Annie Warner was walking by on the way to do her laundry, but she paused to ask Daig a little hesitantly whether she had won her seat race.

"You won your second, but you lost your first just by a little."

"I lost my first?" Annie looked alarmed.

"Just by a little."

Annie disappeared into the laundry room, but she still looked worried when she came back.

"Does Harry notice when the boats start unequal?"

"Sure he does, he notices all that stuff. He keeps a whole log, he even looks at the pattern of a person's seat races it's very complex."

"When's he going to pick the spares?"

"Well, he doesn't want to pick them just now."

"So when's he gonna pick them."

"Sometime, maybe early next week. But once he picks them, they'll be definite. It'll be close anyway, and whoever he picks it'll be a fast boat, so no one should be too disappointed."

Annie looked at Daig like he was being naive. "Yeah, but who the hell wants to be a spare," she said darkly, almost to herself.

* * *

"I sure don't want to be a spare. I can tell you that." Jackie Zoch stretched her long legs down the seat at Tommy's Lunch and looked across the table at Carie Graves. Carle didn't have to worry about being a spare; she'd been stroke that morning, the most prestigious position in the boat. "I'm not doing all this just so I can go over there and watch other people row. So you get a free trip to England, so what? I can go to England on a tour, if I want go."

Jackie and Carle have been rowing together at the University of Wisconsin, and they both look and talk kind of like large cheerleaders--Carle is six feet one inch, and Jackie not much shorter--only they're tougher. Jackie is blonde and a little pouty, Carie dark and sleek and a little more sophisticated--she rows with large silver hoop earrings dangling from her ears. They've become breakfast regulars at Tommy's--another group, led by Nancy Storrs, drives over to "The House of 'Cakes" every morning, and today Claudia Schneider got a bunch of people to go to Zum Zum's because she was in love with their jelly. The waitress behind the counter at Tommy's made a point of calling over to Jackie and Carle to ask them if they wanted the last of the grapefruit juice, and later she came over to talk and joke around with them.