If you can’t stop any of this, if you can wait sixteen years, it will end well, or at least, better than you’d guess. At your ten-year high-school reunion, near the night’s end, on the crowded patio, Jared will approach you.
At the reunion, throughout the evening, you will have noticed that most of the boys from your high school—the football players and basketball players, the class officers and the prom king—are quickly balding or already bald, and somehow all shorter. Everyone’s life is sort of rearranged: one of the football players walks on prosthetic feet now, and the class president is a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader. You are taller than you were then and your classmates look at you and look again and tell you that you seem grown up. And instead of hiding a part of yourself from them like you did in school you will have decided to bring your boyfriend.
You stand next to him. The open bar is closed. Classmates make plans to meet at nearby bars, promise to e-mail each other, send letters, and exchange photos of children to keep in touch. Your best friend and your boyfriend are smoking cigarettes. You are standing outside with them on a patio overlooking a courtyard, waiting to walk back to your hotel room and look through the senior yearbook you brought, to point at pictures and talk about the faces. Out of the clump of classmates and spouses, Jared suddenly walks up to you. You already knew he was at the reunion, and you almost thought you’d made it through the night without talking to him. He looks like he did in high school—big and thick, a round chest, thick stump legs, a spread-out face with large, wet eyes—only his skin is lined with age. He has a wife; she’s extremely thin. Jared extends his hand, and you shake it. He says “Hey, Ryan,” like he’s surprised to see you. The patio is very dark. Classmates crowd around you both, squeezing the space away, their faces covered in shadows. Jared’s name tag—like your name tag, with a scan of your senior picture printed on it—is stuck to his shirt, a crease down its center and dotted by drops of beer.
Your boyfriend and your best friend drop away, leaning to each other in their own conversation; they won’t notice Jared. He asks you the customary questions, the ones answered this evening already a hundred times. Where do you live now, how are you doing, what are you doing, do you like Chicago? You tell him, wondering why he’s talking to you. You are still afraid of Jared. Or at least you are still afraid of that Jared, the one with the glasses on an afternoon in sixth grade. The conversation comes to an end, once you’ve exhausted the usual, casual exchange. Then Jared lifts his big arm to your shoulder. He says: “Hey, listen, you probably won’t even remember what I am talking about, but there was this time, at fuckin’ Mark’s house, when—” and you stop him.
“I know what you’re going to say.”
“You do?”
“I know exactly what you’re going to say.” You are surprised, too.
“I don’t have to say it?”
“No,” you say, and actually you don’t want him to say it, you don’t want to hear him tell it. It would seem too easy, too obvious for this tormentor to apologize at your reunion. You wouldn’t even test this moment on the page—if it were a story you could write—because no reader would believe it. “It couldn’t really happen this way,” you think, standing in front of Jared, watching it happen.
“Well, look, I just want to say that what we did, it was stupid. I’m really sorry. We were just asshole kids.”
You think it’s strange that you assumed you were the only boy hurt by that kiss in Mark’s bedroom. But you see that Jared carries that day with him like you do; he carries a shame not very different from yours. Somehow you’ve shared a scar this many years. You say to Jared that just knowing he remembers that afternoon is enough. He thanks you and grabs you again. On your shoulder his hand feels a little like the warmth of comfort, and a little like the squeeze of danger.
Youth Group
I’m sleeping against the van window when they all start gasping at the sight of the Rockies and wake me up. I squint in the sudden bright afternoon, looking for these mountains, but all I can see is a distant dark bulk. I’m in the last row of seats, crammed against the side of the passenger van because I’m sitting next to Aaron. He’s sprawled out like always, legs and giant sneakers spread across our row. And I know sitting anywhere else would be more comfortable but I always sit next to Aaron. In fact, I have to sit next to him because I’m in love with him. Though none of us has figured that out yet.
