“People say there are snakes,” Emma says, “but I think it’s just to scare off tourists.”

Daisy gives a theatrical shudder. “Please don’t say the S-word.”

Emma rolls her eyes behind her sunglasses. “OK. But seriously, it’s quite salty. I haven’t even seen a fish in three years.”

“If we see one, I will kill myself. I’ll have no choice.”

If anyone should be making such threats, jokingly or otherwise, it is Emma. She is the one who has suddenly found herself single at age 37 with no clear plan to continue paying her mortgage, let alone buy out her ex Dylan. Yet she is trying to have a nice day. That is what Daisy has promised: some healing time together on the unseasonably warm October weekend, although the seasons aren’t what they used to be. Their friendship is, though, Emma tells herself, even if Daisy’s visits upstate have been sparse.

They reach the point where the gravel path opens onto a clearing with a picnic bench and a pile of inner tubes, a little girl at the center of them like the skewer through a kabob. She is beating her arms on them. Burdened by chairs and a cooler, Emma gestures toward the girl with her chin. “Look, there’s nothing to worry about. There are families here.”

Daisy lifts her sunglasses to give Emma a reproachful look: You know parents don’t know anything.

A few paces down, they arrive at a larger picnic area, where two patches of grass are bisected by gravel that leads to the shore. A thick wooden railing looks over water as blue as the sky. Emma explains that in her childhood, she came here on visits to her grandparents’ house. Then, the water was brown and full of algae—that was before the summers of acid rain, and the decades-long parade of urbanites decamping for greener pastures. Eventually, the rain and road salt and sunblock and bug spray conspired to make the pastures less green than before. But after the death of all aquatic life, the water clarity—if not quality—improved. Local volunteers test regularly; the water is deemed safe enough to swim in. In the summer, Emma comes here almost every day, along with the families and their babies and the old ladies who traverse the whole length in wet suits, April to October. In July, there is nowhere else to go when your window unit rattles and groans and seems to only circulate the same stale air. The closest mall is in Albany. The movie theater is only open on the weekends. The Walmart is weirdly warm. This was why she and Dylan moved here, of course: the solitude. And she hopes Daisy will enjoy it too, although not from the spot where she has chosen to drop her towel. “Hey,” Emma says. “That shiny plant is actually poison ivy.”

“What the fuck,” Daisy says, snatching at the fabric with real fear.

“It’s fine,” Emma says, laying out her plastic blanket further to the right. “You didn’t touch it. And we’ll be safe here.”

“God. Nature really has it out for us.”

This is Daisy’s fifth visit in the six years since Emma moved, not that she is counting. Dylan did. But Emma had plenty of reason, constant reasons, to go down to the city, and for all that time, she has known the truth: Daisy hates it here. Sitting on the blanket, her knees to her chest to keep her toes from the brown spiky grass, Daisy inspects the poison ivy from a distance. Emma is not sure if she feels threatened or dubious; Daisy hasn’t trusted Emma’s plant ID skills since she made a salad using foxglove on Daisy’s first visit. They had only had a little diarrhea. Although Emma has improved since then, she won’t bother to get out her plant ID app. There are bigger problems to confront—for example, the possibility of seeing Dylan with his new girlfriend, a 26-year-old barista who posts pictures of her latte art on Instagram with no sense of irony, no whiff of embarrassment. She speaks her fear out loud: “I hope I don’t see Dylan.”

“You didn’t get the lake in the divorce?”

“You know we weren’t married.”

“I’m speaking figuratively. Can’t you just tell him you don’t want to run into him here? That it’s your spot? That you’re trying to have a nice weekend with me?”

“I don’t really want to open the line for casual communication.”

