The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [80]
Buff, too, was surrounded by chattering, laughing kids at all times, and after he finished cooking and eating he started throwing a football with some of the guys. The guys seemed to love him as much as the girls did. He was like the popular kid, only he wasn’t a kid.
The smoke from the grill gradually died down. Travis sat under a huge live oak tree, reading a book that appeared to be a fantasy book, from the lurid cover. Why did guys like to read that kind of crap? What was wrong with the real world? Facts. True stories. Biographies. Ava had never liked made-up nonsense. She’d read the first volume of the Guralnick biography of Elvis five times.
Finally the group tidied their shelter and moved in a herd down to the changing rooms beside the lodge. Then they descended the tile walkway onto the narrow strip of sugar sand beach beside the river. Most of the kids threw down their towels and got in line to jump off the tall wooden diving tower.
Suzi’s posse had positioned themselves close to the water, surrounded by cypress trees like a little fort. Knowing she wouldn’t be welcome in Suzi’s group, Ava positioned her towel in some sparse grass under a cypress tree and sat down feeling hideously self-conscious in her pink and black zebra-striped bikini. People were always telling her how thin she was, how gorgeous, but she never felt like she was either, at least not for long. She was always, it seemed, preoccupied to distraction by some flaw she’d detected in herself, on her body, something she couldn’t stop worrying about no matter how much her mother told her she needn’t worry, that she was making another big deal out of nothing. Today it was the fact that her pubic hair was sticking out of her bathing suit on the right side. She usually remembered to shave down there but had forgotten this morning. But why was it sticking out only on the right side? Then she noticed a slight pooch in her stomach. She shouldn’t have eaten all those chips! She sucked her stomach in and it popped back out.
A shadowy figure loomed over her. Travis, wearing only swimming trunks and a baseball cap pulled down low over his face, clutching his towel and book. Ava couldn’t take her eyes off his chest—hairless except for a silky dark nest in the middle. He asked if he could sit by her, and she said sure.
He laid out his striped towel in the sand, smoothing down the edges and sweeping off errant grains of sand. He arranged the towel so that it was precisely six inches away from her towel. Then he sat down like he was lowering himself slowly into a hot bath. He smelled like he’d used two bottles of sunscreen, but even so his skin was toasty brown, his arms dotted with enticing-looking freckles, and Ava had to restrain herself from connecting them with her finger. As soon as he was settled, he started in talking about the time when an alligator ate an FSU student at Wakulla Springs, a story Ava had already heard a hundred times. While Travis talked on, Ava took in the scenery. The diving tower was over to the far left of the beach, near the underwater spring where the river started, bubbling up from the deep caverns at exactly 70 degrees. Ava had always wanted to jump off the high platform, but had never had the nerve.
The lifeguard, a little rooster of a guy, sat in his squat lifeguard chair, talking to some teenagers who sat near him on an overturned rowboat. People swam in the designated swimming area and sunned themselves on two platforms anchored out by the far edge of the swimming area, near the ropes. Supposedly, the alligators, waiting on the other side of the river, wouldn’t come into the swimming area because they didn’t like crowds. (The FSU student who’d been