If You Knew Then What I Know Now (10 page)

“And how would
you
know?” she says. Her forehead crinkles in disbelief, and she shakes her head and snickers. I feel a sting in her look and her words—how she knows I've never had sex because she knows why. Brad starts laughing, and he flicks his hand against the water and splashes me. The girls laugh, and the other boys laugh, and then Aaron laughs. I stand there, heat rushing up and drying out my mouth as if I'm on the mountain hike again.

Because I thought we were all just pretending; I didn't think any of the kids in the pool had actually had sex. In youth group, we talk about waiting for marriage, about love and men and women, and most often, about temptation. And because I never feel tempted by girls, I assume not giving in is easy for everybody else. I don't know yet that my desires live inside a tiny spot too tough to open. In the pool, under the white lights, even though my face is pink, I laugh too. I splash Brad back and keep laughing because I want it all to be a joke.

Somehow, since the last time we drove over it a week ago, Kansas has stretched out three or four times its actual size. In my seat, my body begins to feel stunted, like I'm compressing myself by being stuck in here. The sun shines in on our faces and arms but our legs are freezing from the full-blast AC. I'm sitting next to Aaron who is sitting next to Gina. A long flannel blanket that's covered in potato chip crumbs is pulled over all three of us.

Gina finishes our novel. “Here,” she says, reaching over Aaron and thrusting it into my hands. “The ending is stupid. You don't have to read it if you don't want to.” Thanks, I say, and flip to the third-to-last chapter where I left off. I don't see how it could end badly when everything that's come before has been so good. Aaron is sleeping, mouth wide open, and now Gina yanks on the blanket to cover her chest and arms and she tilts her head back and closes her eyes too.

The bump bump bump of the tires on the highway, the whine of the stereo, the soft murmur of conversations. I try to stay focused on the killer test-tube toddler, but I can't stop yawning and my eyes close suddenly, like the darkness is something I need. Quickly, I enter a dream. In an hour, I wake up when someone shouts that we're about to cross from Kansas into Missouri. I bend my stiff neck, pop my knuckles and look around in the sun-flooded van. Aaron still sits beside me, now staring at the road ahead of us like he's got to know exactly
where he's going. I'm lucky enough to have skipped about eighty flat Kansas miles and I stretch, smiling as I yawn again.

What I've also skipped, what I won't know until about a year later, is what happened under the blanket while I was sleeping. I'll be in our high school's library with my English class, all of us supposed to be researching our term papers. Mine is on whale poaching. And because my teacher is down the hall smoking in the janitor's closet, when I see Aaron for the first time in a long time, he'll sit down at my table. It will be a long time because neither of us will go to youth group anymore. We'll talk in whispers about what's been going on and then we'll talk about this trip. And he'll tell me that when I slept beside him in the van, Gina pretended to sleep too, but crept her hand under the blanket and slid it into his shorts. And the night before, the night all of us stood in the swimming pool and talked about blue balls, after everyone else went to sleep, Aaron and Gina had sex. And as he leans in close to whisper the details—how they searched for a wide enough shadow, how she laid her beach towel over gravel and pulled him down—I'll finally understand I feel something real for Aaron, some kind of love, because I'll feel betrayed. But I'll confuse the feeling with disappointment, thinking they shouldn't have given into temptation, not during youth group, not at a religious campsite, not ever, because they didn't even like each other, not really, but most of all, because it's a
sin
, a word that also finally feels real. And I'll hate Gina for it, for making him do it, and for what she said in the pool,
confusing that feeling too because it won't be hatred I feel for her—it will be jealousy.

Before we left Colorado to drive home, I decided to start collecting rocks. It seemed like something I should want to do, especially with so many rocks around, and I was immediately thrilled by my new hobby. I couldn't find anybody to walk around with so I set off alone, searching the campsite for something worth keeping forever. I didn't know exactly what kind of rock I was looking for—craggy, fossilized, smooth, or the kind where shapes emerge if you stare long enough and then suddenly recognize a lumpy apple, a man's fist, a curled fish. Near the bottom of the slope that reached up to the interstate, I found one. About as big as my head, this rock must've weighed nearly ten pounds. I had trouble holding it with one hand, but as I turned it in the sun, and looked at its weird streaks of rust and yellow and glittery black, I somehow knew this was what I wanted. Even wrapped up in T-shirts, the rock felt no less heavy, and I was barely able to heave my duffel bag into the van when it was time to go.

Now, barefoot on our church parking lot in Missouri, I stand at the back of the van with the rest of the group. The thought of leaving them, all of us going to separate houses and families is awful; I've been sick of everybody, but now I want to know what they're doing tonight. Aaron stands at the van doors and starts pulling apart the great mass of our luggage. He grips each suitcase from the pile and swings it down to its weary
owner. Mine's on the bottom. I watch him and know it will be days before I'll see him again—probably not until youth group next week. When he finally hands me my bag, and the weight of it tugs at my arm, I don't believe how much I struggle to carry something he doesn't even notice.