“I’ll just chase him away if he shows up, OK? I’ll tell him off.” Emma knows she means it. This is one reason Daisy thrives in the city: She can handle conflict, whether over a cab fare or art world politics. It is also why Emma has been so looking forward to her friend’s long weekend visit. She knows Daisy will let her list out Dylan’s offenses again and again and remain incensed on her behalf. Emma feels grateful—close—as she rehashes the breakup once again while setting out a picnic spread of baked pita chips, pickled carrots, and canned wine. Six years ago, she and Dylan wanted the same things: To have a well, a source of fresh water. To have a garden and a cellar for canned goods. To ride out the apocalypse with trees on the horizon. She had a job and he didn’t, but his parents made the downpayment, so she forgave him. Given their shared pessimism, they easily agreed not to have kids. But then, his sister had twins, and all of a sudden, it was a whole thing. Not just the shift in his perspective, the fawning over babies at the farmers’ market, but a new onslaught of criticism. If she was so upset about the state of the world, why not get involved with local organizing? If she was so broken up about the dying lake, why not go to the town halls to advocate for environmental remediation? On one evening, as they walked home from the local dive bar, both drunk, she mocked the activist puppet show they’d just seen. “You don’t do anything,” he told her. “Who are you to make fun of sincerity?” She reminded him that she was very much doing something—working, making the money that paid their daily expenses. He was defensive, then confrontational, enumerating all the things he had paid for after sudden windfalls from his parents or the sale of vintage furniture he’d restored in their garage: a replacement bicycle after hers had been stolen, eight visits to an acupuncturist when she’d developed chronic headaches (it turned out she had sleep apnea), a trip to Thailand somehow financed by credit card points. And he would contribute more if he believed that they were actually working toward something, some shared vision, but as it stood, he felt like he was living with a zombie. He really called her that—a zombie. Back in their kitchen, standing at the laminate counter, she cried and cried, then told him that, for her, this was living, this was all there was to life. If he wanted something else, he should go.

He did.

While Emma tells this tale, edging closer to tears, she is fully aware of the threesome that arrives: two men, plus a woman with bright orange hair. As soon as they sit down on the other side of the poison ivy tree, the woman takes her top off.

“I’m sorry,” Daisy says. “I really am paying attention, and Dylan is the worst. But can we just take a moment to appreciate that tan line?” Emma lets her gaze follow Daisy’s, and they both behold the woman’s breasts, perfect save for uneven pigment, the white triangle with the brown nipple like the text on a traffic sign. “Do you think she goes to a tanning bed?” Daisy asks. “Do they even have those up here?”

“Where there are strip malls there are tanning salons,” Emma says, despite having no clue whether there actually is one in the shopping center with the Walmart and the Dollar General.

Daisy too takes her top off. Her breasts are triangular in shape if not in pattern.

“We should put on sunblock,” Emma says. While they’re waiting for it to settle in, the orange-haired woman jumps into the lake, her strands clipped up. One of the men follows—her boyfriend, Emma guesses. The other sits behind on a burgundy bath towel in his wifebeater smoking a blunt. He has tattoos: on his right arm, a cross, a rose, some numbers. The left is black from shoulder to bicep. Does the ink cover something racist, or is it an aesthetic choice?

The smell of his weed envelops them.

“Honestly,” Daisy says, returning to the subject at hand, “Dylan was the worst kind of man. He couldn’t admit how conventional he was. Not even conventional—retrograde.”

Emma hears the guy with the blunt mumbling. Daisy turns her head to address him. “Excuse me? Are you talking to us?”

“Yeah,” he says, craning his neck around the tree to attempt eye contact. “I asked if this dude is really the worst. There are murderers out there, you know.”

“It’s not polite to eavesdrop,” Daisy says. Unlike Emma, she is more afraid of snakes than of men. She turns back. “God,” she whispers. “You live in a place where men just, like, start talking to you?”

“It’s a thing that men do universally, I’m pretty sure.”

“I haven’t talked to a man in, like, a year. Not even at the grocery store. They know just to ring me up without speaking.”

“OK,” Emma says. “You’re right, I live in hell. But the water is nice, I promise. Are you ready?” She stands, wiping za’atar on the flesh of her thighs, walking toward the shoreline. She can tell Daisy doesn’t really want to swim, but neither does she want to sit alone, and after all, she agreed to this—they discussed it on the phone. A dip would be divine, she said.

The approach to the water is treacherous. Emma demonstrates the correct route for circumnavigating the poison ivy on the left and the wobbly rocks, then turns around, her arms out to the side as if on a balance beam. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I should have told you to bring water shoes. But you can just dive from here. It gets deep quickly.”

Daisy belly flops in with a shriek, then paddles wildly.

