I am in love with you, I think then. That’s what this is.
Too bad you didn’t get the descant, he says.
It’s yours, I say. You’re better for it. There isn’t anyone else.
I don’t care if I have it. Big deal. Extra rehearsals.
I don’t mind, I say. And I won’t. There’s probably something for me later.
A book I had with me for one week was about Russian psychics spontaneously combusting into flame. The author thought it mysterious, the sudden acceleration of the body’s heat to a temperature that would sear bone. This did not mystify me then. The person writing had never met Peter.
2
Tub sun on the first day of the section-leader camping trip with Big Eric is a shiny white smear in the center of a white sky. There’s four of us: me, Zach from the altos, Little Eric from the second sopranos, and Big Eric. We hike for hours that first day and then find a rock pool to swim in at some distance from the trail. We decide to camp here and pitch our tent, first. Then we take off our clothes, Big Eric first, and he removes all of his and stands, looking at us, waiting. Swimming nude, he says, is one of God’s greatest gifts to us.
Zach shrugs. I like it. His clothes come off, then Little Eric, then me.
Big Eric takes out his camera then.
Krick. The camera shutter flicks open-shut.
Little Eric perches on the edge of the rock pool, sylph-like, naked. His blond wavy hair frames his profile, an elegant twelve-year-old Swede. Big Eric holds his camera across his broad hairy chest. He aims at Little Eric and shoots. Click. Slower, that time, his finger lingers at the sight in the frame. Zach and I stand to the side, crouch occasionally in a pool here at the stream, naked also, the summer air like a wet towel on my back.
That’s great, he says to Little Eric. You look like a faun.
I sink myself under the water and expel the air from my lungs to make myself heavy, to fall quickly to the bottom of the deep pool. It’s a diver’s trick my oceanographer father taught me. I keep enough air so I can lie flat on the smooth stones of the bottom and look up, through the glossy, pearled surface of the water, to the sky.
The currents spill softly around me. The water has the milky freshwater taste of having come through granite, which is why it is so clear here. The sun above turns flat and silver like a dropped coin.
I stand and shove and a dolphin kick brings me to the surface, where I gasp. Little Eric and Big Eric continue. Click. I dive down again, drifting.
Zach punctures the pool in a jackknife and water careens in sheets. I lift my head from the water to see the Erics disturbed. Little Eric is laughing, and Big Eric says, Don’t you worry, You’re next.
Later, we build a fire and cook dinners wrapped in tinfoiclass="underline" hot dogs, potatoes, corn on the cob. I am sunburned again and Zach rubs a lotion on my back for me. There is a quiet in which I pretend I don’t know what all of this means, Big Eric’s talks on the drive up here about libertarianism, nudism, child rights. And then I don’t pretend. The mosquito-screen zipper sizzles shut.
In the tent at night his body is huge. Covered in hair. His penis looks comical, enormous, a cartoon. His age renders him like another gender, or a species apart from us. Our bodies are small, bones are small. Of the three of us boys, I am the only one with a little bit of hair swirled at the base of my penis. I feel half him, half them. Zach and Little Eric reach out fingers toward me, and touch the hair.
In the morning the sky lights an hour before the sun shows and we wash in the pool with Dr. Bronner’s, check our food for raccoon assaults, make a fast breakfast. Big Eric makes coffee and I ask for some. At some point I remember: the Erics huddled in a sleeping bag, like hideously mismatched twins. Zach and I. And then a switch, Little Eric slipping inside with me, Zach gone over. I didn’t think I would like kissing so much, Little Eric giggles.
And then the trees, the prismatic air presses on everything that needs it here on the earth, the sun fires itself on the stream and spreads light through the underbrush where we are camped, spangling our faces. Vertigo. The night before scatters away. I press the hot coffee to my face. I look at my face in his shaving mirror and don’t recognize myself. My hair is streaking from the sun. My pupils are huge. I want to say, Take me apart. Leave me here for dead, if you can.
Zach gets out of the tent and stands in front of me and when I meet his eyes he winks. He puts a finger on my lips and smiles. Hey, he says. Nice tan.
Too bad we can’t hike nude, Big Eric says to me, as he stands, his camera in hand. Zrrick. The hideous slide forward of film. He slides into his shorts and shirt reluctantly.
3
July. Two weeks before camp, I am at Peter’s house watching television. His mother and father are gone to work. He lives in South Portland, next door to my town, Cape Elizabeth, the town of a rival swim team. We rode our bikes to the beach this morning and ran in the ocean with his dog, Peg, for hours. Now we are sunburned. I am brown and red like a rose cane and when I pull down my shorts I see a band of white skin that sits there around my hips like reflected light. Peter is red all over and now lies on the couch, covered in Milk of Magnesia that his mother applied before leaving. We are watching television now. I want to tell him, to warn him not to be alone with Big Eric. What that means. But I don’t.
Later, the sun sets. We wrestle on the couch. My mother is coming to pick me up, as I can’t ride my bicycle home in the dark. I have Peter trapped on the couch, my elbow across his chest, as he jabs his knees into my ribs repeatedly. His mother is in the kitchen, his father is still not home. I want to kiss him. I want to not want to kiss him. His face is red from laughing and his sunburn. As I pound his chest a last time, I tell myself, Not possible. When I finally let him up I move to the other side of the couch and we catch our breaths. You suck, he says, laughing. You suck so bad. I slap his hot face and he laughs harder and I pin him back to the couch again.
I leave without telling him, afraid all the way back home in my mother’s car that it leaks out of me, this desire I have, like the fungi that grow in Peter’s yard, puffing out little clouds when you crunch them with your feet.
You have freckles, my mother says at home. Angel kisses. They sure love you a lot.
In the bathroom I kick off my swimsuit from where I lie on my sunburned back against the cool tiles of the floor, One, two, three. The door is closed and locked and after a while my mother knocks. Aphias. Open the door.
I say nothing because that is what nothing says. I am nothing, a o, an outline around a hole.
Aphias. You are worrying me. Dinner’s going to be ready soon. If you aren’t downstairs for it, I’m going to call your grandfather and father to come and get you.
Time passes. Eventually, something passes through me and I get up and pull on my suit. I close the bathroom door behind me.
It’s still daylight and I find my mother in the yard. Hey there, she says. She is squatting over a plant. Poppies, site says. After they bloom, they die back. You can’t see them. I run a finger over the fuzzy leaves, the yard-long stems. Now I know what I want to be when I grow up.
The difference between a remainder and a reminder is an A, which stands for Aphias, my name, and the letter slips in and out like a cartridge in a rifle.