The Last Swim

Summer was over, and so were we.

That was what I told myself the morning they drained the Lansing Community Pool, when the deep end became a tiled blue bowl full of leaves, pennies, dead June bugs, and all the things kids had dropped without noticing. The whole neighborhood smelled like cut grass, hot asphalt, and the first tired breath of September 1983. The movie theater had changed its marquee, and at Dairy Queen, somebody had taken down the cardboard sun in sunglasses and replaced it with a football helmet.

Everything was moving on, rude and ordinary. Everything except for me.

I stood outside the chain-link fence with my hands in the pockets of my red lifeguard shorts, watching Mr. Dugan from Parks and Recreation dragged the hose across the concrete.

“You don’t have to stand there like it’s a funeral,” he barked.

I wanted to say, it is. Instead I said, “just forgot my whistle.”

He looked at the whistle still hanging around my neck, scoffed, and went back to work.

I was good at lying in small ways. Not big ways. Not ways that mattered. But small ways, I could manage. I could tell people I was fine. That was the funniest lie of all.

In high school I was shy and average, Benjamin Toyton, but in the summer, at the pool, I became Benny.

Benny yelled “Walk!” at little kids sprinting past the snack bar. Benny spun his whistle around one finger. Benny climbed onto the high chair with a magazine tucked into the waistband of his shorts and sunglasses pushed up into his hair. Benny knew every regular by name. Benny could be loud, charming even.

There was Benny, and then there was Rory.

Rory Callahan had started the same day I did, the first Saturday in June, ten minutes late and smiling. He rode up on a bike, his uniform shirt un-tucked, and his hair damp like he had already been swimming. He was tall, freckled, and sunburned across the nose by noon. He had a laugh that carried over everything

He was my perfect opposite in every possible way. He made everything look easy, which made me want to hate him.

Then he climbed onto the guard chair beside mine, squinted at the crowded shallow end, and said, “so which kids are the future criminals?” I laughed so hard I nearly pissed.

By the end of June, I knew he hated grape popsicles but ate them anyway because nobody else wanted them. I knew he had a scar on his left knee from a nasty bike crash when he was eleven. I knew he was scared of deep water if he couldn’t see the bottom, which was a ridiculous thing for a lifeguard to admit.

“You can’t tell anyone,” he said, floating on his back one night after closing. Everyone else had gone home. Mr. Dugan trusted us to lock up because Mr. Dugan trusted everyone.

“Who would I tell?” I asked.

“The town. The papers. The national lifeguard association.”

“There’s no national lifeguard association.”

“There is now, and I’m disgraced.”

I swam beside him, slow, making no waves. His face looked softer upside down, ears under the water, eyes on the darkening sky.

Then he said, “You’re different here.”

I stopped. “What?”

“Here,” he said. “At the pool. You’re like… I don’t know. You’re more you.”

“Maybe school was less me.”

Rory stood suddenly, water sliding off his shoulders. “Then don’t be school-you anymore.”

“That easy?”

“Probably not.” He grinned. “But I’ll supervise.” He said things like that. Like he was making a joke. Like he wasn’t setting me on fire.

Our first kiss happened in the pool supply room during a thunderstorm.

It was July 3rd, and the sky had gone greenish over the city. We cleared the pool when the first thunder rolled. Rain hit the concrete so hard it bounced. Rory and I ran to the supply room with kickboards over our heads, laughing like idiots. Rory shook water from his hair like a dog.

“Don’t,” I laughed, wiping my face.

“You love it.”

“I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.” He said it too fast. Or maybe too softly.

The rain filled the space after it. His smile faded, just a little. Mine did too. We were standing close because the room was small, because the storm was loud, because every excuse in the world had finally gathered around us and locked the door.

I don’t remember who moved first.

I remember his hand touching my wrist, not grabbing, just asking. I remember the edge of a metal shelf pressing into my back. I remember the kiss being quick and clumsy and almost missed, more question than answer. Then another, because the first one had not been enough to prove anything except that we were both shaking.

When we pulled apart, Rory looked terrified. So I laughed. He laughed too, breathless, covering his mouth like we had just stolen candy.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay,” I said.

Outside thunder cracked over Lansing, and July became something I would spend the rest of my life trying to explain. After that, the summer split in two.

There was the summer everyone saw: kids cannonballing into the deep end, Rory flirting with every grandmother who bought lemonade, me cleaning melted Bomb Pops off the concrete, both of us yelling “No running!” forty times a day.

And there was the summer that belonged only to us.

We stole kisses in the supply room between adult swim and swim lessons. We brushed hands under the front counter while counting quarters from the snack bar. We sat too close during staff meetings and moved apart whenever someone looked over. Rory would pass me notes on torn receipt paper that once said, I can’t stop thinking about you.

I keep that one in my wallet.

