“Don’t let Fohi scare you away. Nobody listens to him anyway.”

“I don’t need to give Coli any more reason to be calling me … names.”

“Excuse my French, but fuck Coli. Nobody listens to her either. She and Fohi should hook up.”

“Hey!” yelled Fohi, still working on drowning Paci. “I heard that!”

“Good!” yelled Winky before turning back to me. “Come on. Get in the water. We’ll go to the other side and gossip with the girls.”

I hadn’t gossiped with any girls in I couldn’t remember how long, and for once it sounded like fun, so I jumped back in the water and swam with Winky over to her group of friends. Most of them I recognized from the training sessions, but LaShay was there too, along with another girl from the canner house.

“Hey,” I said, pinching the water out of my nose.

“Hey, Bryn,” said LaShay, her voice drowning out the others who were welcoming me. “This your first time here, too?”

“Yeah.”

“You as nervous as I am about them gators comin’ in here for a midnight snack?”

I laughed. “Hell, yes.”

“Okay, good. I decided I’m gonna throw one a these girls in front, if one-a-them monsters gets in here, since they seem so confident it ain’t gonna happen.”

“I’ll help,” I said.

“Good.” She flopped around in the water for a second and then said, “Shit. I was jus’ gonna give you some skin but I ain’t figured out how to swim right yet.”

Everyone stopped talking and waited to hear what she was going to say next. It was painfully awkward, all of us knowing she couldn’t swim well because canners had taken her arm.

“Ya’ll ain’t gonna start acting all weird an’ shit cause I got half an arm, are ya? I’ll be liable to slap some-a-you if that’s the case. Serious.”

“No,” I said, “no weirdness here. Go ahead and flop around like a one-armed seal. I won’t say a word.”

Everyone froze in place, probably shocked that I’d said it. But I couldn’t think of any other way to diffuse the uncomfortable feeling, and it didn’t serve any purpose to keep pretending everything was normal.

“I can’t believe you jus’ said that,” said LaShay.

I didn’t say anything. I was waiting for her to flop around some more and slap me. I wouldn’t have fought her if she’d decided to do it either, since I probably deserved it.

“That was funny as hell,” she said, smiling. “Damn, girl. Remind me never to ask you if I look fat.”

Everyone laughed and the tense moment was over, just like that.

Fohi further erased the bad feelings by swimming over and saying, “We need you ladies to settle a bet we have going on over here. Who’s better-looking … me or Rob?”

“Paci!” yelled Winky, sending us into giggles all over again.

“Paci’s not in the contest, Winky. Shut up. It’s me or Rob, no one else.”

Another girl yelled out, “Trip!”

“Come on, seriously? He’s friggin’ gay. Me or Rob. Tell us.”

“Peter!” yelled LaShay. “He’s got you all beat.”

Fohi splashed water at all of us. “Never mind. You chicks are lame.”

“I pick Rob!” yelled a little voice from the middle of our group. It was a smallish girl I remembered from one of my sessions. She’d voluntarily walked out instead of fighting anyone, which had been a relief to me. She was too tiny to go up against those canners without serious training.

“Whoo hoo! You hear that, Fohi? I win!” yelled Rob.

“You cheated,” he grumbled. “I’m outta here.”

“Poor Fohi,” I said quietly to the girls. “He doesn’t get any respect.”

“I actually think he’s kinda cute,” said another girl. “But we don’t need to tell him that. His stupid head gets swollen just looking in a mirror.”

“Honest to God, I think the chiefs are the best lookin’ guys in this place,” said LaShay. “You guys musta picked ‘em for that, right?”

“No,” said Winky. “We picked them for their parents’ positions in the tribes before. But they’re kind of natural leaders anyway.”

I nodded. They had different styles, but both of them were effective in their own ways.

I almost didn’t want to broach the subject, but I had to because it was niggling at the back of my mind and I knew it wasn’t going to let me sleep. “Why’d Fohi say Trip is gay? Is he just messing around?”

No one said anything for a few seconds and LaShay let out a burst of air. She was feeling the tension just like I was apparently.

“It doesn’t matter to me. I’m just curious,” I said, trying to shrug it off. Hopefully I hadn’t just dis-invited myself from future pool parties.

“It’s just a rumor,” said Winky. “Nobody really knows.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It wasn’t like it was my business, really. I was starting to really regret saying anything.

“I think he is,” said the girl who said she thought Fohi was cute. “He’s never really had a girlfriend.”

“Yes he did, Mandy,” said Winky. “He dated that girl two years ago … what’s her name?”

“Yeah, but they never did anything. They just went to that formal together and that’s it. Just a kiss goodnight. And it wasn’t very hot either, from what I heard.”

“How do you know that?” asked Winky. “He acts all manly man around us all the time. I can’t believe he gave an un-hot kiss.”

“Seriously,” said LaShay. “The boy is hot. But that don’t mean nothin’. There’s plenty of gay hot guys walkin’ around. Like Peter.”

I giggled. “You think Peter’s hot?”

