We all stood there watching Terry take off his clothes when suddenly Skip said, “What the hell!” and we heard his first zipper go down too.

Bette shook her head for a moment and said, “Would a Yale graduate with honors do a stupid thing like this? It stinks, for Christ’s sake!”

I unzipped my jacket and said, “You bet your sweet ass she’d do it. Don’t tell me you never played stickball naked on the campus grass, or crawled out the window to go to Rook’s bar in the middle of the night, or cooned apples and threw them at the dean‘s windows and ran like hell. Sillimanders have no fear!“

Laughing we began to undress quickly as the men slipped into the murky water ahead of us and swam away. We both took our clothes off posthaste and dropped them in a pile at our feet.

Bette grabbed my hand as we left the freezing bank and inched our way into the hot water. The bottom was squishy between our toes – sucky, mucky and yucky and we soon found there were drop offs as well. Bette fell into one hole with a screech and swam into the darkness. I followed her.

What ensued was a lot of noisy bantering between the four of us – back and forth, mostly of trying to find each other. I felt something on my leg and screamed. Terry yelled that it was probably only a muskrat. I let out a groan of disgust and he laughed, assuring me that they did not bite.

Once we got used to it, the heat of the water, the smell and the muskrats, it was not so bad. In fact, the stench kind of went away when you were in it. Bette and I swam where the water was deep, splashing, giggling, until we hit a shallow spot and crawled on all fours. We found a bank where we could lean back on, stretch out our legs and just enjoy the soak.

“Where’d the guys go?” I asked in a subdued voice. “They suddenly got quiet.”

“I’m guessing they’re behind that big rock,” Bette said, gesturing across the water to the other side. “I noticed a small cove there…….” She lowered her voice. “…..and I’ll bet we won’t see them for at least a half hour.”

“What do you mean?”

Bette looked at me with an earthy gaze, dropping her head and lifting her eyes to mine, whispering, “Terry likes seconds.”