Once they had settled themselves, Ben looked at a group of three girls lying facedown to their right. In the time it takes to blow out a match he took in the all-over downy fuzz, the secret moles, the ridges along the Achilles tendons, the twin dimples at the small of the back, the unbroken expanse of skin from the top of one girl’s neck all the way down to the waistband of her bikini bottoms: she had unclasped her top. He saw the crease of flesh where her breast swelled out below her shaved armpit.

Ben remembered himself almost immediately and looked back down at the rainbow terry cloth conforming itself to the gaps between the planks of the dock. But he looked back at that little fold, desperate not to get caught looking, then away, then back again. This girl had a neck so beautiful that Ben wished English had a better word for it than “neck.”

Hutch laughed. “Jesus, Ben, it looks like you’re trying to see through her.”

Ben couldn’t tell if the girls had heard it; none of them moved. Slowly Ben turned toward Hutch, and when there had been no reaction from the girls’ group for long enough, he lunged over and punched Hutch as hard as he could in the middle of the thigh. Hutch fell back and hooted with laughter, and Evan pounded Hutch’s other thigh, and Hutch hooted again, and Ben was happy and worried they were making a spectacle of themselves.

Hutch and Evan took off their shirts—Evan’s chest was almost concave—but Ben left his on for now. He didn’t want to get a farmer’s tan, but he was self-conscious about how thin he was. He hoped some imagined onlooker would understand that he had a strong body for squash: lanky but whip-supple on his right side, solid legs and hips. But who notices anyone else’s hips? Everyone would likely just see a person so thin that his somewhat-tallness couldn’t be much of an asset.

Ben tried to look anywhere but at that fold of flesh and his eyes fell on the corner of the boathouse roof. Before he had ever seen the boat docks, he’d heard the story of Teddy doing a backflip off the boathouse roof into the water. This was almost unimaginably dangerous, Ben had been informed, not only because the water was only about two feet deep where a jumper could reasonably reach from the edge of the roof, but also because there was this big white-pine tree just to the left of the ideal flight path, and so you had to pass within a few inches of the tree if you didn’t want to go too far to the right and land on the dock itself.