Read Boys in the Trees: A Memoir for Free Online Page A

salty waves, their most sensitive naked parts on sunlit parade. Bodies, beautiful, homely, and everything in between, bounced, jiggled, sprang, and strutted from the waves. Everyone was there, wearing nothing at all, from Joey and Lucy and their friends to my parents and their friends, with their cucumber sandwiches and martini shakers.
    You would never see me naked at Windy Gates. The idea of letting my own towel fall, and exposing myself with everyone else, felt like an unimaginable torment. I felt ashamed of something, likely something having nothing to do with my nudity. Still, when my family returned to Stamford from the Vineyard, leaving behind the warm brown bodies of Windy Gates, I was vulnerable, maybe, to some of what I’d been seeing and sensing.
    From my perspective now, it’s disturbing to look back on what happened to a young girl with a much older boy. The thing is, even though I instinctively knew I couldn’t tell anybody, it didn’t feel shameful at the time but, instead, thrillingly clandestine, and full of naughty fun.
    Billy was the teenage son of family friends who were visiting Stamford from Chicago, where his father was a lawyer. They were renting a house in the neighboring town of Westport that summer. One thing about Billy was clear. He made no secret about how much in love he was with my sister Lucy. In fact, the first time I saw Billy, he was spying on Lucy through a window as she made her way to the swimming pool, wearing her sexy black bathing suit.
    That summer, on our first walk up the hill to the house after dinner at the pool house, Billy asked me whether Lucy was “developed.” I must have looked as confused as I felt because he added, “I mean, does she have hair down there?” I told him that I didn’t know, but the subject was never far from my mind that summer. Every time Lucy was nearby, Billy mooned over her as if a goddess had favored him with her presence, a rank of deity I could never come close to matching.
    A few evenings later, Billy and I found ourselves in the living room after everyone was asleep, talking. Billy told me about a Swedish movie he’d seen recently. He described the two actors, and when he went on to say they were both naked, and touching each other, I couldn’t help myself: what he was saying excited me. Billy was a little beer-drunk, maybe, when he proceeded to tell me how good looking I was. The way I felt didn’t show on my face, but at the same time I found I couldn’t keep still. I felt physically aroused. Then Billy suggested the two of us go swimming.
    We walked to the tennis house in silence. It was dark, maybe ten at night, and the air had a hot, saturated feel to it, as if it were about to rain. Inside the tennis house, Billy and I began changing into our bathing suits, Billy in the men’s room, me in the ladies’.
    Earlier that night, Billy had asked me if I’d ever skinny-dipped, and I said no. Now he went for the kill. “Carly,” he said, the sound echoing like a signal from a boat in distress, “have you got a quarter?”
    “I don’t have a quarter,” I said, my voice sliding across the tennis house’s cement floors and pinewood interior. I slipped on my favorite plaid shirt over my bathing suit. Then, in an attempt to please him, I began poking around in ashtrays and in the pockets of the robes hanging off hooks, where my fingers found a dime. Would a dime be good enough? I called out.
    “If you want,” Billy said, as if he were doing me a favor, and then he proposed a bargain: if I brought him my dime, he would give me a quarter in return. I felt even more excited, grown-up, and my heart stepped up its beat.
    That night, the only light came from the cocked lights trained on the pool, which cast spooky shadows.
    “Come in, and bring the dime,” Billy said again from behind the men’s room door.
    Which I did, moving stealthily, sensitive to any and all shadows that moved. I felt scared, less about being attacked by someone