In the Heart of the Canyon - By Elisabeth Hyde Page 0,39

said in unison.

Peter couldn’t argue with the two women, but he also knew the difference between god-nice and smiley-nice. God-nice was how you acted when a new kid came to school, and his mother shamed him for crying, and so you invited him to play kickball during recess. Smiley-nice was how you acted when your mother made you play with the hairdressers kids while she got her hair done.

Jill and Susan, he was sure, were being smiley-nice.

As for other matters of group dynamics, Peter was also 100 percent certain that Dixie was sleeping with Abo. He knew this because when they were unloading the boats yesterday, he overheard Abo asking Dixie if she knew what a hernia looked like, and Dixie bent and inspected a very white part of Abo’s groin—felt it, even, with her own two fingers. And this afternoon, after they set up camp and Peter went down to Dixie’s boat to retrieve one of his beers, there was Abo lounging in the well of Dixie’s boat with his feet up in her lap so she could clean his toenails with her pocketknife.

They had to be sleeping together.

Peter took his beer back to his own campsite; he popped it open and savored that first cold, fizzy swallow. Their camp tonight was at the base of yet another rapid, on a small beach walled off by chunky gray slabs rising straight up out of the water. Not a lot of room here, and he’d spent some extra time helping Abo set up the groover tonight; as a result, he’d had to settle for a small uneven patch of sand close to the kitchen area, a site that lacked any privacy—Evelyn as usual having claimed the nicest spot. But Peter resolved to make the best of things tonight—he did, after all, have a full beer in his hand and two more allotted for the evening.

Nothing like cold beer in hundred-degree heat.

Upriver, Jill was trying to convince the boys to wash. They were having none of it, though, and huddled on the sand, hugging their knees. Peter knew he should go down to the river right now with his own bathing kit, horse around, splash the boys, get everybody laughing. He didn’t really like kids, but Jill wore such a pinched, irritated look that he felt sorry for her.

And he was all set to gather up his towel and wash kit, when out of the corner of his eye, he saw Amy toiling across the sand in his direction. She was wearing her oversized Jamba Juice T-shirt and carrying her own wash kit, and when she got close, he could see beads of perspiration above her lip, right where a mustache would have been.

“Hey,” he said, squinting up at her.

“Hey,” she sighed.

“I was just going to go wash.”

Amy collapsed on her knees in the sand.

“You don’t look so good,” he said.

Finally she opened her eyes and breathed in deeply.

“Oh my god,” she said. “I’ve just never been so hot in my entire life.”

“Want some of my beer?”

And to his surprise, she took the can and drained what was left.

“Whoa,” he said. “Does your mother know you drink like that?”

“I’m almost eighteen,” she said, letting out a froggy burp. “When my mother was eighteen, it was legal.”

Peter had a thought. He knew it was against the law, but down here in the canyon, the law didn’t seem to apply. And based on what he’d seen in Susan, he didn’t think she’d mind.

“Don’t go away,” he said, and he went down to Dixie’s boat and gave the guides a goofy wave and got another two beers and came back and opened one and gave the other to Amy.

“Where’s your mother, anyway?” he asked.

“Reading. Not bugging the shit out of me, for once.”

“I can’t read down here,” Peter said, opening his second beer, which didn’t really count as his second, as Amy had drunk most of his first.

“Abo reads at night,” Amy said. “Have you seen him? He lies on his sleeping pad with his headlamp and reads before going to bed.”

Peter felt scolded.

“I’m supposed to be reading The Satanic Verses for my lit class next year,” Amy went on. “I’m having a hard time with it, though.”

Now Peter was unable to stifle his surprise. “I brought that book too!”

“Are you reading it?”

“No,” he confessed. “Its at the bottom of my bag.”

“It’s just so dense, and I want to like it because I know he’s a good writer, but—” Amy bent forward, as though