Summer Holidays #1

Your valiant heroine (me) is snorkelling around the pier at Portsea. Under the water, there are:
-weedy sea dragons (awesome)
-puffer-fish
-stargazer fish
-cuttlefish
-etc

Above the water (on the pier) there are:
-entirely obnoxious, tanned, bleached-blonde, overly muscularly developed, (did I say obnoxious?) teenagers who clearly think they are living in the OC.

One of said obnoxious teenagers (a boy) suddenly yells out to me:

Kid: Lady! Lady! Get out of the water! Now!

Lili: ??

Kid: There's a stingray! There's a stingray! Right under you! Get out of the water!

Lili: (looks down into water through snorkel) Actually, there's two stingrays.

Kid: (nearly wetting himself which would sadly ruin his expensively distressed board-shorts) !!! Get out!!!! It will kill you!!!

Lili: It will not kill me.

Kid: It will! It will! Get out!

Lili: It. Will. Not. Kill. Me.

Kid: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lili: Kid, how old are you?

Kid: 14.

Lili: (takes a moment to marvel at the kind of parent that would let their 14 year old son have his own speedboat) Right. Do you know how many people have been killed by stingrays in your ENTIRE LIFETIME???

Kid: No.

Lili: ONE. ONE MAN WHO WAS PROBABLY TRYING TO PASH THE STINGRAY*. Now bugger off.

Kid's Girlfriend: If I get in the water, can I look at it through your snorkel?

Lili: Sure.

Kid's Girlfriend peels off her sundress to reveal the kind of body that I know I didn't have when I was 14. And still don't have. Bitch.

She gets in the water, looks at the stingray. Her boyfriend? Won't move off the jetty. Is that his knees knocking together I see? Is that a puddle of terrified urine I see gathering at his feet? Or is it just the last trickle of his overblown pre-pubescent masculinity running down his inner thigh?

__________

*I am not without blame when it comes to pashing sea-creatures. At one point earlier in the day the man showing us the marine life of the Mornington Peninsula fished out an abalone and explained that it was a gastropod (stomach and leg), and then stuck it on my snorkel mask and made an entirely lame joke about it now being an eye-pod. Except the abalone was obviously feeling frisky and schlooped its way down off my mask and gave me a bigsloppy one right on the kisser. It wasn't bad. Beggars can't be choosers.