The Swimming Hole - 1. Chapter 1

The Swimming Hole

Chapter 1.

I owe my journal a little background before I begin this crazy tale...a story about unspoken feelings for a boy and one who discovered perspectives could have infinite horizons. But I digress dear journal, so…from the beginning.

We argued in our family, partly because we didn’t have a TV. My older brother and sister were always fighting over what to watch when we did have one, until Dad picked the set up and tossed it out the front door when I was in first grade. Well, that put an end to that. What we got instead was Scholastic Book Services once a month, and the almost unlimited chance to order from thousands of books in dozens of genres. History, adventure, science fiction...the choices seemed unimaginable. My brother and sister weren’t much for reading, so in exchange for doing their turn at the dishes once a week, I got their book allowance. I’m not sure my parents knew, and if they did, they turned a blind eye.

National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, Time, The Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek, Life, and Look came into our house regularly, along with newspapers. We had a record player and speakers powerful enough to make the living room windows vibrate. For my parents there was Glenn Miller and the Big Bands, Tommy Dorsey, and Frank Sinatra. And when my grandmother came to stay…ugh…there was Lawrence Welk.

Somewhere in storage are the early Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, Johnny Horton, Patsy Cline, Buddy Holly, and the Beach Boys records and so many more. Later, when the genre gave way to outside influences, harder rock and roll joined the stack.

But I digress, sliding straight down another tangent. Like I said, we were a family of arguing fools. There wasn’t a supper where a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or some other source of information wasn’t tossed onto the table to make or prove a point. I remember telling my father we needed to send more troops to Vietnam because we were winning the war. It said so in the newspapers and on the radio news.

Dad sat back in his chair, looked me in the eye, and asked how I knew that. My heated response was to slam the daily newspaper onto the table, front page up, and tell him it was in the papers, so it had to be true. Not too many years later, probably in tenth or eleventh grade, I had hair down to the middle of my back and wore faded blue jeans that left nothing to the imagination, followed by super-wide bell-bottoms and flared-collar shirts with balloon sleeves. But here I am on another tangent again...stories for another day.

It’s that tangent thing again. The summer before fifth grade, a new family moved into the old Perkins house. It had been empty for a couple of years, simply closed up, and the family who owned it never explained why they had left. Someone from out of town was hired to mow the lawn and keep the grounds respectable. So, when I saw the for-sale sign on the front lawn, I knew I was getting brand-new neighbors. The question was what kind.

We lived so far out on the edge of the township that the school administration decided it made no sense to send a full school bus to pick up one kid. Instead, they sent a station wagon. For a couple of years, I was the only student on that route.

Elementary school in the 1960s was its own little republic, with rules nobody voted on and punishments everybody understood. The place smelled of pencil shavings and perfume from the 1940’s, chalk dust, and wet mittens steaming near the radiator in winter. Desks sat in straight rows, as if we were expected to march through arithmetic and spelling in formation. There were cloakrooms for coats, cubbies for lunch boxes, milk money collected in envelopes once a week, and teachers who could silence a room just by turning from the blackboard with a piece of chalk still in their hand. If that didn’t work, they had The Look, and The Look could travel faster than any sound known to science. And if you got The Look, you could bet your parents would know by the time you got home.

Penmanship was treated like a moral virtue. You didn’t simply learn to write...you learned to prove you had patience, discipline, and the ability to keep your letters from leaning into the next county. We practiced row after row of letters on paper ruled like a prison yard: capital A, lowercase a, capital B, lowercase b, over and over until your fingers cramped and the side of your hand was gray with pencil lead. If your letters wandered above the line or sagged below it, the teacher circled the offense in red, and there it was...evidence of a character flaw right on the page. And then the horrors of cursive.

Then came New Math, which arrived dressed up like progress and left half the parents in town muttering at kitchen tables. Arithmetic had once been simple enough: add, subtract, multiply, divide, and show your work. New Math brought sets, bases, number lines, and explanations that made perfect sense right up until somebody asked you to explain them. I remember my father looking at one of my papers as if it had been written in a foreign language, then pushing it back across the table and saying something along the lines of, “Ask your teacher. I learned math before they ruined it.” That was Dad’s official position on educational reform.

We also had duck-and-cover drills, because nothing said childhood like being told an atom bomb might arrive between spelling and recess. The teacher would give the signal, and we would crawl under our desks, tuck our heads, cover our necks, and wait there among dust bunnies, lost crayons, and somebody’s petrified raisin from last Tuesday’s lunch. We were reminded not to look at the flash, which seemed important, though none of us could quite figure out how the desk was supposed to protect us from something that could turn a city into toast. Still, we followed orders. Children did that then...mostly.

School lunches were another education altogether. You carried your tray along a metal rail, pretending to be casual while secretly hoping the lunch lady would recognize your worth as a citizen and give you the corner piece of dessert. There were square slices of pizza that had only a passing acquaintance with Italy, mashed potatoes scooped with the precision of warm ice cream, and vegetables cooked long enough to surrender completely, what had green was now limp gray…OH…and yes…sauerkraut once a month. Whose bright idea was to turn an entire school into walking flatulent bombs. Milk came in little cartons that required engineering skills to open, and every table had at least one kid who could turn a straw wrapper into a weapon of war.

