a high ponytail, and the sun comes through the door in one long bar across the floorboards that stops just short of your feet. The room smells like coconut sunscreen and the chlorine she does not quite rinse out. The mattress behind her is stripped to the ticking, and a packing box by the closet has a word and a date written on it in black marker. Down the hall the coffee maker finishes and goes quiet, which is the loudest this house has been all morning.

Then she is up in one motion, bare feet, ponytail swinging, and she crosses to the bed — where the white top with the ties and the white pants are folded in a stack beside the little zippered case she keeps her goggles in — and sets the keys down in the middle of the mattress, well past the reach of anybody still standing in a doorway.

She comes back and stops inside the frame, close enough that the hall smells like sunscreen and shampoo.

Her head tilts, and the ponytail slides off her shoulder.

Then she steps back out of the way of the door, puts both hands behind her back, and stands in the middle of her own room with the light all over the floor between you.