“I don’t care. You can do what you want.”
He finished his beer in one long pull, making a popping sound when he pulled it away from his lips. “Man, what I really want is to paint this pool. And maybe you’d let me paint you in it. Would you let me do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you mean?”
He laughed. “Just like this, you in the pool, in this light. I would like to create a painting. I mostly do abstracts, but for this . . .” He trailed off, scratched at the inside of his thigh. After a pause, he asked, “Do you know how goddamn beautiful you are?”
“No.”
“You are. You’re a beautiful girl. I’m not supposed to say that to you because you’re young, but I’m a painter so it’s okay. I understand beauty, or at least I pretend to.” He laughed. “You’ll think about it?”
“I don’t know how much more swimming I’ll do. The water is kind of dirty.”
“Okay.” He looked into the woods behind me, slowly bobbing his head. “I need another beer. Can I get you something?” He was now holding the empty bottle upside down by his side, drips of beer falling onto the unmown grass. “I’ll get you a beer if you want one.”
“I don’t drink beer. I’m only thirteen.”
“Okay,” he said, and stood watching me for a while, waiting to see if I would get out of the water. His mouth hung open slightly, and he scratched again at the inside of his thigh. I stayed put, treading water, and spun so that I wasn’t facing him.
“Ophelia,” he said, almost to himself. Then, “Okay. Another beer.”
When he left I got out of the pool, knowing that I was done swimming for the summer, and hating Chet for wrecking my secret pond. I wrapped myself in the large beach towel I’d brought to the pool and ran through the house toward the bathroom nearest my room on the second floor. My chest hurt, as though the anger inside of me was a balloon, slowly inflating but never going to pop. In the bathroom with the rattling vent turned on and the shower going, I screamed repeatedly, using the nastiest words I knew. I was screaming because I was mad, but I was also screaming to keep myself from crying. It didn’t work. I sat on the tiled floor, and cried until my throat hurt. I was thinking of Chet—the scary way he looked at me—but I was also thinking of my parents. Why did they fill our home with strangers? Why did they only know sex maniacs? After showering, I went into my bedroom and looked at myself naked in the full-length mirror on the inside of my closet door. I’d known about sex for almost my entire life. One of my earliest memories was of my parents doing it on a large towel in the dunes on some beach vacation. I was three feet away, digging in the sand with a plastic trowel. I remember that my baby bottle was filled with warm apple juice.
I turned and looked at my body from all sides, disgusted by the patch of red hair sprouting between my legs. At least my breasts were barely noticeable, unlike my friend Gina who lived down the road. I pulled my shoulders back and my breasts completely flattened out. If I held a hand between my legs I looked the same as I had when I was ten years old. Skinny, with red hair, and freckles that darkened my arms and the base of my neck.
I dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, even though the night was still sweltering hot, and went downstairs to make myself a peanut butter sandwich.
I stopped swimming in the pool. I don’t know if Chet continued to look for me there. I would see him sometimes on the top step that led to the apartment above my mother’s studio, smoking a cigarette and gazing toward the house. And he was occasionally in our kitchen, speaking with my mother, usually about art. His eyes would find me, then slide away, then find me again.