Rainy days meant gym inside, which sounded like mercy until somebody rolled out the red rubber balls. Dodgeball was less a game than a test of survival. The fast kids became hunters. The rest of us became moving targets with sneakers. You learned strategy quickly...hide behind someone bigger, never turn your back, and if a ball came whistling toward your head, make peace with your maker and duck. The gym echoed with squeaking shoes, bouncing balls, and the kind of laughter that only comes from children who are extremely glad it was somebody else who got hit.

Then came calisthenics, the official school program for discovering which children could touch their toes, and which of us children were apparently assembled from spare parts. We did jumping jacks, sit-ups, push-ups, squat thrusts, and those terrible pull-ups where you hung from the bar like laundry in a stiff wind while the teacher counted with unnecessary optimism. “One,” she might say, though in my case that usually meant I had jerked upward enough to suggest a medical condition. There were charts, standards, and expectations, all of them apparently designed by people who believed third graders were training for the Marines...or possibly escaping from them.

Outside, we had to run around the track and beat a set time, as if childhood itself came with a stopwatch. The teacher stood there with a clipboard while we circled the field, lungs burning, side stitches digging in, and sneakers slapping the cinders. Some kids ran like deer. Others ran like furniture being moved reluctantly across a room. I was somewhere in the middle...fast enough not to disgrace the family name, but not so fast that anyone made the mistake of calling it talent.

The boys’ bathroom was another milestone in public education. The first time you walked in and faced a row of urinals with no dividers, you understood that privacy had not yet been invented...or at least had not reached our school district. Some gifted souls stood back, planted their feet, and demonstrated to the world the pneumatic pressure their kidneys could produce. Naturally, some smart aleck decided to place bits of toilet paper on the floor as distance markers, and just like that, civilization took another step backward. Then there were the rest of us, the cautious ones, whose bodies practically melded with the porcelain. Neck muscles locked, eyes straight ahead, elbows tight, breathing shallow...statues of dedication praying no one said anything funny before you finished or got back to your next class before the bell.

Of course, once the school was finished measuring how far we could run, how high we could pull ourselves, and how bravely we could face a row of porcelain fixtures, it still wanted to know what was going on inside our heads. Tests came in more than one flavor. There were the regular written tests, where at least you could show your work, plead your case, or write something that looked intelligent from across the room. Then there were the standardized tests with rows of little circles and four possible answers, where your future seemed to depend on coloring in the correct dot without straying over the edge. We were told to use a number two pencil, fill the circle completely, and erase them cleanly. That sounded simple enough until you realized one smudge might be the difference between being labeled promising and being sent to sharpen pencils for a living.

The library was where those labels finally met real life, and it had its own rules, too. I ran into them early. By third grade I was reading well above my grade level, which sounds wonderful until you are standing at the checkout desk with a book meant for sixth or seventh graders and the librarian looks at you as if you are trying to buy cigarettes. I had to bring in a note from my parents saying yes, I was allowed to check those books out, and yes, I might even understand them. After that, the older shelves for students opened up like a secret country. I still remember the feeling...walking out with books that seemed too big for my arms and exactly right for my head.

And then there were the teachers...the good ones, the strict ones, and the few whose names alone could straighten your spine. Every school had at least one teacher whose note home was treated like a legal document. You prayed they never wrote your name at the top of a folded piece of paper and told you to take it home to your parents. A bad report card was one thing. A note about your behavior was another. That meant the school had run out of patience and was handing the matter over to the higher court, where Dad sat at the kitchen table and Mom stood nearby pretending not to listen. By then you knew the sentence had already been decided. The only mystery was whether you were losing television privileges you did not have, dessert you had not earned, or Saturday morning itself.

And then there were the girls. In third grade they seemed less like classmates and more like visitors from one of those 1950s science-fiction movies...The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Blob, or maybe some terrifying new feature called The Girls from Planet Complicated. They were right there in the room with us, breathing the same chalk dust, drinking the same suspiciously warm milk from little cartons, and somehow operating under an entirely distinct set of laws. They passed notes, whispered in code, laughed without warning, and seemed to know things no boy had been issued at birth. If there was a manual, we never got one.

Now, I did have an older sister, so you might think I had some inside information. You would be wrong. My sister treated me the way a scientist might treat a disappointing lab specimen...interesting only when her girlfriends came over and she needed proof that boys were a lower form of life. According to her grand view of the universe, I was an annoying pimple with sneakers, a walking noise, a brother only by technicality. I could be summoned, inspected, laughed at, and dismissed before I knew there had been a meeting.

So, when the girls at school huddled together and burst into laughter, I assumed an investigation was underway and I was the chief suspect. They could glance across the room, whisper two words, and reduce an entire row of boys to nervous silence. A boy might fall off a swing, eat paste, or get hit in the head with a dodgeball and still recover his dignity by recess. But one well-timed giggle from a girl in a plaid dress could collapse him like a card table. I learned to stay alert, avoid saying anything too stupid, and never...under any circumstances...assume the laughter had nothing to do with me.

