The Summer of Naked Swim Parties Read Online Free PDF Page A

It Up,” came on. She screamed like she was at a concert, then climbed out of the pool to dance. Debbie clapped her hands and danced beside her, then Mike jumped in and did the bump between them. Bill raised his fist in the air, bouncing in the pool, singing along so loudly that they could hardly hear House of Honey.
    Jamie looked over at Joseph, floating on his back, his head cocked in her direction. She wished she could break the spell and crawl out from beneath his gaze so she could do the bump and sing loudly and put on a swimsuit and eat more wet brownies off her fingers. And not worry about swallowing them down.
    At two in the morning the boys loaded into the Dodge Dart and drove away. Tammy, Debbie, and Jamie each threw on oversized T-shirts and climbed into Allen and Betty’s king-sized bed, Jamie in the middle. Tammy and Debbie fell asleep instantly, as if each had an Off switch in her head that had just been flicked down. Jamie lay still between them, careful not to breathe too loudly or shift and jostle them. Her heart fluttered as she feared she’d never fall asleep, that she’d be struck with a years-long case of insomnia, a world-record-worthy feat, like the man in the Guinness book who had been hiccupping since 1922. Tammy rolled to her side and tossed a bony leg over  Jamie’s knee. Her friend’s flesh against her own made Jamie tingle, made her forget about interminable insomnia. She shut her eyes and she could feel it all over again: the buzzing down deep, the stirring of newly discovered pockets of sensation.

2
    The encounter with the pizza boys came at a time before Jamie, Debbie, or Tammy had developed the sense of entitlement that usually accompanies lust (or love) and always gives way to demands. And so the girls neither expected to hear, nor heard, from the boys again. It didn’t even occur to them to feel slighted or disappointed. Yet something inside Jamie changed after that encounter.
    The pool didn’t look the same after the pizza boys had swum in it. It wasn’t that it was bigger or smaller; the embedded boulders still looked like dead, limbless elephants; the thatched-roof bar still had a strange stage-set feel to it; and the red phone hidden under the weightless, fake rock still seemed funny to Jamie, as if Maxwell Smart would show up any minute and use the phone to call Agent 99.
    What was different was the water and air. Before it had just been water and air. But now it was imbued with something slippery, something pungent, something that snaked up and down her legs like an invisible finger. The pool was now, Jamie finally decided, sexy.
    So when Allen and Betty threw a party in the end of June  to celebrate the opening of the bicentennial summer (the only bicentennial summer they’d all be alive for, Allen pointed out to his daughters), Jamie couldn’t witness it with same detached obliviousness as she had witnessed her parents’ past parties.
    Jamie sat on the steps of the pool. Her sister, Renee, sat beside her. Jamie was staring up, her flat hand making an awning over her eyes, watching Leon, their neighbor, naked on the diving board. His hairy grown-up body looked slightly melted as he jumped: up and down, up and down.
    His penis and balls flew in the air in unison like a long bird attached to its eggs. Was this what Joseph’s penis would look like? Jamie studied the flying penis, wondered how it happened that people actually wanted to touch penises, put them in their mouths, put them in their bodies.
    Renee elbowed Jamie to look away. Jamie elbowed her back and continued to stare at Leon’s penis.
    There were twelve adults and eight kids at the party. The children clumped together in an approximation of their parents’ friendship; theirs was an intimacy borne of the shared experience of witnessing the grown-ups’ revelries.
    All of the adults were naked. All of the kids were in swimsuits, even the one-year-old girl, Lacey, who wore a bandana-print suit.
    Lacey waddled