Margo waded in until the hem of her dress got wet. Any
farther and there’d be trouble.
Come on, someone shouted. She barely knew these kids’ names
when she could see their faces, but now that it was dark they were mysteries.
And they were just kids, weren’t they, just barely out of college. Maybe she
was only a year or two older, but there was grey in her hair and a rasp to her
voice. They had tossed their nice new clothes from their nice new bodies and
ran, their nakedness concealed by darkness and then water.
There was no one to tell her no anymore, but she could still
feel the ghost of a grip on her arm, fingerprints telling her to go home, to go
to sleep, to get up early and go to work. Margo hiked her dress up a little
higher. The kid with the shaggy blond hair, Dave she thought, dunked his head all
the way under and then popped up his face tingling and his ears slightly
ringing. He tried to convince the others to try it. Margo was glad their
attention away from her. She kept slowly dragging her dress up her body,
sliding deeper and deeper. When the frigid water touched her underwear she froze.
The boy with the brown hair and the girl with the pony tail had heard her
slight gasp and in turn caught her eye before looking away.
Suddenly Margo felt really silly, but instead of doing what
her body told her to, what she pleaded with her body to do, she found herself
pulling the dress even higher, up and over her head. She tossed the garment
toward a large rock and the dress spilled onto the ground. The way the
half-moon lit the trees behind it, she was reminded of a dead body on the
forest floor.