Oh...so where was I? Right. I had wandered off on another tangent, and we were supposed to be talking about the new neighbors. I had no idea what we were getting, but I was hoping and praying for a boy...or better yet, a couple of boys. I first heard they were moving in on Friday afternoon, maybe Friday night, the way children hear important news...by overhearing parents who think walls, doorways, and kitchen floors have no ears. When they finally decided to tell me officially, the message came with conditions. I was not to bother the new family, and I was absolutely not to ride my bike past their house a dozen times pretending I just happened to be in the neighborhood. They had no idea what it was like to be stuck miles from civilization with only trees, dirt roads, and adults for company. I was eager enough not to require supervision.

Sometimes I think parents are as mysterious as the girls I mentioned earlier. When they had information of critical importance, they released it in dribs and drabs, as if too much truth at once might damage a child. It reminded me of the Charlie Brown specials I watched at Grandma’s house around Thanksgiving or Christmas. Whenever the adults talked, all you heard was, “Blah...blah...blah...blub.” That was how grown-ups sounded when they were keeping the good part from you. I wanted facts. I wanted details. I wanted someone to sit me down and say, “Here it is, kid. Is there a boy your age or not?”

Near the end of the week, I was told we might meet them on Sunday after church. And do not get me started on church. Whoever invented vacation Bible school, or Sunday services for kids in the basement, must have had a special talent for crowd control and an extremely limited sympathy for children. We were herded downstairs where the air smelled of damp concrete, powdered sugar from somebody’s stale donut, and small children who had been dressed too warmly. There were snot-faced three-year-olds, toddlers with overloaded diapers, and teachers trying to convince us that sitting still on folding chairs was good for the soul. The folding chairs themselves seemed designed by someone who believed that such discomfort built one’s character. If you shifted too much, the metal legs scraped the floor loud enough to announce your sins to the entire congregation upstairs.

The worst part came at the end of the service when I went back upstairs to sit with my parents and had to surrender part of my allowance to the Lord. Into the little envelope it went, and then into the collection plate, as if Heaven itself required exact change and kept accounts receivable. Whoever designed that collection plate was an evil genius. It had a handle long enough to reach the farthest sinner at the end of the pew, so there was no pretending you had not seen it coming. It glided down the row like a financial judgment, polished, silent, and unavoidable. You could hear coins clink, envelopes land, and every kid in the pew calculating how many comic books or ice cream cones had just vanished in the name of salvation.

For a couple of weeks, I solved the problem in what seemed to me an elegant, efficient, and spiritually harmless way. I took Monopoly money from the game box, selected bills in what looked like respectable denominations, folded them with great care, and tucked them into one of the little offering envelopes from the box we had been given. I figured God knew the difference between real money and play money, and if He did not, that was a theological problem far above my pay grade. Besides, the envelope had weight. It had substance. It made a soft, satisfying little thump when it hit the plate. From my point of view, the transaction was complete.

What I did not know...and apparently no one felt the need to explain to the criminal mind in the family...was that each envelope had a number printed on it, and that number matched a name. My name. So, when the offering was counted and someone opened my envelope to find brightly colored money suitable for buying hotels on Boardwalk, the trail led straight back to me. There was no investigation. No fingerprints. No courtroom drama. Just a numbered envelope, a stack of fake cash, and my mother standing there with the expression of a woman who had just learned her youngest child was running a counterfeit operation against the church.

Mom was royally mad. Dad, on the other hand, hid behind one hand and pretended to cough, though his shoulders were doing things that looked suspiciously like laughter. I lost my allowance for two weeks, which seemed unfair, since technically I had already donated it in a more imaginative currency. The next day, after work, Dad took me to Woods Pharmacy. He sat with his friends and had coffee while I got a root beer float, the kind served in a heavy glass with foam climbing over the top like it had somewhere important to be. Somehow, my allowance came back too. I never did find out whether that was mercy, bribery, or Dad’s private admiration for creative finance.

Crap...there it is again...the tangent thing. Anyway, the new neighbors were not in our church that week, which meant I still knew nothing useful. As it turned out, I would not find anything out until the next Sunday. One of my sister’s friends had a cousin who belonged to the new family, and that was how the next important fact arrived. The new neighbors were Catholic.

I have often been told I write checks with my mouth that I cannot cash. The following Sunday proved the point. My sister, her friend, and I found ourselves waiting outside Holy Angels Church for Mass to end. We stood there listening to the music drifting through the doors and watching the steps the way a kid watches a curtain before the magic show starts. At last...thank frigging God...my sister’s friend’s cousin appeared. While we were talking with her, her mother excused herself to get the car, and I was doing everything I could to find out whether she had a brother close to my age. Before I could get a straight answer, Father Dwyer came down the stairs to the sidewalk and asked who we were. When he learned we were not Catholic, he informed my sister’s friend’s cousin...in the calm, official voice adults used when ruining your day...that she should not associate with us because, as Protestants, we were going to hell.

A sensible boy would have stood there quietly, accepted his scheduled trip to hell, and let the matter pass. I watched Father Dwyer turn from us and walk toward his shiny Cadillac, parked there in the sun like a rolling commandment with whitewalls and chrome. The car looked less like transportation and more like proof that poverty had taken the day off. That should have been the end of it. Instead, my brain stepped aside, my mouth shoved both hands onto the wheel, and before anyone could clap a hand over it, I called after him, “Father...if Protestants are going to hell, do Catholics get there in Cadillacs...or is that just for the clergy?”

