When I was a kid, I could hold my breath underwater for a really long time. My sister was envious but she didn’t have the discipline and perhaps the lung capacity to get better at it. With the idea that she’d stop bothering me about it, I told her that my secret was that I could breathe underwater like a fish.

I also told her how to do it — that is, breathe underwater. That’s how my sister almost drowned herself. I didn’t think she was quite naive enough to believe me, but she was in fact incredibly naive (even taking the age difference into account).

Of course, as I was for anything that happened with my sister, I was blamed for her half-drowning. It didn’t help telling my parents that “I can’t help if she’s just stupid.”

No, that did not make things better at all.