“I have this funny story,” said Renee, smiling and flapping her hand. “Like I said, we were hiking in the Cinque Terre. It’s really rough there, the trails are steep and rocky, but gorgeous, right along the sea. You can imagine: rocky like Maine but warm and the houses have those red tile roofs. So, after hours of hiking we finally came to this place where we could swim. It was a gorgeous little cove. Beautiful blue, blue water. So my cousins and I all stripped off our clothes and jumped in and we were floating around, just relaxing and cooling off, not really noticing anything, when we heard this awful voice. This woman, this American woman had come along the trail after us, with her kids, and when she saw us in the water she went crazy. She was yelling at the kids to cover their eyes, not to look. We were dying with laughter, we thought it was sooo funny.” Then Renee’s tone changed and became more serious. “But the weird thing was, even though I knew I wasn’t doing anything wrong, that woman made me feel as if I was. As if swimming without a suit was somehow dirty or something. So I decided then and there that I wasn’t ever going to be ashamed of my body ever again. So that’s why when this whole boob thing started…”

Lucy interrupted. “I don’t understand. What boob thing?”

“Well, first they wanted to know if they were real…”

“Who wanted to know?”

“Well, Matt Engelhardt and his little sidekicks Justin and Will started it, but pretty soon the whole team was in on it. They wanted to check them out, you know, touch them. So after a while we got sick of that and told them they could touch but they had to close their eyes, you know, so they wouldn’t know who they were touching.”

“Sara? Sassie?”

“We all did it,” said Renee. “We were hoping that would be the end of it, that they’d leave us alone, but it wasn’t. Then they started wanting to see them.”

“You didn’t…” began Lucy.

“Oh, I did. I was just sick and tired of it, so I stood up and lifted my bra and flashed them. I mean, what’s the big deal? If they were in Italy or France, instead of the U.S., all they’d have to do is go to the beach and they could see all the boobs they wanted.”

“And where was the coach when this was going on?” demanded Lucy.

“Coach Buck usually sleeps on the bus trips,” said Renee, adding a wicked smile, “or pretends to.”

“You think he knows what’s going on?”

“He not only knows, he encourages a lot of stuff. It’s like he wants to be popular with the cool kids, at least that’s what I’ve heard.”

“From the players?”