Oops...another tangent. Where was I? That’s right, the new neighbors. A couple of days later, it seemed like a miracle: my sister, her friend, and her friend’s cousin were all at our house again. Dad was at work, Mom was meeting with her thespian club at the town hall to plan a play for the fall, and my brother was off riding dirt bikes with his friends. Mom would not be home until it was time to start supper.

The junior-league coven was holding forth in my sister’s bedroom, and I was warned to stay out on pain of death...or suffer a pantsing in front of her friends. Since I was wearing only my ratty gym shorts, they did not need to know that a single layer of fabric was all that covered me. Needless to say, I got the hint, and once again I missed my chance to ask about the new neighbor boy. As I walked past her bedroom, their giggling made me want to gag. Why they were trying to hide one of Dad’s cigar tubes from me, I’ll never know. Girls...go figure.

My bike was right where I had left it on the side lawn. The front tire needed air, rear brake needed adjusting so I wheeled it into the garage and took care of that. I had some allowance money, and the thought of an orange sherbet ice cream cone made the ride downtown seem worthwhile. The center of town was not much to look at: a post office, a convenience store, and the pharmacy. Across the common stood the town hall, overlooking Mill Pond. Just up the road from the pond was Dr. Mackey’s office. I had mixed memories of that place. Shots did not bother me much, and the yearly checkups were tolerable. As Dad reminded me, Dr. Mackey had already seen me in the altogether...he was the one who slapped my bum after delivering me.

A couple of years earlier, I had been playing with Jim Perkins and his little brother in their backyard when I had the bright idea to build a slide for their swing set. We found a couple of long boards and rested them on the crossbar attached to the swing-set legs. Easy peasy. We finished it in no time, and because it was my idea, I claimed the first ride. As we were all about to discover, it was also the last. About halfway down, I picked up the mother of all splinters in my backside...the left cheek.

Horrified, I jumped off and rode home standing on the pedals, moving like the wind. Mother took one look at me and had me lie on the couch with my shorts and underwear around my ankles. She tried to pull the splinter out, and I screamed bloody murder. Then she wrapped some ice cubes in a facecloth, hoping to numb the area before trying again. Have you ever had an ice cube escape its confinement and pause as if deciding how far it should travel? I now know that water seeks its own level, and ice-cold water is no exception. It found the perfect valley to irrigate.

Mom could not remove the splinter, so off we went to Dr. Mackey’s office. In the exam room, a new nurse named Nancy told me to undress from the waist down. I had never seen her before, and she had certainly never seen me in the altogether. After one last plea to keep my clothes on, I proved it was possible to slip off my sneakers while leaving my socks on, guard what she should not see with one hand, and use the other to remove my shorts and underpants.

Dr. Mackey gave me a numbing shot in the backside while Nurse Nancy quietly plotted how to make me use both hands when it was time to get dressed. Once the area was numb, Dr. Mackey tried to pull out the splinter, but even he could not manage it. He finally made a small incision and cut it out. When he finished, he applied some cream, covered the incision with a large bandage, and told me to take it easy and keep the area covered when I showered. And yes, I managed to get my underpants back on simply fine.

There it is again...another tangent wandering off like it owned the place. Anyway, I made it past the junior-league coven, slipped by the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of juice and an apple, and headed for my bike. I had a mission. After the ice cream cone, I was going up by the old Perkins place to take a look around, or as I preferred to think of it, reconnoiter the lay of the land. Somewhere over there had to be evidence of a boy close to my age, and I was not coming home until I found it.

Now, I liked to think of myself as sophisticated and coordinated, mostly because no one had yet gathered enough evidence to prove otherwise. I rode past the house as casually as a boy can ride past a house when he is trying with every fiber of his being to look casual. And there he was. A boy. My age, or close enough for government work, mowing the side lawn and doing his own poor job of pretending not to notice me. I kept going, because even I knew a person could overdo a thing. Then I spent the next five minutes arguing with myself about how far was far enough before turning around. My better angels packed up and left. I circled back slowly as cold molasses, trying to look like a fellow with destinations, responsibilities, and absolutely no interest in the boy with the lawn mower.

By the time I came around again, he was on the front lawn and almost finished. He looked up, I lifted one hand in what I hoped was a friendly, man-of-the-world wave, and that was the exact moment Sod’s Law stepped out from behind a tree and hit me with a shovel. Earlier, I had been fooling with the rear wheel because the brake pads were rubbing the rim. In my hurry to get everything ready for this grand expedition, I had not tightened the wheel nuts enough. So, when I waved, the rear tire decided it would rather meet Randy on its own terms.

Thanks to my natural intelligence, athletic grace, and the kind of reflexes usually associated with startled cats, I turned what could have been a face-plant into what I later chose to remember as an acrobatic dismount. That version depends, of course, on nobody asking the bicycle for its opinion. As the back end started sliding out, I caught the boy’s expression. It was not horror. It was not pity. It was more like a half grin that said, well...this ought to be interesting.

For a few frozen milliseconds, time stood still. Then the bike tried to leave without me. I planted one foot, skidded in a half circle, stepped over the fallen machine, and brushed myself off as if this was exactly the kind of entrance I had planned. Since he was already coming over, I straightened up and said, “Sorry about that. I just need to make sure I can get the tire back on. I thought I tightened the wheel nuts after adjusting the brake.”

