“Why is hearing you say fuck so hot?” she asked.
“Um…I dunno?” It ended up sounding like a question, but I didn’t mean it to.
Great, now my inflections also had a mind of their own.
“Mayra said you’re really, really hot, you know,” Samantha said. She leaned over close to me and spoke in a very loud hushed tone. “She said you have the chest of a Greek god.”
“She did?”
“Mm-hmm…” Samantha’s lips squeezed together into a thin little line. I had a weird desire to poke at it, but I didn’t. “She said you work out a lot, and you look fabulous naked.”
“She said that?” Now I was genuinely surprised because I didn’t really think Mayra would talk quite that freely.
“Well, she actually said with your shirt off,” Samantha said, correcting herself. She was starting to slur her words a bit, or maybe the waves from the lake lapping against the rocks were affecting my ears.
I took another drink and finished off what was in that cup.
“Want more?” Samantha asked. She grabbed the plastic cup out of my hands before I had the chance to say yay or nay.
Horses say neigh.
I giggled and took another drink from the full cup Samantha handed me. It was kind of cold and wet, so I held it up to my face, which made my face cold and wet.
Damn!
I laughed again, and Joe did, too, so it must have been funny.
“You should take off your shirt,” Samantha said.
“Huh?”
“See? Some of the other guys have.” She pointed toward the water.
She was right. A few of the guys were running around without shirts. I was pretty sure they had been swimming though. They were all wet, at least.
“I don’t like swimming much,” I said. “Not in the lake, anyway.”
“You afraid of drowning?”
“No,” I said. “Catfish. They’re very common here. They have spines near their gills that can sting, just like a jellyfish in the ocean. They’re quite dangerous.”
Joe spurted his drink out in front of him as he laughed again.
“Jellyfish!” he screamed. Samantha started laughing as well. A couple other kids whose names I wasn’t sure of joined us, and we all started yelling ?
??jellyfish” at each other. Joe got up on the table and yelled it out at everyone. Pretty soon, all the kids were yelling it out over and over again.
“Jellyfish! Jellyfish! Jellyfish!”
Something about Joe being way up on that table was quite intriguing, and I decided I should join him. When I stood up, my legs were all wobbly, and I figured I had been sitting there way too long. I saw the basket of chips and grabbed a handful of them on my way as I clambered onto the bench and then stood on the table.
“Portuguese man o’ war!” I yelled at the top of my voice.
Joe stopped and looked over at me. His eyebrows and mine must have been in cahoots, because they were dancing all over his face.
“What the fuck did you say?” he asked.
“Portuguese man o’ war,” I repeated. “It kind of looks like a jellyfish, but…”