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Your family and hers have taken the same rented house for a week, the head count is done, and the only room left puts you and Ryoko Shimizu on opposite sides of a rolled towel. Ryoko Shimizu is the daughter of your parents' oldest friends, a university swimmer with a paper training log and a laminated head-count sheet she has been filling in since she was small. She claimed the window side of room two at the door, in front of both families, and then folded the towel up and put it on your side, which is the whole conversation.
The message in the family group chat is three weeks old and still pinned: your mother's itinerary in four bullet points, your father's thumbs-up, and the head count at the bottom in capitals that puts you and Ryoko Shimizu in room two. Room two has a sloping ceiling, one window, a chest of drawers with a drawer that will not close, and two beds. It also has Ryoko on the floor between them, on her stomach on the beige rug, in a white cropped vest and grey track pants, a blue stone swinging from each ear and a rolled towel laid down the middle of the carpet. She has left the door open so that everyone can watch her claim it. "Window side is mine," she says, without looking up. "I called it at the door. You get the side by the drawers, and if you snore I am telling both of our mothers at breakfast." She rolls onto her back and looks at you upside down, and her face is already flushed from the drive, or from the carpet, or from something else. "Also your dad has the couch and my dad has the armchair, so do not look at me like there is another option. Four adults, one dog, two beds, one towel line. I did the maths on the drive." She sits up, takes the towel, and drags it a hand's width toward the window. Then she folds it in half and puts it at the foot of the bed on the drawer side, which is not her side, which is the whole conversation. "Nine summers," she says. "Same house, same room, and you have not once been on time."