“Doesn’t look too bad,” he said. “Could’ve been worse if you’d been going faster. Nice dismount, though. I’m Randy. Randy Spindell.”

“Owen Stockton, at your service,” I said, because apparently, I had decided to introduce myself like a butler in a bad movie. I turned the bike upside down, gave it a hard look, and found nothing broken except my dignity. “You wouldn’t happen to have an adjustable wrench I could borrow, would you?”

And that was how it started. Not with trumpets or destiny or any of that folderol, but with a loose wheel, a bruised ego, and a borrowed wrench. For the rest of that summer, if you saw me, Randy was probably somewhere nearby. His father had bought the old garage and gas station just outside the center of town, and Randy had been helping him shovel out years of accumulated junk. The place was supposed to open in another week or two, assuming they found the floor before then.

In only a few days, we had each other figured out well enough. We were, as the saying goes, chalk and cheese, though at that age I probably would have said peanut butter and axle grease. I talked enough for two people, sometimes three if I was in form. Randy was quiet by nature, the kind of boy who looked at a thing before doing it, which struck me then as excessive caution and later as basic intelligence. Whether we were hiking, biking, or inventing some new way to get into trouble around town, he gave matters actual thought.

When it came to fixing things, especially the endless ailments of my old beat-up bike, I was useless. If talking, pleading, threatening, or calling it names had worked, I would have been a master mechanic. Randy, on the other hand, could fix darn near anything. Worse, he could see trouble coming. I cannot count the number of times he told me to hold on a minute, or asked if I had a spare inner tube, or suggested I carry a small tool kit on the rear carrier. Naturally, I found this irritating because he was usually right.

Those days were idyllic until we reached seventh grade. We were still transported to and from school as the only two passengers in the station wagon. But unlike grammar school, where we had all our classes together, we were separated. The only classes we shared were English, history, and PE. And PE was where I came to truly hate Mark White.

Mark thought of himself as the fountainhead of everything the rest of us should aspire to be. We were pawns, and he was the games master. I think his animosity toward Randy came from a deep well of jealousy. I was a tall, scrawny beanpole, but Randy was solidly built, already a miniature version of the man he would become. Looking back, he was a football player in the making…a wide receiver waiting for the rest of his body to catch up.

It began in our second PE class. During the first, we had been told that everyone would take part in everything and that showers were mandatory. A couple of weeks before school started, we had been given a list of what to buy and what to bring. There was plenty of moaning and groaning from some of our classmates, but Coach Driscoll quickly put a stop to it. In his no-nonsense way, he caught our undivided attention with a PG lecture about the unpleasant facts of life and our bodies. Some of us had blue eyes, some had brown hair, some were tall, and some were short, he explained, but we were all individuals worthy of respect. Any disrespect or deliberate embarrassment of another classmate, he added, would result in expulsion. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mark White was not taking Coach’s warning seriously. As the school year began, Mark kept finding moments and places to make fun of me. At first, it was harmless enough…pointed comments about my height, calling me a giraffe or some such nonsense…but gradually the remarks became more personal and cutting. I could handle the comments, and when necessary, give back as good as I got. What I could not understand was why I was being targeted.

Unfortunately for Mark, it all came to a head the first time we had to shower after PE. For me, Randy, and most of our classmates, it was not much of an issue. We had all been down to the town swimming holes, and depending on the time of day or who else was there, skinny-dipping was nothing new. Mark’s family had moved to town midway through sixth grade, which was why we had never seen him there.

Sometime after Randy and I first met, we found a swimming hole not far from his house, hidden back in the woods where town noises could not follow. A stout little stream came hurrying down from Brigham Pond, dropping off a hill about a quarter mile beyond the back fields. We rode as far as an old tractor path would take us, then spotted a narrow trail climbing into the trees. We left our bikes at the edge of the path and followed it uphill, with the water chattering beside us as if it already knew the way. Fifteen minutes later, the trees opened into a small clearing, and there it was...our private discovery, or so we liked to believe.

It was one of those hot afternoons when even breathing felt like work, and by the time we reached the pool we were sweating enough to water the ferns. Randy looked at the water, looked at me, and suggested we take a dip as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He peeled off his T-shirt and pants, then the rest of his clothes, and after a moment I did the same. Whatever awkwardness I expected never quite arrived. There was only the cold shock of the water, the pine smell of the woods, and the uneasy understanding that my eyes had begun noticing boys in a way I had no words for yet and that would soon change. Both of our bodies were changing then, though neither of us would have said it so plainly. I noticed he had been circumcised, like most boys of our generation. With my mother being from Norway, I had not been, which made me different in a way I did not yet understand, and how it could matter to anyone else.

