The Summer of Naked Swim Parties Read Online Free PDF

to the edge of the pool. Jamie turned toward her, pleased to have the distraction. Lacey’s father, Rod, sat on one of the boulders. On his lap, covering his penis, was a paper plate piled with garbanzo bean salad, which Betty had made.
    Jamie pushed off from the steps and swam to the baby at the edge of the pool.
    “What are you doing?” Renee was always bossy, sharp.  She followed Jamie.

    “I’m just making sure the baby won’t drown,” Jamie said.
    Renee rolled her eyes. This was the difference between Renee and Jamie: Everywhere Jamie went, she imagined death first and humiliation second. Everywhere Renee went, she imagined humiliation first and greater humiliation second.
    “If her parents weren’t so stoned,” Renee whispered,  “you wouldn’t have to be watching her.”
    “Do you think we’re getting lung cancer from all the smoke in the air?” Jamie flicked her eyes back and forth, tennis-match style, between the precariously perched baby and her black-eyed sister.
    “We’re probably just getting stoned,” Renee said. “I’m going inside. If the police come I don’t wanna be here.” Renee hoisted herself out of the pool. She was as lean and shapeless as a twelve-year-old, a body without the necessary fat pad, the doctor had explained, to induce a regular period.
    Lacey dipped a curled white hand into the water. She teetered forward, then back, and landed on her fat, diapered bottom. Jamie was about to reach up and collect her into her arms when Rod approached and stood right behind her. Foot level is a bad place to be when viewing a naked, grown man. His cactus-pear-looking testicles sagged toward Jamie’s face; she could see pimples on the inside of his upper thighs. She wondered, Do boys who have pimples on their faces have them on their thighs, too?
    “They say if you throw a baby into water it will just know how to swim,” Rod said.
    “Oh yeah?” Jamie squinted as she aimed her gaze toward his pointed face. She wondered who they were.
    “How ’bout I toss her in and you just stay there to get her if she needs help.”
    “You haven’t tried it before?” Jamie asked.

    “We don’t have a pool,” Rod said. “And the ocean’s too cold for a little kid.”
    “Okay,” Jamie said.
    Rod lifted his doughy child and in one swift motion swung her out over the pool and dropped her. His face was blank, bored almost, like a man tossing a bag of dog food into the corner of the garage. Lacey plunged down then surged up, but not all the way to air. The top of her head skimmed the surface of the water, her silky hair floated in a little swirling pile, a sea anemone in a tide pool.
    Jamie reached down, wrapped an arm around her belly, and heaved her up, head above the water. Lacey’s fat legs clamped around Jamie’s waist as Jamie held onto the edge of the pool with one hand. The baby gasped in a burping sort of way, a croak really. Then she let out a scream that instantly dappled her face with pink. Her fists were in the air: angry white, flower buds.
    “You should have given her another couple seconds.” Rod was unmoved by the crying; he pulled the baby from Jamie’s arms and returned to his rock. Jamie wanted to take Lacey back from him, kiss her and press her against her chest until the baby was sure that the ground below her was solid.
    Jamie turned away from Rod and joined the kids who were drifting in the shallow end, an amorphous circle of heads and half bodies. There was Paul, a year older than Renee, stocky and built like a miniature man; his younger brother, Mitch, who was almost Jamie’s age; and the furry white-haired, preteen Olsen boy. The Layman twins were there, too; they were a year younger than Jamie but seemed far more sophisticated in their stringy, spare bikinis. The Layman girls were dark and looked like they smelled of  spice; they flirted with the boys so extensively that Jamie often felt jealous for their attention.
    Paul was organizing a game of wink-murder,