In the summer of '76, Jamie's house is a party house.
Her parents, Allen and Betty, have a backyard swimming pool, with an open-air thatched bar and boulders embedded in the tiles, but they don't own swimming suits.
Blau takes the most embarrassing epiphanies of that fateful summer and writes about them with such subtle candor that it makes the readers' legs buckle, much as Jamie's do one summer night out past the eucalyptus trees: And then, in an instant, Jamie understood why sex was such a big deal; why it made marriages and broke them up again; why most graffiti in public bathrooms was about sex; why Dog Feather read Jugs and loved Betty's breasts; why Allen loved Betty; why Leon hung around the house like a mosquito you couldn't pin down long enough to catch; why Tammy and Debbie thought they were in love; why Flip wanted to do it right then and right there.
The borehole water we drink today is our personal effort.