For us, that afternoon had the shine of something untouched: no school, no parents, no clocks, and no one telling us where to stand or what to do next. Of course, the place was not quite the undiscovered paradise we first imagined. Other boys had found it before us and had treated it with the respect usually reserved for trash cans. Rusting beer cans, food wrappers, and other junk were scattered around, so we gathered what we could and made a pile to haul back down another day. Someone, at least, had put real effort into the small dam on the downhill side of the pool. It was not as big as the swimming holes closer to town, and it certainly would not have impressed anyone with standards, but to Randy and me it was perfect. More than that, it taught us without a word that bodies were just bodies, awkward and changing and different in their own ways. So, by the time seventh-grade PE announced that showers were mandatory, most of us had already crossed that particular bridge...or jumped off it into chilly water with a yell loud enough to scare birds out of the trees. Mark White, having arrived in town too late for those summers, walked into the locker room thinking he had found a secret worth exposing. He had no idea the rest of us had already learned not to be surprised.

So, when we filed into the locker room after PE, he seemed to think he had discovered a battlefield the rest of us feared. The room was all steam, wet tile, snapping towels, and the metallic clatter of locker doors. Boys tried to act casually while moving as quickly as possible, each of us pretending that undressing in a crowd was no more troubling than changing socks. Coach Driscoll stood near his office door with a clipboard and the expression of a man who had already heard every excuse known to adolescence. Randy was a few lockers down from me, calm as ever, folding his shirt with more care than any seventh-grade boy had a right to possess.

Mark waited until Coach turned toward the equipment room. Then he glanced at me, lifted his voice just enough to carry over the hiss of the showers, and said something meant to draw every eye in my direction. He had that grin boys get when they think cruelty passes for wit. A few heads turned. A couple of boys laughed because laughter was safer than being noticed. Mark pointed out that I looked different from everyone else, as if he had uncovered a scandal, a medical mystery, and proof of communist influence all at once.

For one awful second, the locker room seemed to shrink around me. The steam, the wet tile, the hiss of the showers, and the smell of soap and damp canvas sneakers all pressed in at once. I felt heat rise in my face, which was ridiculous considering I was standing under water that had only recently decided to become warm. Then I saw Randy a few lockers away. He was not laughing, and he did not look embarrassed for me. He was simply watching Mark, who still had a towel wrapped around him and was standing just outside the spray, with the steady patience of someone measuring a board before cutting it.

That look steadied me. Mark wanted me to flinch. He wanted the other boys to see me as strange and himself as bold enough to say it out loud. But because of that hidden swimming hole, that hot summer afternoon, and the simple fact that boys came in more varieties than Coach Driscoll could ever fit into a lecture, I already understood something Mark did not. The truth was not nearly as dramatic as he wanted it to be.

Tommy Appleton must have reached the same conclusion. He stood slightly behind Mark and off to one side, close enough to catch the corner of Mark’s towel. With one quick yank, Tommy pulled it loose and let gravity finish the job. For a second the whole room went silent, the kind of silence that arrives before a storm or a verdict. Then Mark was the one exposed, not because there was anything shameful about him, but because he had tried so hard to make shame out of someone else. Whatever he had hoped to strip away from me fell at his own feet instead. I do not remember who laughed first, and I am not sure that part matters anymore. What I remember is Randy looking at me, steady as ever, and realizing he had understood the cruelty of that moment before I did. He knew it had never really been about bodies. It was about power, and Mark had just lost more of it than he knew, after all it was his shortcomings that were also on display. After that day, he was never quite as large in the room again.

Part 2

After that, Randy and I slipped back into the ordinary business of being boys, although ordinary had begun to mean something different. We still explored the woods, back roads, ourselves, and the deep questions and our private thoughts along with the fields whenever school let us go, and we still rode to and from school in the station wagon as the only two passengers. But something had shifted. The locker room had taught me that humiliation did not always land where it was thrown, and Randy had taught me that quiet did not mean weak. We did not share every class that year, but we were learning enough of the same lessons to compare notes. History with Mr. Poor was a class almost everyone loved. Somehow, he made the past feel connected to the world we were living in by bringing current events into the room. PE had become easier, too. Mark White finally understood that humiliating someone else did not make him bigger, especially when Coach Driscoll was watching.

English, however, was another matter. During our rides to and from school, Randy and I usually went over our homework together. If a test was coming, we quizzed each other until we both felt ready. That was when I noticed that Randy read more slowly and more carefully than most of us. Later, I learned he may have had a mild form of dyslexia. If that could be called a problem, it wasn’t because he couldn’t learn. He learned perfectly well. He simply needed more time the rest of us were usually willing to give.

Mrs. Hopkins did not seem interested in giving him that time. She called on Randy more than any other student to read aloud from whatever book we were studying, and she seemed especially fond of making him defend his thoughts on the papers we had written. In a class of twenty-five students, with the odd exception of one or two, you could feel the room tighten whenever she chose him. It was not the ordinary embarrassment of a wrong answer or a stumble over a sentence. It was the kind that made the rest of us look down at our desks because watching felt too much like taking part.

One day at lunch, just after English let out, Tommy Appleton finally asked the rest of us to think about what was happening to Randy. Mark White started almost at once, mocking how slowly Randy read. Before he could get far, Brent Collins cut him off and reminded him, none too gently, that his birdhouse in shop had only earned an A because Randy had fixed the mess he made. Randy had saved more than one project that way, Brent said, which made Mark’s criticism sound even smaller than usual.

