“He’s mysterious,” I told Jane.
It was the first week of August, the heat unbearable, and we were all in the water, Jane and I lounging on the steps. She’d stolen a bottle of Krug champagne from her parents’ anniversary party, and we’d chilled it, secretly, in the freezer. Every so often I slipped inside and refilled our glasses, and then the bottle was empty, and I brought it out of the house and threw it into what we’d begun calling the “bottle pit,” a patch of woods behind the barn that bordered one side of the golf course. It hit another bottle, the sound of shattered glass carrying, and Del came around the side of the barn and stood, staring at me, her hands on her hips.
“Why didn’t you share?” she said.
“It wasn’t mine,” I said. I came unsteadily up the hill to the edge of the barn and joined her.
“You’re drunk,” she said.
She had on Leanne’s pink bikini. She’d been sunbathing on the lawn and had the top undone, and she held the strings up on either side of her breasts. Her blond hair was long and loose down her back. The boys loved Del, but she didn’t pay any attention to them yet. We joked that we were the vestal virgins; we needed to remain pure so as not to corrupt our clairvoyant powers.
“Mother is going to have a fit,” she said.
Our mother had suspected we’d been drinking last week and had given us a warning.
We came around the barn and Jane was swimming her laps, and a few of the girls were on the hammock in the shade with Paul, and David Pinney was under the diving board, watching everyone. Del returned to her towel, and I slipped from the edge of the pool into the water at the deep end. It was so cool, I wanted to stay submerged. Jane’s legs, white under the water, kicked up little waves. David Pinney’s navy blue suit trunks and the lower part of his tan torso wavered in the deep end. And then he slid down into the water, and we were suddenly looking at each other, and I knew for sure he had picked up my interest in him, like an electromagnetic wave. We both surfaced at the same time, and I swam over to the board and looked at what he saw from that spot—the whole of the house against the sky, the points of the copper rods, the canopy of trees beyond, the lawn rolling out in all directions, the windows glinting with the sun like mirrors sending messages.
“This is a nice view,” I said.
He laughed, and his voice was low and pleasant. In the confusion of other voices I hadn’t had the chance to notice.
“So is this,” he said.
I watched the way his eyes shifted to my breasts, and I felt the heat in my face. Del called me then, stood by the rim of the pool, her towel wrapped around her. The sun moved behind a cloud. She told me she was going to the beach, and was I coming with her, and I told her no. She stood, waiting, but I ignored her, and then she rejoined Katy and a few others, all of them crossing the lawn, moving toward the pebbled drive. Del looked back once, and I waved to her, and she must have believed David Pinney was harmless, a quiet boy who kept to himself. Maybe she thought we were talking about school in the fall, or our favorite movies, or books, or songs—the sorts of things you talked about with regular boys. David’s face and mine were so close he might have kissed me there in the pool, but he didn’t.
“Meet me in the barn,” he said.
He pulled himself out onto the pool’s rim, the water dripping from his suit. He dried himself with a towel in the grass and started up the lawn toward the hedge, his back speckled with water dripping from his hair, his arms swinging by his sides. He didn’t once look back at me, as if he knew, from the moment he’d been next to me in the pool, that I was the kind of girl who’d be intrigued and, once hooked, would never refuse him.
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