W
e have to hear that one again. Angie sits up and presses the rewind button to stop the tape in exactly the right place, in the silence between the two songs. We're lying on a blanket in the park, eating the cherry bars my grandma baked this afternoon and singing along to the whine of Simon and Garfunkel on my battery-operated tape player. It's summer 1992, we're seventeen. A heavy tree stretches over us, leaves so dense most of the sunlight is blotted out and can't reach our blanket. We look like we've been flung, arms and legs bent and slapped down in odd directions. The cherry bars are thick and warm, red blobs swirling across the top. We pick chunks of them out of the blue plastic container my grandma made me promise to bring home. “Like I'm really going to throw it away,” I muttered in Angie's car, as she reversed out of my driveway. My parents are on vacation, so my grandma is staying with my brother and me even though I'm old enough to watch us.

Angie and I are best friends. We are the precise age for believing that always living in the same town and seeing each other every day for the rest of our lives is possible. We'll always
be best friends and never anything more. I know what happens when you date your best friend because that's what happened with Claire, who, before Angie, was my best friend until she was my girlfriend, then my ex-girlfriend, and now she's nothing. This won't happen with Angie, though, because I'm certain that we are forever.

“These cherry bars taste sweaty,” I say. I'm sucking the sticky bits off my fingers. We're listening to the lyrics of “The Sound of Silence,” trying to figure out a meaning no one else has ever found. This song means more to us than it did to them, and by “them,” we mean the people who were around thirty years ago when this album was originally recorded, specifically our parents. We were born in the wrong time. Angie tie-dyes T-shirts in her back yard, and I wear round sunglasses like John Lennon. We relive these memories even though they aren't ours because our parents had hippies and protests and pot and JFK and Vietnam and what do we have: nothing.

Angie is beautiful. Her eyes are pale watery green. She says they are the same color as her birthstone, peridot, which I know is pronounced “pair-a-doe,” but I say “pair-a-dot” just to be corrected. When we see each other in the narrow hallways at school in the morning, we say, “How are you the smorning?” and laugh, because some people actually say it that way. Angie's breasts are the largest I have ever seen in real life. She hates them. She lies on the blanket in the shade ripping up grass, letting it sift through her fingers. Her cotton T-shirt is striped
yellow, and she's pulling at it, yanking the bottom cuff down over her waist and the V-neck up, to cover her cleavage. We have a secret hand signal when we are in public and her cleavage is showing. I do the signal—lightly stroke my own neck with thumb and forefinger—and she fixes her shirt.

I'm wearing shorts, Birkenstock sandals and a double XL T-shirt, even though I weigh approximately 100 pounds. I am the smallest boy in our class. My auburn hair is stiff from gel and hairspray and perfectly parted, a white straight line always cut across my head. It's hot today; the sun glaring down on the grass heats up its sharp smell, which makes me sneeze. I have a handful of wet tissues in my pocket. I wipe my nose with the worn shreds and stuff them back in my shorts. Angie rewinds the Simon and Garfunkel tape again. I have to hear this one part. It's from “Bookends” which is our song now. It used to be “America,” where he and Kathy ride the bus and count the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel and Angie and me all sing, “Time it was and what a time it was, it was.” We love that line—the reminiscence but also the wisdom we think we understand. We smile and fall down again on the blanket.

We start talking about Kevin, her ex-boyfriend and Claire, my ex-girlfriend. Angie and Kevin dated for two years. They had sex. Claire and I dated for a year and a half. We never kissed. Right now, Kevin and Claire are hanging out together, we just know it. We think Claire likes Kevin, and we don't like that at all.

Claire and I got to know each other when we were both actors in an experimental school play. We wore black turtleneck sweaters and stood in front of giant neon arrows while delivering monologues about teen issues. Our friendship deepened after rehearsals when I needed rides home—we performed the radio songs in her car and soon discovered we enjoyed melancholy music, melodrama and each other. We were also both writers, and we already knew that one day we were going to be famous—she for her poetry, me for bestselling suspense thrillers about lawyers—and we constantly tried to impress each other with our words.

It wasn't long before Claire and I were best friends. When she ate dinner at my house, we whispered jokes and sayings my parents didn't understand. My mom would ask, “What?” and we'd smile or laugh at her, one of us nudging the other's shin under the table, my dad rolling his eyes. We made mixed tapes for each other, the music always organized in a theme. She made
Solitude
for me, a collection of moody, depressing songs with an illustrated booklet folded out of gray résumé paper. And we wrote notes, a lot of them. Both of us could fill the front and back of an entire sheet of paper in a 50-minute class period and still get As and Bs—except I couldn't write notes in Algebra. Our notes were dramatic, passionate, ridiculous. We described the moon, the stars, our tears, smiles, and wishes. I used big words I didn't understand; she addressed me as “Dearest” and
laced her letters with
thou
,
doth,
and
shall
. She signed her notes
Solange
and I signed mine
Sergé
, our names from French class. Love, Solange or Love, Sergé—even when we were just friends, we already signed Love.