When report cards came out, the anger that had been gathering quietly finally found its voice. Several parents challenged Mrs. Hopkins’s grading, and Randy was not the only student whose marks began to look less like judgment and more like punishment. The graded tests made her position almost impossible to defend. Randy’s answers were often as strong as mine, and as strong as those of other students who had passed without question. Those papers became evidence of something darker than strict teaching. They showed how easily an adult with authority could turn a classroom into a place where certain children were made to fail. Mrs. Hopkins resigned shortly after she was ordered to regrade the work, but the damage she left behind did not fit neatly into a corrected report card. By then, I was beginning to understand that some lessons followed you long after the bell rang, and the next one was already waiting.

One afternoon, as school was letting out, I went down to the industrial arts department to meet Randy. I found him and Mr. Porter bent over the lathe, which had been out of commission since the end of the previous school year. The money for repairs had apparently been approved, but the technician was still a month or more away. The drill press was in the same condition. It was all a matter of time, and time was exactly what the students were losing.

Just as Mr. Porter switched the lathe on, Randy straightened up with a greasy rag in one hand and a grin spreading across his face. The machine hummed to life as if it had only been waiting for the right set of hands. Mr. Porter crossed the room, clapped Randy on the back, and told him to get the heck out of there. That they would tackle the drill press tomorrow. Randy had on what I had come to recognize as his excited face: the corners of his mouth turned up slightly, his eyes shining, and his whole body practically humming along with the machine. He stayed that way the entire ride home.

By the time we climbed out of the station wagon, Randy was already carrying that excitement somewhere else. The lathe, the drill press, and Mr. Porter’s shop had filled his head for the ride home, but once we were standing in the late-afternoon light, our plans turned back toward the woods. We agreed to get together after school the next day, and Randy wanted to go back out to our swimming hole. With the weather promising to hold through the weekend, a couple of nights there sounded like the kind of adventure summer used to hand us without asking anything in return.

I could already picture the shock of cold water, the splash fights, the dare-you-to-jump-games, and all the foolish contests boys invent when no one is around to tell them better. It was nearly the middle of September, though, and even then I could feel those days slipping away.

Near the end of the day, just before history, I finally caught Randy at his locker. He was trading one stack of books for another, his mind probably still half buried in belts, bearings, and whatever secret language broken machines spoke to him. I leaned against the locker beside his and kept my voice low. “Mark started in again this morning,” I said. Randy glanced over, not startled exactly, but sharpened. “What did he say?” “Nothing clever,” I told him. “Crude comments. Cruder suggestions. The kind of thing he thinks sounds smart because nobody wants to repeat it out loud.” Randy’s jaw tightened, but he did not ask me to say the words. I was grateful for that.

“Not just once, either,” I said. “Later, when we were heading to science, he did it again. Louder that time, like he wanted witnesses.” Randy looked down the hall, where students were moving toward class in clumps and currents, then back at me. “Was it about you?” he asked. I almost said yes, because that would have been easier. But the truth had hooks in it. “Some of it,” I said. “Some of it was about us. Or what he wants people to think about us.” The bell had not rung yet, but suddenly the hallway seemed too full of ears.

Randy shut his locker carefully, the way he did everything when he was trying not to let anger make the decisions. “Mark’s an idiot,” he said. That should have settled it. In most ways, it did. But as we started toward history, his shoulder close to mine and neither of us saying anything more, I could feel the question still moving around inside me. It was not only what Mark had said. It was why Randy’s silence felt heavier than Mark’s voice, why the space between us suddenly seemed crowded with meanings neither of us had invited in. I wanted Randy to laugh it off, or get mad, or say something so ordinary that the whole thing would shrink back down to Mark being Mark. Instead, he walked beside me, quiet and steady, and I could not tell whether he was protecting me, protecting himself, or simply waiting for the bell to give us both somewhere else to look.

What kept circling in my head, though, was not Mark White’s mouth. Mark’s mouth was a known hazard, like poison ivy or a loose dog. What I could not sort out was the comments directed towards Randy. Why had Mark acted the way he did? Why had those comments seemed to come from places I could not see? It was no great secret, at least not to me or Randy that my interest leaned more toward boys than girls, even if I did not yet have the courage or vocabulary to say that plainly.

Randy, on the other hand, hadn’t expressed an inclination in either direction. That had always seemed obvious enough. So why the comments? Why did Mark’s crude jokes follow us around as if there were something there to expose? I kept turning that over in my mind, trying to decide whether I had missed something, whether Randy had missed something, or whether Mark White had simply found another way to make ordinary friendship feel like evidence in a trial nobody had agreed to hold.

Thankfully, the rest of the day passed without incident until just after the final bell. Randy had gone back to Mr. Porter’s room to pick up the manual for the now-working drill press, along with the one for the lathe. Our station-wagon bus was running a few minutes late, and when Mark saw me standing alone, he started up again from the steps of his own bus. This time he made his crude suggestions loud enough for an audience, though not quite loud enough, he thought, for Randy to hear.

“You got something you want to ask him, Mark?” Randy called.

Mark turned so fast he nearly missed the next bus step. “What?”

“I said, if you’re that interested in Owen, ask him out yourself.”

The laughter hit Mark before he had an answer. His face went several shades of red, and after a stunned second he snapped, “That’s your job.”

Randy shrugged. “It’s a possibility, if Owen doesn’t mind a good-looking boy like me.”

