 On the cover of Swimmer's World was a swimming guy's face obscured by splashes. On swimming monthly, a coach in a rose garden. The smell of cigars stuffed the air at Rich's news and beneath it, a note of stale trading card gum. On the wall, a sign said, no reading. Rich, if it was rich, unpacked cigars behind the counter, ignoring me. My monthly or so spot check of swimming magazines consisted of a practice skimming. Contents, capsules, photos. The cover of Poolside had a blonde diver tumbling off. If Rich took my skimming as reading and called me out, it would be easy to say I'd been looking for something. And if Rich said for what, Rich wouldn't. Next to me, a guy was working. He was pulling magazines off the rack, tearing off their covers and throwing the magazines and the covers into two piles on the floor. I'd gotten through swimming monthly and had just picked up Poolside. The guy said, Poolside, right on. You're a swimmer? I'd never seen him before. One of the things about coming to Rich's was that nobody who knew me went there. Being at Rich's was like being nowhere. I said, I'm not. He said, you look like you could be. I didn't look like anything. My jeans and my raincoat and my flannel and my Henley. I said, I'm not. He said, right on. I said, are you? He laughed. He touched a bead on a cord around his neck. He had skaterish hair and he was older than me. My brother's age may be. He said, not me. He said, sorry to interrupt your reading. He smiled like he knew me. I said, I'm not reading. He laughed. He said, that sign's just there for the guys who come in to read porn. He made quotes with his fingers when he said, read. The back wall was all magazines and plastic with their titles popping out above blank sheets of paper. A few men stood in front of them. Should someone who didn't know me be talking to me about pornos? Should he be talking like he knew me and making quotes with his fingers? The men at the back wall shouldn't, it seemed, be doing what they were doing in public. Scoping pornos behind plastic, hard on squirming in their pants. My finger marked poolside centerfold. The guy was still standing right there as if he had something else to say to me. I turned the pages as fast as I could, barely looking, defeating my purpose. Goggled eyes, ripped abs, smashed boobs flashed by. Swimmers stroked down lanes and water splashed up and hid their faces. The guy ripped off a cover and tossed it in a pile. Any minute he could ask me what I was looking for. Riches was only a few blocks up from the river market. It was raining, surprise. Two rainy days in a row in November meant it wouldn't let up until June. This was the third day. Not that the rain bothered me. Erica showed up and we put up our hoods and walked around the vendors. Neither of us was going to buy anything. Erica wanted to look at the Fimo beads. She looked at a purple and green bead on a brown leather cord and said, I could totally make that. Erica's mom made jewelry that she sometimes sold at the river market. Erica had used her mom's beading stuff to make me a seed bead necklace that was as nice as any for sale in the stalls. The prices at the market had gone up or the things we liked now were more expensive. The Guatemala backpacks and the earflap hats. We went because it was what we did, something to do on a Saturday. We got noodles or kettle corn. Erica wanted to go eat our yakisoba by the fountain. I said, it's raining. She said, we'll stand under the awning by the coffee shop. She wanted to watch the skater boys doing tricks on their skateboards by the fountain. There were signs that said no skateboarding, but nobody stopped them. Other skater-ish boys and girls stood around smoking. Erica said, don't you love the smell of cloves? A couple of the skaters had brown cigarettes. All I could smell was the tobacco from the regular cigarettes. I said, they smell good. She said, maybe I should start smoking them. I bet they're not as bad for you as regular cigarettes. She said, but I wouldn't know how to buy them. I said, you could ask one of those kids knowing she wouldn't or expecting she wouldn't, who knew she might. She was the one who wanted to stand in the rain and watch these kids skate and smoke cloves. It was generous of me to watch them with her. The skaters rode their skateboards up on the cement rim of the fountain. Erica said, do you think that one is cute? I mean hot. I said, the one with the pants. She said, with the purple sweatshirt. His pants were stupid too, but not as stupid as the other ones. Purple sweatshirt kept flicking his hair out of his eyes while he was trying to jump his skateboard up on the rim. Erica said, don't you think it's cute how he keeps flicking his hair? To me, flicking hair wasn't something to call cute or not cute. I said, sure. Erica said, you don't have to think so just because I think so. I said, okay. She said, which one do you think is the cutest? They all looked fine. It really was stupid that skaters had huge pants and hair in front of their faces when they were