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steer up here,” Neto said. “Gives us better control of the boat.”
    “How do you know we don’t have more muscle?” Claire asked.
    In the section in front of them, Gay Jay popped a biceps, and Will shook his head. “You’re such a fag.”
    “Ya think ?” Jay pulled off his Mariners cap, dipped it overboard, and clamped it back atop the blue bandanna fastened over his scalp. He swiped the oar through the water a few times, propelling them in lurches.
    “We can steer,” Claire persisted. She glanced at Eve for solidarity. It did look more fun up there. “Don’t you want to ride closer to the bow?”
    Eve felt all seven sets of eyes settle on her and focused more than necessary on wiping drops from her Ray-Bans. “I’m okay.”
    “That’s not what I asked,” Claire said.
    But the others had already moved on, rowing and chatting, and Eve felt a burn in her face, the shame of having failed some test she hadn’t signed up to take. You’re a grown woman. You can’t ask for a damn seat you want ?
    Claire held a contemptuous stare on Eve. “Why don’t you speak up?”
    I’m trying.
    “I do,” Eve said.
    Her face still hot, she considered herself with frustration. When had her voice—her real voice—maddeningly faded? She remembered it when she was a girl, braying laughter and sitting side by side with her father at the listing upright Yamaha, his callused hands raspy over hers, guiding her to the right keys, making her fingers sing. And when she was a teenager, sticky with sweat on the soccer field, stretching or running bleachers with her teammates, chatty and uncensored, sharing wisps of gossip, half-formed theories on boys, lurid rock-song lyrics, her mouth barely pausing to catch a breath. Where had it gone? Into the void her father left when she came home from junior finals to find the mint green Tercel hatchback gone for good and her mother sitting on the porch in her bathrobe, smoking one of her hidden cigarettes in the flagrant open? Or had it gone underground later, after she’d tucked safely into her life with Rick? No, she’d still had it then, and then. Or at least some of it; she could still hear her own music, give it expression. It had never vanished, but the volume knob had been adjusted down ever so slightly, by indiscernible degrees, the invisible drift of twilight into darkness.
    Will stood, wobbly in the raft, bringing Eve back to the present and the Great Seating Debate. “I’ll switch with you, Claire,” he said. “Who’ll give up their spot for Eve?”
    An awkward silence. Finally Sue said, “I don’t care where I sit.”
    “The only thing worse than a controlling person,” Claire said, just loud enough to be overheard, “is a controlling person pretending to be flexible.”
    Harry gave a wobbly look to his wife and then rose in her place, relinquishing his seat instead, and Eve and Claire moved up toward the bow. Lulu rode in the very front with Neto, displaying skill controlling the raft. Her hair was taken up in a ponytail, revealing a CARPE DIEM tattoo across the base of her neck. Clearly she was more than the princess Eve had first pegged her for.
    The shoreline scrolled by, buttress roots that would dwarf a human, elephant ear fronds nodding, white ceiba trees thrusting above the dense canopy, spreading fans of branches. A great blue heron whoomped overhead, its wingspan so vast it looked aeronautical. The sweet smell of organic rot crept beneath the fragranced air.
    Eve raised a hand against the glare, and Jay said, “The Mexican sun’s gonna have its way with that milky-white skin, girlfriend.” He pulled off his baseball cap and flipped it to her. “Take this. I got my do-rag.”
    She pulled on the hat. “My milky-white skin thanks you.”
    They drifted around a bend, and a cluster of indígenos came into view. Women with plastic laundry baskets on their heads. Others bent to the river, cracking ear-shaped pods from the guanacaste tree and raking the pulpy