And if you butterfly-kick on your way in you’ll be disqualified, Ms. Fields’s yells from the bench. Her stomach now has a tiny perch to it.
Watch from below, he says. I take a breath and start under, watching from below as he heads toward the wall again. He lands on the wall without looking, parts the current following behind him with his arms spread ahead of him like a knife turned to the side, and pushes off, foam at his feet as he kicks. He swims over me, two feet above, and the waves of his passing bump me against the floor, gently.
Did you get that, he asks, when we are both above water again. He didn’t even glance at me as he went over me, and even now, it seems to me he doesn’t see me somehow. As if I’m transparent, made of glass. To make sure, he says, before you continue, I want to see twenty somersaults right here, in front of the wall.
Around me the rest of the team pounds the cold blue water. I stand in the shallow end, turning myself over and over as he watches, to make sure I’ve got it right. I squeeze the memory of him above me out, not so much even the sight of him as the feeling I had, of an aurora of heat and skin above me. I know there is no way for me to feel the heat of him through the chill water. And yet I do. It comes to me later, as I lie under a thin sheet in my dark overheated dorm. I wasn’t feeling it with my skin. The part inside. Entelechy, a word from my SAT vocabulary worksheet, springs into my head. The original energy inside of something. The source of movement.
I hear Tom turn over. Tom, I say.
What.
I’m working on that chapel, I tell him. You too, okay?
Okay. Sleepy-sleepy, he says. He says it every night, has for four years. And like a magic charm tonight, I go to sleep, almost immediately, on hearing it.
12
The pit is dug in advance by a bulldozer, and the stones, having been quarried nearby, arrive in several trucks, where they are dumped into a pile, the entire thing causing less sound than I had thought. So that’s what it sounds like when all those rocks fall, I tell myself, as I stand, watching, from my window. I bet you didn’t know that rocks could rustle, did you? These do. They fall off the truck as if they were dragon scales, to shine wetly across the distance from my dorm here, the far hill for the chapel, there. And so it is we gather, on a somehow-clear day in March, to put this together. Thirty of us, in sweaters and fleece vests. We look like an ad, Tom says to me, as we look at all the pretty people around us, so well cared for, clear-eyed.
But for what, I say. Clean living?
Tommy Hilfiger, he says.
Alyssa slaps her face with sunscreen. Rosy as always. She wears little makeup, probably more than I suspected, She says a sharp hello, passing me by. I follow.
Yes, I say.
You make plans to go to Florida with Tom and I find out from Tom. What is that?
A mistake, I say. I’ve been really busy, I forgot. I actually thought I’d already told you, I say, as the other twenty-eight students follow Mr. Zhe, who eyes us briefly before starting. Can we talk about this later, I ask.
You have all the time in the world, she says. For Tom. Interesting. Her eyes narrow, nostrils widen, as if something were leaving through the one, taken in by the other. I see I never think of her anymore, in this moment. She had departed my thoughts completely, to the extent it took seeing her to remind me of her.
When I find out who the bitch is, she says, looking over my shoulder to the sea behind me, I’ll punish. Fully punish.
Alyssa, I say. There’s no one else.
It’s all over this, she says. Someone else is all over this. And she turns, to sit down, in a cross-legged drop. I drop beside her.
Mr. Zhe wears a gray zip-up turtleneck sweater that makes him look like he’s a sailor preparing us for departure. He shrugs back and forth in front of us, laughing occasionally, nervous as he outlines what the job is. It’s like putting a puzzle together, he says, and introduces a handsome blond guy, his skin brown like he’d been left out in the sun since birth. The expert. We watch as he and Mr. Zhe put together a few of the rocks.
Listen to the rock, the expert says, as you hold it. I think of the rustle they made as they fell. The rock has a shape, search for where it meets the rock below, how it will ask for the rock to go above it. The idea is to set them in such a way that gravity holds them in place.
The first day, the foundation is set and banked. At night, from the dorm, it looks like a giant’s footprint. Someplace a god stood on the earth. In the morning that follows, we set the stones quietly, all jokes gone. We work in pairs, one holds the stone as the other orients it, and it is built in strips. We cut one way, then the next, and when we break for lunch, the walls to the chapel rise to our shins. The shape they imply is in the air above them, like they’re singing a song of the next thing to come.
When Alyssa slaps the back of my head, passing by, I don’t do a thing. Tom Ludchenko mouths to me, What happened? And I mouth back, I don’t know.
We return to building.
13
The chapel is completed in a week. At night Tom rubs my shoulders and talks to me about the girls of Florida. I say nothing I remember in response. Alyssa has told everyone in our class that I am cheating on her, and that when she finds out who the girl is, there’ll be real trouble. This last is emphasized with her right fist slapping her left palm. Smack.
Who is it? Tom asks me after our last day of building. You can tell your Tom, sure.
She’s high, I say. Even Tom believes her now. I am taking her pictures down from the wall, sick of her smiling reproach. I still love her, I say. She’s the only girl.
What are you doing with those, he says. Presuming you aren’t lying even to your best friend.
I pull them all down, sunny picnic smiles, the class trip to Katahdin, the road trip we took out to Montana with her family. I put them in a file folder and slide them into my filing cabinet. Best friend, I say. I am teaching her a lesson in silence.
You mean, she’s right, he says. He walks up to the wall and puts his hand on it. What are you going to put here instead?
Don’t know, I say. She’s not right, I say. She’s just going to embarrass herself, when the truth comes out.
Uh huh, Tom says.
You are such a fuck, she says, when she sees the wall the next morning. Really.
Tom runs out of the room for the bathroom. Listen, I say. All you have to do is admit you are wrong, and I’ll put the pictures back up.
I don’t give a fuck about the pictures, she says. Are you some kind of moron? I don’t mark territory. Where are they, and here she plucks at the desk. Where? My homework spills across the floor.
I leave the room while she isn’t watching. I walk to the bathroom, where Tom brushes his teeth. Through a mouth of foam he says, You are a brute, man. Unbelievable. I walk back to the room, where Alyssa sits in the floor’s middle on her knees. Paper around her as if she’s shed it. I hate you, she says.
I love you, I say.
14
On the night before I go to Florida, I slip out to visit the silent stone bump we’ve made. Since finishing it, I’ve wanted to be alone with it, and after Alyssa’s meltdown I want to go somewhere on this campus that doesn’t remind me of her.
Open to the four directions, domed, slate benches in rows facing toward a central granite altar, it seems, already, as if it has always been here, since before the school. On the slope of the rise toward the sea, it looks down to the houses of the school, like a large trail marker. There is no electricity for it, no heat, no light, and so in the dark night as I come up to the entrance I do not see that someone is inside. From just outside the door, I feel it, instead, whatever warm air this visitor makes by just standing there reaches me through the stone chill.