I’m fourteen years old and there are twelve of us in the van—besides Aaron and me, seven other high school kids and three adult chaperones. This is our church youth group summer trip, and we’ve almost made it from Missouri to the campsite in Colorado where we’ll stay the week. I’m yawning as Aaron notices my nap is finished, and then punches my shoulder. The hit makes my arm feel dead for a few seconds until the throbbing begins—my pulse flaring right where a bruise will emerge tomorrow. “Mountains,” he says, pointing to the front of the van.
“Thank you so much.” I say it deadpan and rub my arm.
Aaron is a year older than me. He’s tall and solid, a sophomore player on our school’s varsity football team. He’s going to be in the Army so he’s always wearing camouflage. The sun reaching into the van lights up the clear bristly hair that covers his chin, legs, and arms. He smiles and scratches his elbow near the spot where a spider almost killed him. A rare pleasure of mine is asking him to stab this spider scar with a knife; the tissue is so damaged and desiccated that even a blade can’t split it open. It’s his invincible spot, as though he’s Achilles in reverse. I love the story of the spider bite and when I’ve heard it and watched him press a knife into the scar, I’ve imagined his hospital stay, the deadly fevers, a doctor’s needle squirting antidote into his veins at the very last second. That Aaron, the weak, helpless one is so different from this one next to me, it’s almost as if part of him did die from the spider’s bite, leaving an Aaron I can marvel at, and be a little afraid of.
“Here,” Gina says from the seat in front of us, handing me her paperback book. “I’m done with chapter six.” We’re sharing the same novel because I didn’t bring one. She reads a couple of chapters, then I catch up. It’s a book about married geneticists—the husband is sterile so he and his wife create a test-tube baby who mutates into an amazingly intelligent but psychotic toddler; the kid ages too quickly though and eventually tries to murder them. Sex and violence. It’s the best book I’ve ever read.
I say thanks, and fan out the pages to find my chapter. Gina is the oldest of us. She’ll be a senior in high school this fall. Whenever I’m with her, I somehow feel younger than I actually am. She turns around in her seat and rests her chin on the back of it. “Aaron, come here,” she says. He leans his ear close to her mouth, she whispers something, and then he cups his hand around his mouth and whispers something back to her. I watch and strain to hear their secret but everyone is still talking about the stupid mountains. Almost touching her dark straight hair, Aaron’s large hand is tightly strung with fleshy wires and knobs; the tiny twitches moving under his skin remind me of a machine, of what I see when I peek under the cover of my piano at home while I’m pressing on the keys.
Miles go by. The nearest huge mountain slowly rises above our van and glares down like a bully. I’ve tried ignoring their secret but can’t. Silently, I elbow Aaron, point to Gina’s back and mouth What? He shrugs and says loudly, “Just a question from your book. Mind your own business.” Gina turns around. She eyes him, then looks at me, looks at him again, and this time, she smiles. He licks his fingertips and wipes them on my face.
The campsite, for church groups and Christian families, is called Sermon on the Mount, and it features huge vinyl tents that look like white hay bales, a cafeteria and fellowship center, showers and indoor toilets, picnic tables and a swimming pool. The boys are in one tent with the male chaperones, and the girls are next door. I follow Aaron, the other boys in our group, and our youth leader into the tent where we flump our sleeping bags into a heap on the floor.
> After that, all of us stand in the shade between the tents trading dazed expressions. Brad, one of the other boys, sneaks behind Aaron and tries to clamp him in a headlock. Aaron easily tosses him off and then presses him down into some gravel and pine needles. Brad begs for mercy, then mutters he’ll get even later. When our youth group goes on trips like this, whether we stay in tents, cabins or hotel rooms, the boys organize epic pillow fights. Sometimes I think pillow fighting is the real reason Aaron is in youth group. He’s impossible to knock down, and he’s strong enough to land his feather pillow on your cheek like a sack of flour. He delivers instant headaches with a single tooth-loosening blow. In previous summers when we’ve spent weeks at a camp with cabins in the Missouri woods, each night, the bunk beds were stripped and the mattresses were all piled in the middle of the room. All of the boys would sock each other until only one was left standing: Aaron, on the uneven mass of mattresses, the boys with weaker arms and fluffier pillows whimpering at his feet.
