Boys Life

kicked blissfully, the small buds of her breasts visible above the surface. She wore nothing to cover the area between her long, sleek thighs either, and I was ashamed to be looking but my eyes were spellbound. She turned and slid underwater. When she came up again, halfway across the pond, she swept her thick wet tresses back from her forehead and flipped over once more, gazing up at the blue sky as she floated.
    Now, this was an interesting situation, I reasoned. Here I stood, hungry and thirsty, covered with mosquito bites and thorn welts, knowing my mother and father were calling up the sheriff and the fire chief by now, and twenty feet in front of me was a shimmering green pond with a naked blond girl floating in it. I hadn’t gotten a good look at her face yet, but I could tell she was older than me, maybe fifteen or sixteen. She was long and lean, and she swam not with the splashy giddiness of a child but with an elegant, easy grace. I saw her clothes lying at the base of a tree on the other side of the pond, and a trail led off into the woods. The girl dove under, her legs kicking, then she resurfaced and slowly swam toward her clothes. She stopped, her feet finding the slippery bottom. Then she started wading in toward shore, and the moment of truth was thrust upon me.
    “Wait!” I called out.
    She spun around. Her face turned red and her hands flew up to cover her breasts, and then she ducked down in the water up to her throat. “Who’s there? Who said that?”
    “I did.” I came out, sheepishly, from my hiding-place. “Sorry.”
    “Who are you? How long have you been standin’ there?”
    “Just a couple of minutes,” I said. I followed it with a white lie. “I didn’t see anythin’.”
    The girl was staring at me with open-mouthed indignation, her wet hair crimped around her shoulders. Her face was illuminated by a spill of sunlight through the trees, and I looked beyond her anger at a vision of beauty. Which surprised me, because the power of her beauty hit me so hard and suddenly. There are many things a boy considers beautiful: the shine of a bike’s paint, the luster of a dog’s pelt, the singing of a yo-yo as it loops the loop, the yellow harvest moon, the green grass of a meadow, and free hours at hand. The face of a girl, no matter how well-constructed, is usually not in that realm of appreciation. At that moment, though, I forgot about my hungry belly and my mosquito bites and my thorn stings. A girl with the most beautiful face I’d ever seen was staring at me, her eyes pale cornflower blue, and I had the feeling of waking up from a prolonged, lazy sleep into a new world I had never realized existed.
    “I’m lost,” I managed to say.
    “Where’d you come from? Were you spyin’ on me?”
    “No. I… came from that way.” I motioned in the direction behind me.
    “You’re tellin’ a story!” she snapped. “Ain’t nobody lives up in them hills!”
    “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
    She remained hunkered down in the water, her arms around herself. I could tell that the anger was gradually leaving her, because the expression in her eyes was softening. “Lost,” she repeated. “Where do you live?”
    “Zephyr.”
    “Oh, now I know you’re tellin’ a story! Zephyr’s all the way on the other side of the valley!”
    “I was campin’ out last night,” I told her. “Me and my friends. Somethin’ happened, and I got lost.”
    “What happened?”
    I shrugged. “Some men got after us.”
    “Are you tellin’ me the honest truth?”
    “I am, I swear it.”
    “All the way from Zephyr? You must be worn out!”
    “Kinda,” I said.
    “Turn around,” she told me. “Don’t you dare look till I say for you to. All right?”
    “All right,” I agreed, and I turned my back to her. I heard her getting out of the water, and in my mind I saw her naked from head to toe. Clothes rustled. In a minute or two she said, “You can turn around now.” When I looked at her again, she was dressed in a pink T-shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers. “What’s your name?” she asked, pushing her hair back from her forehead.
    “Cory Mackenson.”
    “I’m Chile Willow,” she said. “Come on with me, Cory.”
    Oh, she spoke my name so fine.
    I followed her along the trail through the woods. She was taller than me. She didn’t walk like a little girl. She was sixteen, I figured. Walking behind her, I inhaled her scent like the aroma of dew on newly cut grass. I tried to step where