Ben laughed. “All right.” He looked back to the front of her sweatshirt but now it just looked like a collection of fabric. Another pair of girls came up the steps onto the dock, laughing easily. They spotted the blond girl sitting in Alice’s group and rushed over and hugged and laid their stuff down and started talking about their summers. To make room for them everyone had to move over. And then Alice was closer to Ben, almost as close as if they had chosen to sit together. Unmistakably now her scent came to Ben, of her shampoo but also of her skin. Later in the dining hall, Ben would pass Vanessa Bates and have her good smell pass over him, but Vanessa’s smell would be like a clean, empty room. Here on the dock Alice smelled, if Ben could have articulated it, slightly like fingers gummed in rosemary, slightly like freshly dried saliva, slightly like overturned sand in a few minutes of sun, slightly like clothes worn for a few days after washing. Ben was unequipped for it.

Alice’s scent reminded Ben of Nina from home, and thinking about Nina he winced there in the sunshine. Ben had liked Nina so much, and after he had won Nationals he had tried to put his hand up Nina’s shirt even though he knew she didn’t want him to.

Upstairs at his house, with his mother down in the kitchen, he and Nina had pretended to play pool on the miniature Brookstone pool table on the landing until finally he leaned over and kissed her, and she kissed him back. Ben didn’t necessarily need to put his hand on her chest; he was amazed just to be kissing her. But he wanted to have done it. His fingers found the seam of her button-up shirt. As soon as the back of his hand was against the skin next to her navel she, still kissing him, put her hand on his chest as though to caress it but with her elbow cleared his arm away. Pretending to take her false caress sincerely Ben brought his fingers back to the hem of her shirt. Again without ceasing to kiss him this time she pinned his hand against her abdomen with her elbow and he couldn’t pretend anymore. He had thought to himself, The girl at SJS is going to want me to do this. Ben realized now that much of his drive to put his hand up Nina’s shirt was from hearing about Hutch and Heather Reese that summer.

Again now he caught Alice’s scent, and then he couldn’t remember what Nina’s had been like.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Sorry?”

“You settling in okay?” Alice asked him.

“Yeah, so far so good.”

She laughed. “Liar.”

Ben laughed. He quickly looked at her face again, trying to make it pretty.

“What form are you in?” he asked.

“Fourth.”