On our days off, we went to the mall and pretended we had money. Lansing Mall had a fountain full of cloudy coins, a Spencer’s we were too nervous to enter, and a record store where Rory flipped through albums like it was sport. He bought a used copy of Thriller even though everyone already owned it.

“You have this,” I said.

“I have it on tape. This is vinyl. Completely different.”

“It’s literally the same songs.”

“You have no romance in your soul, Benny.”

I nearly said, you have no idea. But he did. That’s what was so special. He had every idea.

We ate greasy pizza in the food court and watched old classmates. Rory waved at everybody. I looked into my soda.

“You’re doing school-you again,” he said.

“I am not.”

“You are. Your shoulders disappear.”

“My shoulders do not disappear.”

He reached across the table and poked one. “Found it.”

“Stop.”

“Make me.”

I kicked him under the table. He kicked me back. We were laughing so hard that for five minutes, we were just two boys at the mall in August, sunburned and broke and alive.

Then a classmate walked by and said, “hey, Rory.” I froze. Rory didn’t. “Lisa Harrow,” he said, “a vision in denim.”

She rolled her eyes but smiled. After she passed, I stared at my pizza.

“What?” Rory asked.

“Nothing.”

“You think everyone knows.”

I looked up. “Don’t you?”

His expression changed. Not angry. Not joking. Tired. “No,” he said. “I think everyone’s too busy being scared somebody knows something about them.”

That night, we argued in the Dairy Queen parking lot over ice cream. It started because I ordered vanilla.

“You are the human version of beige,” Rory said, leaning against the hood of his mother’s station wagon.

“There’s nothing wrong with vanilla.”

“There is when chocolate-dipped cones exist.”

“Chocolate dip tastes like candle wax.”

“Take it back.”

“No.”

“Take it back or I’m leaving you here.”

“You can’t leave me here. You drove.”

“Exactly. That’s the threat.”

I should have laughed. Usually I would have. But Lisa Harrow had seen us at the mall, and my mother had asked why Rory called so late the night before, and suddenly everything felt dangerous.

“You joke about everything,” I snapped.

Rory blinked. “It’s ice cream.”

“It’s everything.”

His voice lowered. “What does that mean?”

“It means you act like this is all funny. Like none of it matters.”

His face went still, “that’s not fair,” he said.

“Isn’t it?”

“No.” He looked away, jaw tight, “it matters so much I can’t breathe half the time.”

I had no answer for that.

Rory threw his half-eaten cone into the trash so hard it clanged. Then he got in the car. For one awful second, I thought he really might leave me there. Instead he leaned over and shoved open the passenger door.

“Get in, beige.” I did.

We drove around for an hour without talking. Finally, at a stop sign near my house, Rory said, “I’m not laughing because it’s nothing.”

“I know,” I said.

“I’m laughing because otherwise I’ll start, like, screaming.” I looked at him then. He was gripping the wheel with both hands. His eyes were wet, though he would have denied it if I’d asked.

Instead, “Chocolate dip still tastes like candle wax.” He laughed once, hard, and wiped his face with his shoulder.

In my room, we were safer.

My room had a TV with rabbit ears that only worked if one of us sat on the floor and held the antenna at a tragic angle. On afternoons when my parents were at work and his sister was at band practice, Rory came over and sprawled across my bed like he had always belonged there.

We watched reruns with the volume low. We read magazines we had already read before. Rory made fun of the cologne ads. I circled movie listings in red pen. Sometimes we kissed until the TV static turned to evening news and we sprang apart at the sound of my mother’s car in the driveway.

At night, he called. The phone in our kitchen had a cord long enough to reach the basement stairs if I stretched it. I would sit halfway down in the dark, whispering into the receiver while my mother called from the living room.

Rory called from his parents’ bedroom because the upstairs phone had “better sound,” which was a lie. Sometimes I heard his father’s voice, sharp and low. Sometimes I heard his mother say Rory’s name like she was asking him to choose.

“What are they fighting about?” I asked once.

“Everything,” he said.

“Rory.”

He was quiet. Then, “do you think people can just stop loving each other?”

“I don’t know.”

“My mom says sometimes love changes.”

“What does your dad say?”

Rory laughed without humor. “My dad says a lot of things.”

I didn’t know then that this was the beginning of the end. I thought all parents fought. I thought summer could stretch if you loved it enough.

On the last Friday before the pool closed, Rory didn’t show up for morning shift.

I waited on the guard chair, pretending not to watch the gate. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. By one o’clock, I was angry. By two, scared. By three, furious again, because fury was easier.

He arrived at four fifteen wearing sunglasses even though the sky was cloudy.

“Nice of you,” I spat.

He dropped his backpack behind the counter. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Do this here.”

“Where, then?”

He glanced at Mr. Dugan, at the kids in the shallow end, at the whole stupid watching world. “After closing,” he said.

I spent the rest of the day saving imaginary drowning victims in my head so I would not have to think about him.

