From behind them now, three upperclassmen stood up and ran to the end of the dock waving their arms over their heads and screaming ironically. They stopped short and fell into the water like felled trees. Hutch and Evan had been hanging on to the side of the dock but now they pushed off and swam in a group with the older kids. The pack of them headed farther out diagonally from the left front corner of the dock. As they moved through the water they gave the expanse a human scale, and Ben was aware of the volume of air across the entire pond.

The group slowed down, spread out, then seemed to move in insistent, slow zigzags. Finally one of them stopped with an abruptness that didn’t seem possible in open water and shouted something. The rest of them swam to him as he seemed buoyed up with his back toward the sky. Then, unbelievably, he straightened up until he was standing out of the surface of the water, covered only to his lower ankles.

“Look!” said Ahmed. “Look!” Ben turned and raised his eyebrows to acknowledge that he was looking, and Ahmed lifted his camera and took several photos.

“Well, the Jesus Rock has been discovered again for the first time,” said Alice. Now four of the kids who had been swimming were standing up in the water—not Hutch or Evan yet. The kids huddled close together, and the surface of the rock looked to be about as big as the top of a large refrigerator.

Alice went back to talking to her friends, and several more kids stood up and dove in. Over the next twenty minutes different people exchanged places on top of the rock. They stood close and shivered even in the warm air, so near to each other with so much open skin.

Finally Ben shifted and reached for his towel.

“I’m jumping in.” He looked over to Alice. “Anyone else?”

“Go ahead,” Alice said. She hadn’t changed position from leg-hugging.

He stood up and wriggled out of his shirt, desperate to bury himself in the water so that neither Alice nor anyone else would see his pallor and his thinness; he had a passing image of himself as the ball-chain hanging down from a ceiling lamp. He wanted to run full speed but the uneven planking was too steeply sloped and here and there a nailhead jutted up, so he had to walk down to the end of the dock through the burning of his visibleness. Finally, he leaned into a short, slow dive, crunching into the water, streaming through, the flesh between his toes distinct as the liquid passed over it, then turning over to emerge on his back. He saw everyone facing him from the dock, and it looked like they were spectating his swim. For a second he wondered whether Alice would be impressed that he was swimming, and then realized how stupid that was.