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By Root 1821 0

their bathing suits lending a variegation of color to the scene. His eye caught a slender girl, her body bronzed from sunlight and pinched into an abbreviated one-piece red swimming suit. She stood looking toward the water like a girl in an advertising picture, her head flung back. The glimpse of her caused Studs to see Catherine as small, and plain, and dumpy, and he felt sorry for her. He wanted to look again at the slender bronzed girl, but feared that Catherine might notice him. If she guessed his thoughts and wishes now when he saw other girls, she’d be hurt, and it would be damn lousy to hurt her, considering the circumstances. And yet he had these thoughts, these wishes that girls like the bronzed one were his instead of Catherine. And Catherine, too, she looked better dressed up than in a swimming suit. He glanced sidewise but closely at her. Nothing to notice yet, because she was a little round in the stomach anyway. Her skin was white, and it looked a little rough, and her thighs and legs seemed kind of chunky. Other guys got better-looking girls.

They paused at the pebbly shore line. Studs suddenly felt himself small and puny, and he stood, with the incoming waters curling over his feet, sticking his shoulders back and throwing out his chest. He ran through the waters, dove under in shallow water, and popped up wetted, with drops trickling from his mussed hair.

“Come on in, it won’t hurt you,” he called while Catherine waded in carefully.

“You let me come in my own way!” she shouted back, proceeding slowly, as if afraid to wet her swimming suit.

All about them the water was jammed with a shouting, splashing, joshing, kicking, swimming, diving, ducking, plopping crowd, and Studs’ ears hummed from the noise they made. He turned his back on Catherine, who was up to her waist, dove under, bobbed his head up, swam out for about fifteen yards. He stood up in water that covered his chest, singled out Catherine by her white bathing cap, and watched her swimming breast stroke toward him. He cut back toward her, taking crawl strokes, and circled around her, blowing on the water, spouting it out of his mouth, diving under, coming up, a serious and studied performance which he wanted her to notice by thinking that he was just like a fish in the water. She swam beside him to the diving board, about two hundred yards out and extending off the breakwater rocks that cut vertically through the water. Both of them puffed as they climbed onto the jagged rocks.

“Come on and dive with me,” he said.

“I’m afraid. I can’t dive.”

“I’ll teach you.”

“No, you go ahead, and I’ll watch.”

He crossed a few feet of jagged stones to the almost springless diving board, and waited while a tall, solidly built, dark-haired chap went off. He followed, hitting the water with a big splash, and swam around randomly, liking it, taking easy strokes. His arms began to seem leaden, and his back started to ache. He labored toward the diving board, climbed over the sodden piles and stones with lurching movements, and, puffing as his hair dripped, stood over Catherine. A brief spasmlike pain cut his heart, and passed too quickly to cause him worry.

“You’re a good diver,” Catherine said as he sank beside her.

“That one wasn’t so good. I hit the water too heavy. I used to be pretty good but I’m out of practice,” he said, smiling modestly, breathing with effort.

His eyes roved over the beach, colorful with bathing suits, alive with a mass of people who stood, walked, sat, their shouts and talks rising into a steady, drumming roar. He watched two fellows tossing a ball and he thought he’d like to join them, and then he saw a girl falling off a fellow’s back in a game of leap frog. He felt a part of this scene, of many people all having a good time. Close to shore, a group of fellows were ducking a girl who screamed and giggled loudly. Nudging Catherine, he pointed, smiling.

“They certainly have their nerve,” she said.

“It’s all in fun and she seems to like it.”

“You men, you think that a girl likes anything you do to her, just because it’s you doing