From Bobby, we learned of a controversial proposal to cull 20 percent of Cape Cod’s resident gray seals, as a deterrent against the aggregation of white sharks in nearshore areas.

Bobby had climbed out of the Bay to avoid going into diabetic shock. He sat on the breakwater in soaking wet boxers, reattaching his insulin pump controller to the thin plastic tubes that hung out of his pancreas. (We had told him he’d be better off skinny-dipping like the rest of us instead of getting his underwear wet, but he preferred to keep them on.) The white sharks were aggregating in greater numbers than ever before, he explained, as a consequence of the burgeoning seal population. By some estimates as many as thirty white sharks now patrolled the Cape on a given day.

We all felt aware of the shallow abyss below our necks, thankful to be swimming in Buzzard’s Bay, on the opposite side of the peninsula where gray seals are not so common. The coastline around Falmouth is a patchwork of wharves, research stations, government buildings, oyster farms, jagged beaches, houses on stilts, and areas cordoned off as nesting sites for migratory seabirds. There is very little light pollution, and at night a spectral arm of the Milky Way often takes shape overhead (it was like a movie or an outer god the first time we saw it, but on that night, at the end of our summer fellowship, it was what the sky looked like).

Alyssa climbed out so she could argue with Bobby. “It’s the fucking Jaws effect,” Alyssa said. “People are so terrified of shark attacks, which never happen, they’ll go on mindless killing sprees just to feel better.”

“If it was the Jaws effect, wouldn’t they be killing the sharks instead of the seals?”

“No, because then the seal population would explode even more. White sharks are apex predators, they respond to the dynamics of lower trophic levels.”

“So you admit the proposal to kill seals has a solid ecological basis.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Lorenzo climbed out because he’d been snorkeling with a flashlight, but could only find ctenophores, tiny hermit crabs, and a clump of pelagic tunicates.

Corinne climbed out because the shark argument made her afraid. The lifetime odds of being attacked by a shark are somewhere around 1 in 10 million, lower than the odds of becoming President. But Corinne understood probability theory well enough to know those statistics were essentially meaningless as presented, and that the odds were significantly higher when bathing in active hunting grounds, and in shallow areas close to shore, and when sea surface temperatures were elevated.

Lena climbed out because she felt tired.

Erica climbed out to drink more black spiced rum. Erica has a tattoo of a hammerhead shark on her left hip, in the same region as Bobby’s insulin pump. This would become a minor theme in her vows when she and Bobby married a decade later in Boston.

Samantha, Warren, Drew, and Karina climbed out because Karina was talking about killing herself. Specifically, she was describing a scenario where she would cover herself in ripe, putrid chum, and take a dip off Sandy Neck Beach where the white sharks aggregated, apparently, in greater numbers than ever before. She said it was an honorable way to go, suicide by shark, something musicians and documentarians could grapple with for decades. Samantha tried to talk her down: “It’s not honorable to die on purpose. It’s selfish and pointless. Everyone would think it was just a random shark attack anyway.” But Karina raised her arms out of the water and dug her long nails into her palms until she was bleeding into the Bay, and she said things like “Cull me!” and “Sharks can smell blood from miles away!” while the rest of us erupted in a great commotion. Warren and Drew hauled Karina out as she kicked and made insane sounds, crying and cackling at the same time. Once she was on the breakwater she calmed down. Blood oozed stigmata-like from her hands. She was sorry, she said, she’d taken something or forgotten to take something, really it was a joke and she was basically fine and she loved us and would miss us all terribly, miss us after our fellowship ended, she meant. Bobby wrapped her palms with a couple of long socks.

I climbed out last, because otherwise I would have been swimming alone. We all sat watching the water.