“Sure, in a prim and proper boy-next-door kinda way. Right? Am I crazy?”

“No, you’re not crazy,” said another girl. “He’s adorable.”

“They would make the absolute cutest couple of all time,” said Mandy.

“Who?” I asked. I was totally lost now.

“Peter and Trip, duh. Who’ve we been talking about this whole time?”

“Yeah, but …” I shook my head. Peter and Trip? Is that even possible? I tried to play back the memory of seeing Peter meeting someone in the woods. He was tall and broad-shouldered like Trip. Could that have been him? And if it was, what were they arguing about? Whatever it was, it had upset Peter a lot.

“I gotta go, girls. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yeah, see ya, Bryn. Glad you came out tonight.”

“I probably would have sooner if I’d known about this place,” I said, swimming away backwards so I could still see them.

“How’d you find it this time?” asked LaShay. “It ain’t like you can just stumble on it. Everything’s a dang maze in this place.”

“Paci brought me.” I’d almost reached the spot where my clothes were waiting in a pile.

“Ooooh, Paci!” yelled Fohi from across the pool. “Paci brought her. Did ya hear that?”

“Shut up, Fohi,” said Rob, sounding tired of his friend’s nonsense.

I heard some wrestling around after that and was able to see what looked like Paci and Rob working on drowning Fohi. I smiled to myself as I got dressed, happy in the knowledge that the gossip wasn’t going to be taken too seriously by anyone. Too bad for Coli. Turns out I wasn’t going to be rejected for being a so-called slut; at least, not by the group of girls Winky hung out with.

And now I had some ammo to use in my next conversation with Peter, and I was for sure going to get a confession out of him now. I nearly rubbed my hands with anticipation as I left the pool area for our hut.

***

Peter wasn’t home when I got back, and I was so tired from all the treading water and excitement of the day, I fell asleep soon after lying down. When I woke up the next morning, he was already gone. I knew he’d been there, though, because the smoke sticks we used to keep the mosquitoes away were still lit and he’d left me some food in a basket by the pantry.

“Dang that boy,” I said to Buster, who was lying on his back, fuzzy underparts exposed to the world. He obviously wasn’t one bit worried about leaving himself vulnerable. Either that, or he was making sure to have his belly available for anyone who might want to rub it a little. I scratched him between his front legs. “You are one hot mess, you know that, Buster? Look at you … your hair’s growing in all tangled, you smell like a fish’s butt, your teeth are just nasty. What are we going to do with you?”

Buster decided that the thing I needed to do with him was to submit to his licking. Again.

“Get away, mutt.” I shoved him over onto Peter’s mattress. “I have to go talk to a man about a horse.” I smiled to myself as I walked to the outhouse, Buster at my heels, remembering that ridiculous expression my dad used. I asked him time and again him why he didn’t just say he was going to the bathroom.

“Because,” he’d answer, “no one needs to know when I’m about to do my business.”

And I’d always respond with, “But everyone knows that expression, so you’re telling them anyway.”

He’d frown at me and give me the same explanation he always did and that would end the conversation. “It’s all about being a part of polite society, Bryn. Sometimes it’s important to keep up the charade, and everyone agrees to do that without discussing it.”

What is the world going to do without parents telling us how things should be? I guess I had my answer with the latest interaction with kids whose parents had done nothing to prepare them - the canners. Or who had prepared them in different ways than my dad and the parents of the kids in Kahayatle had.

I finished in the outhouse and walked back to the hut, thinking about Peter and Trip and the things everyone had said last night. Is it possible that Trip is gay? Could he someday be Peter’s cuddle partner? Were we all being part of polite society by just ignoring it but wondering about it to ourselves? I was having a difficult time with the polite society thing. I wanted to ask and analyze and figure it all out. Peter needed a cuddle partner, and Trip wasn’t the worst he could do by far - if he was in the market for cuddling another guy. If Peter were my girlfriend, I’d be trying to hook her up too, so it didn’t feel wrong to have my nose in his and Trip’s business, even if maybe it should have. My mind wandered to Trip and all of my interactions with him.

Trip had acted all sexy guy-ish the first time I’d met him, but looking back now, I realized that it was almost as if he were putting on a show for all the people watching. I’d sensed some guys acting attracted to me since coming to the swamp, but Trip was never a part of that group. More than anything, he seemed irritated by me. I knew I wasn’t the prettiest girl in the world and not everyone was going to like me, but he didn’t even register on the realizing-I-was-a-girl sensor.

Hmmmm. I need to find Peter and grill him until he caves. I had no idea where he was, but I knew he made cloth sometimes, and Winky said it was made in a hut near the pool. I wanted to check out the no-gators system they had set up there anyway, so I headed off in that direction.

Halfway there, I ran into Mandy.

“Hey, Bryn. What’s up?”

“Nothing. Just going to look at the pool in the daytime, maybe check out the cloth-making stuff.”

“You mean the weaving?”

“Yeah. That’s cloth-making, right?”

“That’s part of it,” she said, stepping over a branch that had fallen across the path. “It’s the final part, actually.”