“I know. I’ll bet the water is freezing.” In summer, Sherri and Roberta were always the first in the water and the last to emerge, the skin on their hands and the bottoms of their feet shriveled like raisins. They used to escape the roped area and swim to the island, or furtively sneak around Camp Alice Chester, pretending to be Girl Scouts, even getting free lunch in the cafeteria a few times. One summer, the camp had installed a new fiberglass pier, and the girls decided to sunbathe on it, ignoring the KEEP OFF signs. They had ended up with tiny shards of glass all over their skin that itched and burned like crazy.

The stillness of the lake made Sherri ache to be in it and swim the way they did when they were kids, not the way adults swam at the resort, afraid to get their hair wet, doing a stupid half breaststroke.

The sand was cool and damp beneath them, and the lake was turquoise blue the way it always was that time of year, and crystal clear. The pool at the resort was nice, but Sherri much preferred to swim in the lake in the height of summer, when it thickened with life and turned a luxurious dark green. She thought it was wonderfully illicit to swim in the deep, away from lifeguards and the milfoil that tickled her legs near the shore. She preferred to float high above all that green-gray nothingness below. Unlike the salty, buoyant ocean she’d swum in when she’d been in Galveston, she found lake water sensual and lush, like a languid embrace.

“Who’s that Arthur guy you had breakfast with?” Roberta asked.

“Beats me,” Sherri said. “I practically just met him.” This felt like a lie, but why? She had just met him, yet something had passed between them that morning, and already she felt as if she were attached to him by an invisible thread. Her fingers still buzzed from the feeling of his hands on hers.

“From the way you were talking, you guys could have been married. He’s cute.”

“Think so?” Roberta’s opinion mattered to Sherri. He was cute, Sherri thought, although “cute” wasn’t the right word for him. He wasn’t pretty or classically handsome, perhaps because he didn’t seem to care what he looked like. The shirt he wore could have been a hand-me-down from an older cousin or brother, his jeans were high-rise, and his Converse high-tops were stained, the laces torn. Sherri could picture him perfectly, from the way his hair curled behind his ears to the pointy tip of his nose. It was the crinkle in the corners of his eyes that really got her. But she didn’t want Roberta to know this; she didn’t want to know it herself, because she’d already established a different ideal man to strive for. “Arthur isn’t really my type,” she said.