North Avenue beach was crowded with the Gold Coast moneyed, the downtown young and rich, the tanned, tight-bodied volleyballers, all of them white, and a healthy portion of the rest of the city's masses, a United Colors of Benetton sampler, among which numbered the five of us. School was out for the summer, the next three months sprawled before us like the city from the Skydeck of Sears Tower.

I didn't want to take off my clothes. My body was hairy and flabby and jiggled everywhere. My plans to go on a diet were repeatedly thwarted by my mother, who would wail as if I'd died or threatened leaving home if I didn't eat every meal she put in front of me. And when she did, I ate them, ate them without remorse, ate them with my mind cleansed of thoughts of diets, my stomach devouring all my mouth sent its way and shrieking joyously for more.

Malik was the "beachiest" of us all. Naturally thin, his arms and legs were roped with muscles he didn't put a day's work into shaping or maintaining. We watched without looking as he stripped down to the baggy swim-shorts he had on under his pants and revealed a body that could put him on the cover of a fitness magazine.

"What?" he said, catching us. "You want this?" Then howling with laughter he went splashing into the water.

"Let's go," Teddy yelled, throwing off his sneakers. Amir went next. He was a strong swimmer and dived into the waves and was underwater a long time before his head popped up just before the cordon marking the swimming boundary.

Zeeshan stepped in up to his ankles with his pant cuffs folded. He looked like an elder chaperoning rowdy nephews, a boy become a man too soon, as he stood gazing the horizon with arms crossed at the wrists at his back.

I was the last to join. One by one I took off my shoes, and then my socks. The warm sand gave under my heels. The only times I'd been to the beach was when we visited my mother's people in Chittagong, and there, on the shores of the Bay of Bengal, I recalled the gray sands being wet, cool, and hardened like cement.

The water bit with fangs of ice. Shock gripped my ankles and weakened my knees. I wanted to run back out to the comfort of the hot sand, but I stayed.

Teddy yowled, cursed the cold, laughing maniacally, then went under. Malik was the thrashing swimmer that slapped the water and rotated his head from side to side without ever immersing it. Amir was a beautiful, sinuous sight, slithering just beneath the surface as he slinked along, then broke through and went a few yards in backstrokes, and then flipped over for a combination of breaststroke and freestyle. I knew how to swim, but stood frozen at waist-level water while the cold relieved my lower body of sensation.

The crowd had thickened. Many of the volleyballers were in the water, as were the steady flow of new arrivals to the beach. A thick clot of people surrounded me. Children shrieked, rode the shoulders of parents. Swimmers took the waves and undulated on them like debris. Couples dunked each other's heads. The day grew hotter by the seconds, and my lower body had finally begun to adjust to the tundra below the water's surface. I held my breath, closed my eyes, and took a quick, baptismal dip. The water felt good on my head after the heat of the sun. My scalp cooled down. I opened my eyes for a fraction of a second to a forest of legs of all colors and sizes and shapes in a murk of bluish green. I came back up, gulped air, and rubbed my eyes.

           "Not so bad, is it?" The voice was a woman's, coming from in front of me.

My eyes were still clearing. A group of teenagers was in a raucous game of splashing each other a foot to my left, their sprays catching my face and making it difficult to keep my eyes open. I moved a few paces to my right. I didn't see my friends anywhere, and our clothes and shoes were unattended on the beach. 

"Once you're in it gets better," said the voice, closer now. I saw through a parting between people a young woman, but older than me, swim over and stand up inches from me. Her hair was pasted to her head. She covered her face with both hands to remove the water, opened her eyes, and smiled.

She wore a thin white t-shirt over her one-piece swimsuit. She was big and her breasts pressed heavily against the swimsuit and the sodden t-shirt. Exotropia took her left eye on a seemingly wayward search but I knew she was looking at me.

"Hey, you're not bad looking," she said. "Want to swim with me?"

If I had had the presence of a mature mind, if I had been ten or twenty years older, free of the baggage of teenage angst about reputation and caring about who I was seen talking to, I'd make note of that moment. It was my first compliment from a woman, my first sensation of being told she found me attractive. Instead, I was stricken. I feared from the deepest depths of my being seen talking to this woman with her weird eye and her unsexy body. I would never tell my friends that she'd told me I was good-looking -  or rather, not bad looking – then have them guffaw and jeer that of all the women out there on the beach I'd been singled out by the ugliest one. Told me something about myself, they'd badger, didn't it. I'd rather go back down under water and stay until my lungs burst.

 I looked over at our clothes. Zeeshan was there now, sitting, smoking a cigarette. Seconds later, Malik walked up and started putting his clothes back on. He waved at Teddy and flipped him off, and Teddy, shaking himself like a big, shaggy dog, ran out of the water.

"Ready to go?" said Amir, appearing at my side. He might have seen the woman, as his eyes followed mine for a brief glance. She wasn't there. I couldn't tell when she'd left, and as best I could I gave the vicinity a sweep. No sign of her. The crush of people had gotten worse, and every strange face and body looked like the next one. Even with 20/20 vision I wouldn't be able to spot her, her wandering eye which had found me, selected me out of hundreds, and deemed me worthy of a compliment, unaware of the gift she'd given me.

We put our clothes back on over our wet bodies and sat drying on the sand before Zeeshan would let us in the car.

It was hot enough that within ten minutes we were sweating, our scalps and necks burning, and we started heading back.

People flocked endlessly to the relief of the water, in groups, in couples, in families, by themselves, and someone else out there was finding someone not-bad-looking, and making their way to tell them. 

Nadeem Zaman is the author of the novel In the Time of the Others (long listed for the 2019 DSC Prize in South Asian Literature) and the story collection Up in the Main House & Other Stories. His fiction has appeared in journals in the US, Hong Kong, India, and Bangladesh.