This is the Part Where You Laugh Read Online Free PDF Page B

shiver with the weight of the canoe’s movement. I paddle north, where the algae fields aren’t as thick, where everything stays less boggy. It’s an hour before I catch a fish, and the bass I do catch isn’t big. It fights hard, but it’s medium-smallish when I bring it in. I pull the hook with needle-nose pliers, hit the fish on the gunnel, and throw it in the bottom of the canoe to fillet and eat when I get back home. Breaded, that fish might make half of a meal.
    I paddle back to the middle of the lake and jig some more, this time shipping the paddle, bobbing the rod in my hands, letting the canoe move with the wind. It’s late evening now and the wind picks up, running north and west. The canoe pushes with the wind, and I hope for one of the rare bigmouth that feed in the open spaces late in the evening. I cast out into the hole between algae fields, jig and reel, and cast again.
    I’m watching the tip of my rod, focused on the last eyelet, waiting for that hit on the rubber worm when the stern of the canoe clunks against something solid and the boat tips and I overcorrect and slip and fall into the bottom. I lie there for a second and hear someone laughing at me. When I sit up, I see it’s the girl. She still has her soccer-player headbands on and her phone in her hand. She says, “You actually just about went in.”
    “Yeah,” I say. “I was letting the canoe drift.” I lean and grab the side of the dock. Hold myself there. “I was jigging for bass.”
    “Bass?” she says.
    “Yeah.” I pull myself onto the dock and stand up. “Bass.” I hold out my hands. My hands are dirty and reek of fish.
    The girl tilts her head. Makes a face. “I don’t like bass.”
    “No?”
    “No, I actually hate them.”
    “Why?”
    She shrugs. Doesn’t explain.
    We stand there. She looks at her phone.
    I say, “I’m Travis.”
    She’s still looking at her phone. “Natalie,” she says. She squints, looking at something on her screen, and the scar under her eye shivers.
    With her looking down like that, I can check her out some more. So I do. She’s strong, good shoulders, good quads. I can tell she works out. Plays a sport. And she still has that loose, cutout T-shirt on. I like that. Right now I can see the lacy top of one side of her pink bra. If the shirt was a little looser I could see the rest.
    She adjusts her collar. “Are you staring at my fucking breasts?”
    “No.”
    She turns off her phone. Looks right at me. “You weren’t staring at them?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe?”
    Natalie looks me up and down. I don’t have my shirt on, and I look at my stomach and see a green line going across below my ribs, a mark from the dry algae on the bottom of the canoe. I must have smeared it on myself when I flipped the canoe over before I put it in the water. I rub at it with the tips of my fingers but it just smears wider.
    Natalie giggles.
    I want to ask her why she swam in her clothes the other night, why she was swimming in circles. But I don’t. Instead, I say, “Do you want to go out in the canoe with me?”
    “No,” she says. She looks at her house, then back at me. She’s facing the last rays of sunlight and I see that her eyes have flecks of yellow and orange in the green, like shards of campfire.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yeah,” she says. “I really have to go.” She looks at something on her phone. Presses a few buttons with her thumbs. “I should go now.”
    “Okay.”
    “And you should probably paddle back. I don’t think my stepdad would like you boating up to his dock and just—” She stops talking. She’s looking behind me.
    I turn around. My canoe’s drifted away. The wind must have shifted, and it pulled the canoe out 30 or 40 feet from the dock. “I better…” I look at Natalie, back at the canoe. I take two steps and dive in, breaststroking under the water to try and reach the canoe in one effort, hoping to impress her. I come up, turn the canoe around, sidestroke it