participate with the others at school, she was certainly feeling what they did. It was just that she kept everything at the lake. There was kissing behind the boathouse. Behind the pizza stand, a guy’s hand slipped under her shirt. Nothing was particularly serious, just fun and laughter. And nothing was with any of the Summer Hill kids.
But then, Terri had worked hard to learn not to concern herself with was what was going on in the little town. Since her mother had run off and left her and her dad, meaning all of Terri’s life, she’d heard whispers. “Isn’t that the girl whose mother...?”
In the ninth grade, there had been that incident in a stairwell when Hector and his friend tried to slam Terri up against a wall. It was after school and the building was nearly empty. The heavy fire door would prevent anyone from hearing her yell. Hector said, “Come on, you know you want it. Everybody says you’re just like your mother.”
Terri had gone into a blind rage. She’d used her backpack as a weapon and tapped into every muscle she’d made at the lake. She’d had to duck booms and flying oars since she could walk, so she was agile. When she came back to reality, there were two boys on the floor. She threw open the door and ran into the empty hall.
She would have left it there and never spoken of it, but a bunch of cheerleaders, Stacy Hartman one of them, saw the boys crumpled on the floor and asked what happened. Of course the boys had to save their male pride and say they had been attacked without reason. With sad faces of suffering, they let the pretty girls put their arms around them to help them walk.
In the ensuing weeks, the boys exaggerated what had happened in the stairwell to make it seem that Terri had attacked them with weapons.
Terri, her father beside her, had made only one attempt to defend herself by telling the truth. Right away, she saw that it was a lost cause. She was not popular in school and had no defenders, while the boys were the stars of the football team. They were needed; Terri was not.
Brody had been so angry about it all that he’d lost his temper—which hadn’t helped. His rage was the final straw. It seemed to be proof that Terri had done just what the boys said she had.
The boys got off with no punishment, while Terri was expelled for three days. Worse was that one of the boys, Hector, blamed the incident for his failure to become a professional football player. Terri had yet another mark against her.
All in all, it had made her disconnect even more from the people of Summer Hill.
But she’d been content. She had the people at the lake, all of whom liked her. And eventually she began planning for college and what she was going to do afterward. Maybe after college she’d go into marine biology. Maybe she’d change from freshwater to salt. Oh! but she’d had plans.
But then, the summer before her senior year, Billy Thorndyke changed her life. The day after school let out, he showed up at the lake and asked Terri to teach him to swim.
“You know how to swim,” she told him.
“But not like you do. I might want to join the swim team.”
She pointedly looked him up and down. He had on baggy swim trunks and a towel around his neck. He had the body of a football player, not the long, sleek muscles of a swimmer.
He grinned at her insinuation. “Okay, so maybe the coach wants me to improve my running. I thought maybe swimming would help.”
She knew he was lying but she had no idea why. She’d have to check the reservations. Maybe some celebrity had booked and he’d learned about it and wanted to be there when he/she arrived. She told Billy to return at two for his first class.
When he came back that afternoon, Terri put him in with her six-year-olds and under. She thought he’d be so insulted that he’d leave, but putting Billy with little kids was like pouring chocolate sauce over ice cream. The children went crazy with delight at the very sight of him. They unanimously decided to see how many of them could sit, lie, hold on to Billy while he swam the length of the pool.
After only ten minutes, Terri gave up trying to restore order for lessons. Instead,