Because I weigh about ninety pounds, I’m a watcher of pillow fights instead of an actual fighter—although I am usually pulled into the ring at least once, most often when Aaron grips my ankles and yanks me in for a pummeling. I’m the whipping boy of youth group. It’s just so easy for them to hold me upside down or wad me up and shove me in a kitchen cupboard. And, like the bruise that’s rising up on my arm from Aaron’s punch in the van, there is some pain. But as much as I make a big show when they wring my arms with Indian sunburns or twist wet fingers in my ears, as much as I squeal in protest and flail around, silently and secretly, I do crave the attention—especially Aaron’s.
He lets go of Brad just as our guides tromp up the gravel path. Blake and Cindy, fit and muscled, blond and pink-cheeked, both wearing gold crosses on chains and expensive sunglasses. Their smiles are identical. This week they’ll take us white-water rafting, rock climbing, rappelling and even hiking—several miles out where we’ll pitch tents on a mountain, cook over a fire and drink from a perfectly clear stream. Blake sweeps his arm across the wide sky and points to a short mountain on the other side of the interstate. A glacier slid down its face and dug out the straight scar we see now. Then, a road was cut across the mountain, clearing out a line of pines about two thirds of the way up. With my eyes, I follow his tanned arm drawing a cross in the air, and then I see it carved there into the mountain. “God’s mark on God’s mountain,” he says. Blake tells our circle to join hands for prayer before dinner. I knew this was coming, so I’m already standing next to Aaron though I pretend some reluctance, putting on my Can you believe this guy? look.
Church is just like school—we go because we have to. The worst part is waking up early on Sundays and getting dressed up. Once we get to church, and slide down a pew to sit in the sanctuary, I’m fine because I only have to pretend to listen. I’m free to daydream, to make up stories in my head. As long as I keep my eyes pointed up front, nobody knows how I’m not really getting it when the pastor says salvation, grace or sin—words that sound important but don’t mean much. I imagine that for everybody else those words have a physical sensation, a feeling like your belly is full of warm water or the lightheadedness after spinning in one spot over and over, and because I never feel anything in church or when I pray, I assume I must be doing it wrong. Like now, holding Aaron’s hand in the circle of kids, the only thing I feel is his hand. Blake says, “Amen.”
Time to eat. As Blake and Cindy lead the group to the cafeteria, I try matching Aaron’s huge stride. A few paces ahead of us, Gina turns to another girl, points at Blake’s tiny blue shorts, and whispers, “He’s hot.”
The next day, we cram ourselves into wetsuits and go rafting on the Arkansas River. There’s a guide in each raft to steer our inflatable vessel with long wooden oars, point out rock formations and tell us when to bail the inches of water pooling at our feet. Almost every stretch of the river has a name—Gunbarrel Rush, the Widowmaker, Sledgehammer Falls, Big Drop. For six hours, the water jerks us down its course, and I can’t stop thinking how easily my face could be scoured off by each jutting boulder we pass. My wetsuit is three sizes too big, and between dangerous spots on the river I concentrate on trying to flatten the spongy wrinkles around my middle and crotch. Aaron looks like a superhero in his wetsuit—as dark, hulking, and polished as Batman.
When we return to camp that evening, we’re all sunburnt and soggy. After I wrench off my wetsuit in a bathroom stall, and change into a T-shirt and shorts, I limp into the big tent and collapse on my sleeping bag. With the late afternoon sun slanting over the mountains, the air is warm and still, and after the daylong turbulence, I don’t mind it. One by one, the others climb into the tent, including Aaron, to change clothes and rest before dinner.
His army duffel bag is unzipped next to me. I nod to him as he unlaces his sneakers and brushes sand grit off his feet and shins. I’m lying on my back, my damp hair grinding into my pillow, and I throw my right arm over my face like it’s too bright. In the blurry margin of my vision, I see Aaron lift his chin and pull down the zipper of the wetsuit at the root of his neck. The teeth unlock in a long high note like a sigh, and from the noise and movement beside me, I know he’s stripped off the suit, and he’s down to his camouflage trunks. He steps out of the suit and flings it into a wriggling pile near my feet; drops of water hit my petrified legs. More digging in the duffel bag, then a T-shirt is unfolded and shaken out, snapping like a flag.
