One of them is talking to me?

“Not cold at all,” Tom calls. Simon’s joker sidekick can’t exactly be trusted on matters like this, not if there’s the possibility of drawing a laugh from the look of ice-water shock on the face of someone he’s fooled into jumping.

The water has to be over their heads. I need to be able to stand. Can I just wade in on my own? Lie down in the water, stomach in the mud, the way Diesel used to? The way he still does in my head, when I regret hard enough.

Will they leave me be if I just do my own thing? Of course they will. I’m just the peanut from middle school, after all. Who pays any attention to me? They see straight over me.

“Last one in is a rotten egg!” Morgan taunts as she runs up the dock, leaving me behind on the water’s edge. She jumps in.

A peanut and a rotten egg.

I step in slowly, ridges of sand soft under my feet. Last September I took swimming in gym like everyone else, till the city closed the pool. What did I learn? No running in the pool area. That’s it. The budget was cut before I even mastered treading water. The teacher joked that I needed more fat on my body to float. “You’re just too big a klutz,” Morgan said. Both had a point.

So I signed up for lessons this summer, then had to drop out to babysit Luanne.

“I’ll teach you myself. It’s not that hard,” Dad promised when I told him. But I knew I couldn’t depend on him, especially when he explained how he learned: “My older brothers threw me into the canal and I had to sink or swim.”

If he could learn in that deep, murky waterway where all the ships dumped their oil, surely I can learn in this clean lake.

I wade in past my ankles. Colder now. My feet turn into Popsicles. I will keep going till the water reaches the top of my knees and no farther. Can’t get my shorts wet, after all.

Simon and Tom hoist themselves back up on the dock. The long-legged ones run past me out of the water, then back onto the dock.

A shriek from Morgan. Her feet pound the boards before she leaps off a second time. There’s a sound like glass panes shattering and more shrieks when she comes up. “Hurry. It’s fun!” Her voice sounds different. Is jumping in really that fun? Or is she just putting one over on me?

“Come on, Peanut. You can do it,” Simon calls.

“’Course I can do it. I just don’t want to,” I mutter as I wade in deeper. A wave splashes over my knees. Another, even higher. Whoosh! I suck in my breath. Now my butt is wet. Great. Looks like I’ve peed myself.

“The water carries you up if you let it,” Dad told me last time he tried to teach me. I was four years old. He held me by the strap of my bathing suit, but then he let go.