I stood there flummoxed by the whole byplay, which was not a word I would have used then but fits better than anything else now. Randy had said it like a joke, maybe only as a way to turn Mark’s ugliness back on him, and still the words hung in the air longer than they should have. Part of me was intrigued, which made me feel foolish almost at once thinking Randy could be like me. Intrigued by what, exactly? A comeback? A dare? Randy showing an interest, possibility neither of us had meant to name? I did not know, and not knowing left me feeling exposed in a way Mark’s comments never quite managed. So much remained unspoken leaving me so confused.

That set everyone off again. Mark had nowhere left to hide, and we watched as he scrambled down the aisle of his bus and dropped into his seat as fast as he could, suddenly far more interested in the floor of the bus than in me. There was a subtle tension on the ride home as we went over our homework. Usually with our books open in the back seat of the car, we’d balance them across our knees as we went over the materials and on the ride home. Occasionally either from bumps in the road or when the car cornered our legs or hands would be jostled, bumping against each other, and we’d soon right ourselves.

Today there was a subtle difference, Randy was a bit slower to move apart. All this just added to my confusion. It was if there was unsettled weather out on the horizon, that Randy was trying to get through to reach me. I only thought that he was trying to let me know he had my back, wondering what else it could be. Was he just tired of watching Mark White trying to humiliate me, or was he letting me know I did not need to put up with that sort of bullshit?

Was Randy letting me know that it wasn’t an issue, and like everyone else in our class, who were unconcerned with the fact that boys were the ones who intrigued me, and that everything was ok between us? Was he saying he’d be willing to date me? How would that work or look like? That he didn’t take the garbage that Mark was spewing as an insult to either of us? What was comforting to me, despite having to deal with Mark White, was Randy and the rest of my classmates weren’t bothered, and still were my friends.

My thoughts were all jumbled when I stepped out of the car. I realized I was giving the whole episode too much thought and reading too much into it. I could admire Randy, but valued him too much as a friend to entertain other thoughts. Thoughts I was positive he did not hold. We had been skinny dipping every summer or chance since he moved to town, he had seen as much of me as I saw of him and knowing I was attuned to boys our age being naked around each other was never awkward.

Some of the comments Mark White made were crude suggestions about what two boys could do to each other. Far beyond the innocent games we played like show and tell. We’d played all the different boy games, had displayed all the different ‘conditions’ those parts of our bodies could and would display. Discovering the feelings of pleasure we could give ourselves and on rare occasions lending a helping hand. We had seen each other with morning wood and thought nothing of it. And yes, while we did touch each other on occasion, but nothing ever happened in the context of Mark’s rude suggestions. I believe what we did or would do had no emotional component but rather we were just in it for the feelings our bodies gave us.

As I walked into the house I ran into mom, asking me if my plans for the weekend were still on and nodded yes. She had put together a bag of food that would fit into the basket on the front of my bike, telling me to grab the sleeping bag from the laundry room and a couple of beach towels. Those would go into the box on the back of my bike. I ran upstairs to change out of my school clothes, grab my shorts, , my sneakers, t-shirts, and transistor radio. When I got back downstairs there was a PB &J waiting for me along with an apple and a glass of juice. Finishing and a quick tussle of my hair and I was off, finally a weekend of simple peace and quiet awaited. Homework was done and there were no other worries but to enjoy the swimming holes.

We’d swim and camp out tonight and tomorrow afternoon see who was in the larger pools closer to town where invariably we would meet up with some friends and spend an afternoon. It was when we got back to our swimming hole the following day that Randy surprised the heck out of me by opening the front of his shorts and letting them fall to the ground. Stepping out of the he walked over to me, his erection standing tall and proud. Placing a hand on my belly, he slid that hand down and cupped me, the other resting on my shoulder.

I was hard as a nail in an instant and confused by what Randy was doing to me. Leaning in close he let me know what he wanted to do. He had kept waiting for me to say something, to be the first to ask, but after Mark’s comments earlier he couldn’t wait any longer, asking me if he could try some of what Mark described.

I’d like to say my denouement and introduction to oral sex was a study in patience and fortitude, but it was anything but. Randy touched me, spots I would never have thought could feel so good. Kneeling between my legs I was but an open book, fully opened for his examination. There were sparks where his fingers traced the contours and shapes of my body. Utterly fascinated with the differences between us he had to thoroughly rediscover its workings. I then saw stars that made my eyes roll back beneath my eyelids when he began to suckle me. And all too soon, it was all too much. I became aware of Randy gently massaging me, tenderly rubbing, his fingers caressing parts of me that never saw daylight, me as I drifted back to earth.

That afternoon after I caught my breath, I took a bit more time with Randy examining his unique construction, the scar that formed a ring around him, the heft of his family jewels, holding him in my hands, and then parting my lips with him. I hoped I gave as good as I got, and if his vocalizing was anything to go by, I think I succeeded!!!

This something I was sure we were going to practice again and again, till we were convinced we got it right…I was thinking of it as extracurricular homework…the kind I knew we’d both enjoy…Oh…Nearly forgot…while I may never tell him in person, thank you Mark White for planting those thoughts in Randy’s head…who knew!!!!

Owen’s journal entry for September 23^rd , 1967