I remember now standing with my face to the horizon in the waist-deep tide of the Gulf of Mexico, making up a dance routine. What’s strange is that this memory was lost under a pile of other moments and more pressing daily calculations for decades; then, a couple of years ago, it floated right up to the surface, as clear as the water in the gulf.

At nine years old, I liked to imagine that I might one day command an audience in some sort of performance—not ballet, I was no good at it, but maybe some kind of pep rally like the big girls at my school were always having, or in a dance contest where most of the dancing was just walking and clapping and doing jazz hands. In the water, I was hard at work on choreography for “Stop! In the Name of Love,” one of the songs my mother had sung along to on the oldies station as we drove down the highway from Tennessee to the Florida panhandle. We were on our annual beach trip with my grandmother, whom we’d picked up in Alabama.

Loud voices broke my concentration.

“Little girl!”

I turned around.

“Little girl! ” a man’s voice yelled again, but I couldn’t identify the source of the voice, because gathered on the shore were dozens of people, all bunched up at the water’s edge. Everyone was shouting.

Was a girl in trouble? Was she breaking a rule? Or was everyone cheering for her? Had she done some kind of trick? I looked around the breakers on either side of me, searching for another person about my size, another girl in a stretchy nylon bathing suit with a worn, pilled bottom from sitting in the sand. Another girl with her elbow-length, sun-bleached hair tied up on top of her head in a bun that had been soaked in salt water, then dried, then soaked again, creating a nest of knots that would take an hour of combing to remove. The water had been full of children a second ago. Where were the other kids? Where was that little girl?