If You Knew Then What I Know Now (9 page)

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 circle 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.

“I'm going,” he says. “But you probably don't have to go if you don't want to.” He rolls his sleeves over the humps of each shoulder.

“Aaron,” Gina shouts. She's standing with Blake. She says, “Let's go,” and he heads after her.

For a second or two I consider following him, but decide to throw myself across a boulder, to just lie in the sun and pout instead.

An hour later, I shake out of a daze when I hear distant laughter, screams. I open my eyes and squint at the mountain peak. They made it. The group stands at the edge of the snow, straddling the line between white and green, cupping out snowballs, propping their flat hands over their eyes to look at everything below. Blake points at things. They nod. And then I see Aaron, charging through the snow in his shorts, Gina on him, piggyback. Her arms are locked around his neck, they're both squealing and laughing in the sun.

That night, after the campfire dinner, after tiptoeing in the crickety darkness to pee, I sleep in a small three-person tent with Aaron and Brad. Between Aaron and Brad. They each unroll their sleeping bags along the tent's sides so I'm in the middle. Which is scarier than white-water rafting, scarier even than hanging from my fingertips off the smooth face of a rock when we went climbing. Because it's exactly what I wanted and now I don't want it. I'm scared most of the defenselessness of
sleep, of this pull toward Aaron forcing me to reach out to him in the night or say something weird in a dream. As we settle down on the tent floor, bodies stuffed and sweating against the flannel linings of sleeping bags, I lie stiff and pray that I won't accidentally touch Aaron.

With the steady wind outside rippling the fabric walls, and Aaron and Brad breathing low and slow on either side of me, I feel like I'm sealed inside a lung. Lying on my side, I can't stop listening to the eerie quiet, all the sounds I don't normally notice, like my heartbeat tapping on my eardrums or my eyelashes scraping my pillow as I blink in the dark. But then I have to flip over so I'm on my back; I can't sleep facing him because what if he wakes up? What if these feelings are visible on my face like pillowmarks? As I wriggle around, my shoulder brushes his but he doesn't stir.

So there are only inches between us. Our shoulders—mine white and thin with the dark smudge of a new bruise, his firm and knotted. I imagine my shoulder reaching out like a fingertip to touch his, just pressing against it and staying there. Listening to the mountain, I fall asleep pushing my finger against my bruise, and each time there's comfort in the certainty of the pain.

 

We return to Sermon on the Mount the next day, our last before going home. We wander around with zombie faces, all of us dazzled by the exhaustion of walking up and down mountains.
It's the part of the trip where we're getting sick of each other—when I can guess what someone will say before they say it. Even Aaron starts bugging me. Something about how he won't stay in one spot and how I keep losing track of him.

Later on, we say good night to the adults and hang out in the swimming pool under the too-bright stars with the mountains huddled around us. I'm wearing my T-shirt in the water. We splash each other. When that gets boring, we try some stunts—Brad attempts some tricky dives, cannonballs, belly flops. Gina suggests trying to stand and balance on Aaron's shoulders. And of course, she goes first. He hoists her up and grips her ankles as she wiggles with her arms straight out to either side. Pitching back, she collapses into the pool and comes up spurting water and laughing. They try again and again, and she keeps falling.

“Let Ryan try,” someone says. Maybe it will be easier for Aaron to hoist me, instead of her. I
am
the smallest one. In slow motion through the water, I walk to him, and he crouches down, neck-deep in the pool. I steady myself with my hands on his slippery back and then press my feet into the rubbery divots of muscle in his shoulders. He counts, one two three, and then pushes us up and out of the water. Once he's braced, I stand too, balancing perfectly.

As we stand above the water, I fight the urge to pull on my clinging T-shirt. My shirtsleeve is hiked up, I know that Aaron's bruise is probably showing, I don't want anyone to see it—
they're all looking up at us with hushed faces. But to fix it might set us off-balance, might force me to wiggle too much and fall, splayed onto Aaron. Everything sits still for several seconds. But before I can move, Aaron tips himself forward while holding my feet, and his weight pulls me toward the pool.

We crash into the surface. I twist under the water, and his hands surround my shoulders and push down. I can't open my eyes because I can't stand the chlorine so there's only the dark and the swoosh of legs thrashing and bubbles tickling my face. My arms stretch out for something, and as Aaron holds me under, one of my hands presses full against the warmth of his chest while the other wraps around his hard arm, maybe his spider arm. His body feels like the slick stones we lifted from the river when we rafted. I brace myself against him, and we float for a second or two with me feeling the sensation of feeling him. Suddenly he wrenches me up, back to the air. When I open my eyes, he's several feet ahead, swimming away.

He joins the rest of them in the shallow end, sitting on the stairs submerged at the entrance of the pool. I swim to them too, and we lounge in the warm water under the floodlights on telephone poles, while hunched over in the distance the outline of the mountains is almost as dark as the sky. Everyone is talking about penises.

Gina can't imagine what it's like to have one, so she's asking. What does it feel like to be kicked there? In the morning, why do guys always wake up with erections? Aaron and Brad and
the other boys laugh and joke and answer. Gina's swimsuit is yellow and black plaid, and it looks like it doesn't fit her, as if it's too tight around her breasts, which she covers by crossing her arms in front of them. I'm staying quiet, grinning and smirking according to how the other boys react to Gina. She stands with her back against the turquoise tiles of the pool wall, stroking her fingers across the top of the water; the other girls beside her are quiet too, and continuously shifting—adjusting swimsuit straps, fixing ponytails.

What about sex, she asks. “Why do some guys finish before you even get started?” she says, coyly. This silences the other boys. Brad says, “Oh my God,” and Aaron says, “Wow.” Gina smiles again. “I'm just asking. I'm just asking. Why can't I ask that question?”

Brad starts to answer. Then blushes. Then continues and gets embarrassed again. Aaron takes over. “Sometime you're just too, you know, excited? You just can't stop.” His shoulders shrug. His big beautiful wet shoulders.

“What are blue balls?” Gina asks. “They don't really turn blue, do they?”

“No,” Aaron snorts.

“So what are they then?” she presses.

“They just hurt,” he says, his eyes focusing on hers, as though they're opponents in a staring contest. “You get them when you're hard for a long time without—”

“Oh,” she says. “So what hurts?”

“Your
balls
,” Aaron says, grinning again.

“But why does it hurt?” she asks, skeptically.

I decide to answer this one. “It just hurts because you're excited, and then it's over, and you're like ‘okay, what now?'” I stand with my arms up, palms to the sky, in the cartoon pose of a question. I know the answer because I remember it from health class. It's something about blood flow—who doesn't know that? Everyone in the pool nods, waiting for the next question. Gina quickly turns to face me.