After closing, the pool was gold with evening.. Rory stood by the vending machines, twisting the ring from a can of Coke around his finger until it snapped.

“My parents are getting divorced,” he said.

The words came out flat. Rehearsed. I stared at him.

“My mom’s taking me and my sister to New York. Her brother lives in the city. We’re leaving Monday.”

Monday.

As in two days. As in the day before my orientation. As in not someday, not maybe, not after we figured out what we were.

Monday.

“How long have you known?” I asked.

Rory looked down. That was the answer.

“How long?”

“All summer.”

I laughed, but it came out wrong. “All summer.”

“I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“So you didn’t?”

“I was trying to—”

“To what? Wait until you were gone?”

His face crumpled for half a second before he forced it back into place. “I was trying to have the rest of it.”

“The rest of what?”

“Summer,” he said, and now he was angry too. “You. Us. I was trying to have two more days where you didn’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I already left.”

I hated him then. I really did. For knowing before I did. For carrying the ending around in his pocket while we ate pizza and watched TV and whispered into phones. For kissing me like time was ordinary. But mostly I hated him because I could not make him stay.

“You should’ve told me,” I teared up now.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I know,” he said again, quieter.

“What are we supposed to do now?” I asked.

Rory’s mouth twisted. “I don’t know.” That was the truest thing either of us had ever said.

On Sunday night, we met at the pool.

We had keys we were not supposed to have because Rory had copied Mr. Dugan’s in July “for emergencies,” and apparently heartbreak counted. The parking lot was empty. The CLOSED FOR SEASON sign hung crooked on the gate. Crickets screamed in the grass. Rory unlocked the chain, and we slipped inside like ghosts.

The pool was still full then, one last night before they drained it. Everything looked the same. Neither of us had brought swimsuits. Rory took off his shoes and sat at the edge of the deep end, feet in the water. I sat beside him. Our shoulders touched. This time, neither of us moved away.

“I keep thinking I’ll call you,” he said. “From New York.”

“You better.”

“And write.”

“You hate writing.”

“I’ll become literary.”

“You can barely spell chlorine.”

He bumped my shoulder. “Shut up.”

I looked at his reflection in the water. It broke apart every time one of us moved.

“What if you forget me?” I asked.

He turned fast. “Benny.”

“What?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a whistle. His whistle. Red cord, silver mouthpiece, scratched from a summer of being dropped, spun, chewed, and used to boss around half the children in Lansing. He put it in my hand.

“I don’t want your whistle,” I said, though my fingers had already closed around it.

“Too bad.”

“What are you going to use in New York?”

“I’ll be mysterious and whistle-less.” Rory looked out at the pool. “I’m scared,” he whispered.

It was such a small sentence. Barely louder than the crickets. But it cut through everything.

“Of moving?”

“Of all of it.” He swallowed. “New town. My mom crying all the time. My sister acting like this is an adventure. Not seeing you. Seeing you later and having you be different. Or me being different. Or worse, everything being exactly the same except we’re not.”

I held his whistle so tightly the metal pressed into my palm. “I’m scared too,” I whispered.

“I know.”

He leaned his head on my shoulder. For a while we sat that way, two red-shirted boys at the edge of a closed pool in a town that had no idea what had happened there that summer. The pool would open next June with new guards, new popsicle stains, new pennies shining at the bottom.

But I have been changed here. That had to count for something.

Rory lifted his head and kissed me once, softly, like goodbye was something fragile and easily frightened. I kissed him back. Not desperately. We had already done desperate. This was different. This was proof. This was a way of saying: I was here. You were here. This happened.

When we pulled apart, he was crying.

I pretended not to notice until he laughed and said, “Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You thought it.”

“I thought lots of things.”

“Yeah?” He wiped his face. “Like what?”

I looked at the water, then at him. “That I love you.” His face changed, for one brief second. Relief. “I love you too,” he said.

The next morning, his mother’s station wagon was packed by eight. I rode my bike over even though I had told myself I wouldn’t. Rory was standing in the driveway in jeans and a faded Lansing Pool shirt, arms crossed like he was cold. His little sister sat in the back seat hugging a stuffed dog. His mother looked exhausted. His father was not there.

Rory saw me and walked to the end of the driveway.

Neither of us said much. What was there? Every word felt either too small or too dangerous.

Finally he said, “I wrote the address in your yearbook.”

“It’s August.”

“I broke into your backpack.”

“Of course you did.”

He smiled. Then he took something from his pocket and pressed it into my hand.

A photo booth strip from the mall. Four pictures of us from a day I had almost forgotten. In the first, we looked normal. In the second, Rory was making devil horns behind my head. In the third, I was laughing. In the fourth, we were looking at each other, not the camera. I had never noticed that before.

His mother called his name. Rory stepped back. “Don’t become school-you forever.”

I shook my head. “Don’t become mysterious and whistle-less forever.” He laughed. Then he got in the car.

Summer was over, and so were we.