This bothered Emma in college—Daisy’s brashness, her histrionics. More disturbingly, this is a quality that people find cute, unlike Emma’s anxiety, her inwardness. While Emma has striven to be more assertive, Daisy seems to have made no progress toward becoming easygoing or gentle. She cannot attempt it, even under these circumstances. There were so many times when Daisy was dumped and Emma was her lifeline. Now, Daisy is married to Mona. Daisy is loved. And it is obvious enough that Emma is not. She wishes that Daisy would at least pretend that Emma has not made a mistake somewhere along the line, not brought this upon herself. Daisy asked her time and time again, Do you really want to be with a man if you have the choice not to? As if love is something political, as if you can cross a whole gender off your list when life is so lonely, when it is so difficult to find anyone who even pretends to be interested in you, much less take you to Thailand and insist you are beautiful, even if they only do these things for eight years before their love curdles in the cup of your shared eco-friendly house, both of you holding your noses for months until someone must finally admit that it is no longer potable, that it must be rinsed out.

No—for years, Emma has been like the lake: She’s been open to whoever comes.

Maybe this is her problem.

Still, shouldn’t Daisy at least try to console her?

“OK,” Daisy says. “It actually feels kind of nice once you’re moving a little.”

Emma is grateful for this small concession, and for the 10 minutes they spend treading water. From the middle of the lake, they are surrounded on three sides by trees, the pale undersides of their leaves exposed in the breeze. She is grateful for this beauty, a perfect setting for Daisy shit-talking Dylan—how boring he was, how poor a conversationalist, how Emma can definitely definitely do much better. Emma sensed Daisy’s skepticism all along, but she has chosen the right moment to finally confirm it. For these 10 minutes, the warmth, the bright sparkle of sun on water, and the light of her friend’s attention make her feel buoyant, even joyful.

As they float, Emma sees from the corner of her eyes that the woman who comes every day with her goldendoodle has arrived. She ties her up to the wooden railing within range of the man and his joint. He shouts after her, “You’re just gonna leave your dog?”

The woman doesn’t seem to respond. With her neon-pink swimming cap and her goggles and her turquoise racing suit, she dives in from the railing rather than making an amateur’s wobbly descent. Alone, the dog wags its tail, looking at the man who is looking back at her, and Emma experiences a return to the general state she has inhabited for the past three weeks, since Dylan left. The man’s actions so far do not necessarily bode ill—smoking a blunt in public, reminding unfamiliar women that some men are murderers—but they do not bode well either. There is something heavy in the air pressing down on her like the anxiety she feels when high, a curtain in her mind threatening to open onto something terrible. But she is not high—there is no such thing as a contact high, especially not outdoors, is there?

If Dylan were here, he would follow the swimmer’s yellow buoy, wave his arms until she stopped and heeded him. Or perhaps he would stay onshore, would wait and watch, pet this dog as he has so many times before. But Emma is not Dylan. He knew this dog’s name; he always remembered it. She does not.

Daisy seems oblivious. “Do you think you’ll move back to the city now?” She asks.

For a second, Emma doesn’t even understand the question. What city? When she does, she says firmly, “No. Like, definitely not. Never.”

“Really? But what do you think the dating options will be like here?”

“I’m not thinking about that yet,” she says. Then, paddling off, “Hey, I’m gonna swim a little.”

Emma doesn’t hear Daisy’s response as she dives under, swimming to the place where the water bends, opening onto a vast expanse from which all the shore’s launch points are invisible. Here, she dives down down down, her eyes screwed shut to keep the saline liquid out, her lungs expelling every bubble of air. When she comes up gasping, Daisy has just reached the bend. “Don’t leave me!” Daisy shouts. Over the sound of the rushing in her own head, her heartbeat in her ears, the water splashing, it takes a while for Emma to realize that there are shouts coming from the shore.

When she reunites with Daisy, she pauses and surveys the scene: The woman with the orange hair is back on shore, laughing. Her boyfriend has his cell phone out, seemingly recording.

“Back off, motherfucker!” the tattooed man shouts.

“Um, I think we should intervene,” Daisy says.

Emma wants to tell her that intervention isn’t wise here. Casual conflict isn’t part of the fabric of everyday life, which means it can rip it. People have guns. But Daisy is already dog-paddling back to shore, stopping every few strokes to tread water and repeat “Excuse me? Excuse me?” Emma can tell that none of these people are listening. The man is sitting on his camping chair at the precise spot where he is out of reach from the dog’s open maw, where he dangles the sandwich near before admonishing her more: “You fucking animal.” The dog begins to bark, and still the man does not move his chair or his sandwich. His friends, meanwhile, are laughing, recording.

As Daisy drags herself out of the water, Emma watches her skinny legs unsteady on the rocks, sees the white streaks of mineral sunscreen still on both her shoulders and the straps of her pink bikini, and hears her high-pitched voice: “Excuse me, could you please leave the dog alone?”