My eyes still point at the crossbars holding up the tent’s ceiling but they want to peek at Aaron. I want to see him, the hidden parts of his body I’ve tried so hard never to think about. If I turned my head just a bit, if I only glanced, I could probably catch a quick flash and he wouldn’t notice. And if he did notice, couldn’t I pass it off as just looking around? My tired eyes wandering without really looking? Would it have to mean something?
There’s the sudden soft shushing of his swimming trunks as he pushes them down his legs. Now, he’s naked beside me, no more than a few feet away. Right there. I’m frozen, afraid of what I want to see, afraid of what I want to do, afraid of what he’ll do if I look. In my head, with my eyes staring hard at the black X above me, I try picturing what he looks like, and I can see all the parts of Aaron I’ve already seen, with a murky grey nothing floating over the rest.
In a few seconds, he’s pulled on fresh clothes, it’s over. He drops his heavy body to the platform to put on socks and shoes. With his right leg, he reaches over and rubs his bare foot on my face.
“You going to dinner or what?” he says.
“Knock it off,” I say, pushing him off, pretending to be crabby.
We’re ready early in the morning for the hike—through a forest and up a mountain to an expanse of grass where we’ll spend the night. Blake warns us how tough it’s going to be. “It’s June,” he says. “And today, you’re going to touch snow. That’s how far we’re going.” I’m not impressed, I can see the snow from here. We’re all strapped down under enormous backpacks, full of gear we have to carry though most of it isn’t actually ours. Because I’m so short, my pack stretches over my head and something rough rubs my neck left then right then left again as I waddle under its weight. “You all right?” Aaron asks.
“Oh yeah.”
The hike takes all day, and there are several moments when the cramp in my side almost forces me to toss my body down the scrubby flank of the mountain. At one point, Blake doubles back to encourage me; I’m the last of the group, behind all the girls, which isn’t necessarily surprising to me but is strange to him. Plus I’ve already drunk all the water in my canteen. We’ve gone about a quarter of a mile.
“Hey, big guy,” he says. “You’ve got to pick it up if we want to reach the peak by dark.”
I want to say something but I’ve lost the ability, so I just nod and squeeze my cramp and continue daydreaming that I’m not really there.
When we reach the grassy flatness that will be our campsite, we pitch our tents and then gather in a circ
le around Blake as he bows his head and thanks God for our safe journey and for this majesty. But the view is so gorgeous it’s fake, as if we’re standing in front of giant postcards. Wide sky, thick pines, the snowy peak reaching up and sparkling, an actual babbling brook—I recognize the beauty, but that doesn’t mean I feel anything. With Blake’s hushed voice praying, his words droning like a hum, I can’t keep my eyes on anything besides Aaron’s sweaty forearms. And when I look, there is real feeling—something physical that runs through me with a sudden thrill like fear.
At the moment, I don’t know what staring at Aaron really means. I’ve tricked myself into thinking that I like looking at his body because mine is so small and shapeless, as if this is Mrs. Kline’s second-hour biology class and Aaron is one of the rubbery frog specimens we have to examine and touch and report on precisely. At the moment, I’ve also never kissed anyone and don’t really understand what kissing is, or what you do with your body once you start kissing someone. So I don’t think about that either when I stare at him. I don’t think about what his body could do to mine. What I do think about is all the strength working inside him, the force when he collides with players on the football field, how this hike was nothing for him, not even hard. And sometimes I do wonder what it would be like to take on that force, to be crushed by him and squeezed from the inside out—like the cramp in my side except over my whole body.
After the prayer, Blake says it’s time to keep hiking to that snowy peak, and he points to it looming above the trees. General excitement among the group—the tying of shoes, the chewing of GORP, the rubbing of sunscreen on noses. I nudge Aaron’s arm. “He really thinks we want to hike again?” I ask, smirking.
If You Knew Then What I Know Now Page 6