trying to do something graceful. The guy at Rich's hadn't looked like a skater. He looked like what? A college student? A guitar player? I pointed to one with slightly smaller pants and a black and green flannel and brown hair back in a baseball cap. He was skating around the fountain in circles, smoothly dodging benches and trash and other skaters. Erica said, don't point. She said, he is cute. He looks like a little rascal. I don't like that type. Whatever that meant, my guy rolled to a stop and stretched his arms. He took off his baseball cap and his long hair went down past his shoulders. It was long, soft looking hair for a guy. It wasn't a guy. It was suddenly so obviously not a guy. My face felt hot and I wanted to take off my wrinko and my flannel. I didn't move. The girl went and sat down on the bench and took off her flannel and in her t-shirt you could definitely tell she had boobs. It was embarrassing how much like a girl she looked. The guy with the stupidest pants came over and sat down next to her, close to her and then leaned in his head and kissed her. They were Frenching, going at it, right there on the bench at the fountain. None of their friends noticed or looked. The guy and the girl were mouthing each other to pieces in the rain. The girl's hand went for the huge crotch of the guy's stupid pants. Erica said, whoa. If she said anything to me about how that was the person I picked, I'd be ready for her. I'd blame it on the girl. I'd blame it on the stupid skater clothing. I would say, what was it people said? They should get a room. Erica's guy flicked his hair and took a speeding leap up onto the rim of the fountain and sailed off. Now it was really raining. My dad passed me a drumstick and my mom took some slices of white meat. My dad asked how the market had been. My mom asked if I'd bought anything. These were ideas of questions. The sort of paper airplanes of questions my parents felt obligated to lob in my direction over dinner. I could catch them, crumple them, lob them back. I said, it's gotten too expensive. In my parents' minds, the river market still ran along the river and only sold driftwood and soap. All they could do was take my word for it. I said, a lot of that stuff I could make myself. I pulled the skin off my drumstick with my teeth. My mind kept veering to the skaters Frenching on the bench, to their sloppy tongues, her hands swatting at his crotch, to how the skater girl had been a boy until she wasn't. My mind went to the instant I saw her boobs through her shirt and realized it was like the photo at the back of the elephant man that I couldn't stop myself from turning to again and again as if to make sure it was still as horrible or to make sure that I hadn't gotten more horrible since I'd seen it last. Maybe I was over the river market. Maybe Erica and I only went there because we went there or I only went there because Erica asked me to go. My mom passed me the cranberries and said, what about Erica? Did she buy anything? The jellied cranberry sauce from the can held its shape like a cylinder of play-doh. I remembered feeding scoops of play-doh into the plastic machine, getting a hold on the plastic lever and giving it all my strength until something gave and wormy tubes of gray-green spaghetti pushed out the holes. What did my mom care what Erica bought or didn't buy? I said, I think she bought a bracelet. Pledge came over and put her head in my lap. I felt her skull through her thin soft fur. When the guy at Rich's had caught me scoping poolside and said I looked like a swimmer, I should have said so what or I know or tell me what you mean. When I felt the guy's eyes crawling over my shoulders, I should have told him that he had it wrong. My brother was the swimmer in our family. The thing about the photo in the back of the Elephant Man book, which I hadn't checked out of the library in years, was that you needed the photo to complete the story. It wasn't okay to be willing to read about the Elephant Man and not look at him, though for me to look at the photo and think all the same messed up thoughts people had thought when they looked at him in person, when he was alive, was wrong too, maybe more wrong. Every time I looked at the photo of the Elephant Man or thought about what he looked like in the photo, I wanted to not feel what I was feeling. Nauseated as if my head were a balloon, as if his skin, if I touched it, would feel like paper mache. If he offered his hand, I would instantly drop it. The Skater Girl thing was entirely different. She was choosing to look the way she did and the way she looked didn't seem to be causing her any problems. Anyone who didn't know her and who saw her with those boys and that skating get up would have no reason to think she wasn't one of them. What was getting me was the moment when she went from being a boy to mumbling skate tricks to a girl making out on a bench. It wasn't a moment, but a gap between moments, a face with no features. My head felt like a balloon. I'll stop there. Thank you very much.