“Me? It attacked me. It tried to eat my sandwich. You need to take it home.”

“It’s not my dog.”

“Are you sure?”

“We were both here when the dog arrived.”

Emma has just reached the shore, panting, and she walks past the orange-haired woman to her friend. “Remember what he said about some men being murderers.”

They both bring their eyes back to the man, who stands up and lunges toward the dog. She rises up on her haunches, straining at the lead.

“What are you doing?” Daisy screams, utterly undeterred.

Emma grips Daisy’s wrist. “Maybe we should sit down and have some water,” she says in a low voice.

“Take your dog with you,” the man says.

“Oh my God,” Daisy persists. “You know it’s not my dog. You asked the lady in the swim cap if she was really leaving him. She did, and she’s swimming, and now I’m just trying to make sure he’s OK when she finishes.”

“She,” Emma says.

“What?” the man asks.

“The dog is a girl.”

The man’s eyes are red, and his face is too. His friends are finding this very funny, Emma can tell. Why wouldn’t they? First of all, they are high, perhaps enough to have truly forgotten who the dog belongs to, where she came from. And as for Daisy and Emma, they look, probably, like tourists: so precious, so offended to encounter real-life human beings in their cutoffs with their deli sandwiches and taunting of animals. They don’t know to mind their business; they don’t know to live and let live. How can Daisy not know that the only way to handle this is to sit back down in their chairs, to coax the dog over to them with promises of pets and a few handfuls of potato chips?

It will be difficult now—so awkward—to ignore the people just to the side of them, but Emma has her Bluetooth speaker with her, and maybe all they need is some music and a few minutes in their separate corners for everyone to calm down. She begins to coax the dog, asking the only kinds of questions she knows how to: “Who is a little cutie? Who is a good puppy?” She tries her best not to listen to the last few phrases exchanged by Daisy and the group of strangers. The orange-haired woman is, she gathers, helping quiet the man down, telling him it’s not such a big deal, to “leave these ladies alone.” Ladies. Is that what they are? Her attention is so fractured between the dog and the strangers and the lake, the owner’s distant yellow buoy, the question of when and how they can leave, that she barely knows what to say when Daisy sits back down.

But Daisy does: “You could have given me some backup.”

“Can we just stay calm?” Emma whispers.

“This is your problem. You’re so afraid of conflict.”

Emma feels something in herself float up, breathless and desperate, just like her body in the lake a few minutes ago—five? Ten? Now, on land, the sensation is belch-like, although it takes the shape of words. “So, what, should I be confronting you for only visiting me under duress? For basically thinking that I’m a loser unless I’m willing to move back to the city and go into debt? For being, honestly, a shitty friend?”

She watches Daisy’s face go blank, her mouth open. Emma winces, bracing for admonishment. But, as she stares at her friend, she realizes her gaze is not returned. Rather, Daisy is looking just to the right of Emma’s face. “Holy fucking shit,” she slowly says.

As Emma turns around, she thinks for a split second of Dylan, feels her guts twist up in anticipation of his familiar bald head, on top of everything else—the pain all the worse because, for the first time in three weeks, she has gone more than ten minutes without thinking about him.

It is not him she sees.

It is a snake—enormous, as long as her body, as thick as her leg. It is slithering down from the gravel path, if slithering is a word that can be applied to such a thing. Not slithering, then, but slogging nearer the tree. Nearer them.

She feels Daisy stiff beside her, hears the dog barking.

Oh God, she thinks. Daisy will kill me.

The tattooed man is laughing—is it at the desperate dog or the snake or at them?—and his friends have their phones out again. Emma grabs Daisy’s hand, starts to tug her into the bramble to their left, a dense thicket of shrubs that must lead first to the other picnic area and then to the parking lot. Even in this moment, their limbs catching and scratched, their bodies already itching from the thought of poison ivy, Daisy manages to say, “I can’t believe you fucking lied to me.”

In the bushes, Emma cannot remember whether she ever meant it, whether she believed herself. She is gasping, the feeling unfamiliar, surreal, near-comic, as if her lungs can barely hold the air she needs. With great trembling inhales and whooshing exhales, she tries to circulate enough oxygen to pull her body through the plant life and to the parking lot. And in these sounds, it is so clear to them both that it’s she, not Daisy, who is—who has been this whole time, for weeks—absolutely terrified, utterly unsure of what’s out there ahead of her.