“Hi,” I said. “Sorry I’m late.”

“Why do you Yanks always say ‘Hi’?”

“I don’t know; why do you say ‘Hello’?”

“Because we speak English!”

Since I had lost this argument before, in fact lost every argument we ever had, I changed the subject.

“Did you see any fish when you came out? I didn’t.”

“Why were you so late?”

I told her I had woken up late and she said, “What were you up to last night to make you so tired?”

“You know, you were there.”

Then Jennifer pretended she didn’t know what I was talking about and she made me tell her the whole thing over again. That made me sort of embarrassed because out here in the sun on the rocks it didn’t seem the same as last night. When I finished telling how I ran back to the hotel after I left her at the pensione (of course I left out the part about Mom and Jonathan Edwards) I stopped talking and Jennifer said, “What are you gawking at?” Because I was looking at her thinking how I would like to kiss her some more.

“I wasn’t; I was just thinking.”

“Who taught you to do that?”

“Very funny,” I said.

We put on our snorkeling stuff and jumped into the water and started to look for fish. We hardly saw any at all. But I didn’t mind because I swam behind Jennifer and watched her ponytail fan out in the water and the way the bubbles streamed off her back when she dived and how strong her legs were. When she came back up from one dive I noticed how tight her bathing suit was under the water and how it was almost as if she had nothing on at all.

Then I had a problem because my Little Thing went hard. In fact it had been doing this quite a lot lately—one of the “marvelous changes” in my developing body.

Because I had on the Italian kind of swimming trunks, more like the tight kind of underpants instead of boxer-style American trunks, I was afraid Jennifer would notice what my Little Thing had done. So I swam in front of her from then on and didn’t do any diving and when she was below me I’d tread water so if she looked up she would only see flippers and bubbles and not my Little Thing sticking out of the top of my swimming trunks.