Then the wrestling started up again, this time with Murphy included, and I watched from the arm of one of the couches and wondered what it was I should be feeling. It wasn’t a performance for my benefit, like the way male tigers show off for the female, courting her with manly prowess and antics, though I had seen these guys do that shit before around Andrea Harris, around Sue Knox. What they were doing was what they did all the time when we were together. It was some sort of freedom guys allowed themselves around each other, and I envied every moment of it. It was something louder, and harder, than anything I’d ever been part of with a group of girls. Not that I was really a part of it with these guys. It all seemed to come so easily to them, and I could only get so close to any of that.
“Hey Camster,” Jamie shouted at me from the bottom of a dog pile, “come rescue me.”
“Fuck off,” I yelled back.
“You said you wanna jerk me off?”
“Yep. You heard me exactly right.”
Jamie’s mom went to Gates of Praise. His dad didn’t come along. Jamie only got out of it once in a while. We’d started hanging around the year before, during track practice warm-ups and cooldowns. I’d seen even more movies than Jamie had, which made me some sort of authority to him. The other guys just followed along.
“C’mon, Cameron,” Jamie tried again, untangling himself from the pile and jogging over to the baby grand. “Let’s act out the piano scene from Pretty Woman.”
Murphy and Paul laughed pretty hard at this.
“Okay,” I said. “You want Paul to play Julia, or Murphy? ’Cause he’s got the red hair.”
The light from outside was cut into strange strips, weird angles, by the cheap lumber somebody had used to do a half-assed board-up job of the windows. Those strips of light illuminated the thick dust that the boys had stirred in their play, and its slow descent back to the ground, like glitter, like snowflakes, made everything just a little dreamy and unreal. And the schnapps helped. It felt like we’d entered a world that wasn’t supposed to be found this way. I liked it.
That summer Lindsey Lloyd and I traded off for high point in the Intermediate Girls Division at each of the Eastern Montana Federation swim meets. She would beat me by half a stroke on the hundred free, I’d out-touch her on the IM, and then it would come down to the timers comparing their stopwatches each and every hundred butterfly we swam. Lindsey spent her summers with her father—he was working some construction thing near Roundup—and the school year with her mother and stepfather in Seattle. We’d been each other’s competition since even before my parents had died, with Lindsey always at an advantage, because her school in Seattle had an indoor pool and I had only June, July, and August at Scanlan Lake.
We’d always been friendly—we made small talk while sitting on the heat benches and sometimes stood in line together at the concession stand, waiting for our haystacks, a swim meet favorite of seasoned hamburger, cheese, sour cream, tomatoes, and olives all served with a personal-size bag of Fritos corn chips, the fork sticking out of the top. Lindsey loved those things. She ate them maybe twenty minutes before a race and could still win, a kind of “fuck you” to the stupid wait two hours before you swim rule.
Lindsey Lloyd had just always been there, part of the summer swim team experience. I remember that my first meet back after my parents’ funeral, she didn’t try for one of the weird hugs some of the other girls I competed against went for. Instead, she mouthed “I’m sorry” when we caught eyes during the crackly “Star-Spangled Banner” that they insisted on playing over the PA before every meet—all of us still dripping from warm-ups and gathered around the pool deck, hands on our hearts, nobody quite sure where the flag was hanging at this particular pool. That “I’m sorry” seemed the right way to handle things.
But this summer Lindsey had come back a lot taller, and she’d changed other things, too. She’d chopped off the ponytail that she used to tuck up into her swim cap and she’d bleached what was left of her hair a bright white. She soaked it in conditioner before meets to keep the chlorine from turning it green. She also had an eyebrow ring, a little silver thing that the stroke judges made her remove before she could compete. Coach Ted said she had a butterflier’s shoulders, and that there was nothing I could do about my own non-butterflier shoulders but train harder.
Between races Linds and I sat together on beach towels, playing Uno and eating icy red grapes from the bottom of a pink Sally-Q cooler Aunt Ruth had already been awarded for her commitment to the company. Lindsey told stories about Seattle, where everything sounded edgy and cool, stories about the concerts and parties she had been to, all the crazy friends she said she had. I told her about the hospital, the secret world we’d discovered by breaking in. From our beach towels in eastern Montana we listened to mix tapes of bands I’d never heard of, our heads close together, each of us with one ear pressed to one side of Lindsey’s black headphones.
A couple of weekends in we were at the Roundup meet, Lindsey’s home water for the summer, and I was rubbing suntan lotion on her back, those butterflier shoulders—her skin soft and warm from the sun. She used the oily stuff that smelled like coconuts, like Coach Ted, even though she didn’t need it, as tan as all of us were; little natives, Grandma liked to say. All of us practiced for hours a day in summer sun, and there wasn’t anything all that special about putting lotion on each other, but there was when I did it to Lindsey. It made me jittery, anxious, but I couldn’t wait for her to ask me, each and every meet.
My hands were all gooped up with stuff and I was trying to do under the straps of her suit when she said, “If I was back in Seattle, I would be at Pride this weekend. Now that’s supposed to be a fucking blast. Not that I would know.” She tried to sound all nonchalant while she was saying this, but I noticed her trying.
Lindsey was always talking about these Seattle events and concerts that I’d never heard of before, so not knowing what kind of Pride she was talking about didn’t necessarily mean anything to me right at that moment.
I kept on rubbing, working that soft area at her lower back, where the required team racing suit just allowed for a window of skin, a couple of knobs of vertebrae. “What do you mean not that you’d know?” I asked.
“Because June is always Pride month, and I’m always in Montana in June,” she said, moving her shoulder straps so I could reach better. “It’s not like Roundup-fucking-Montana has a Pride.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” I said, still working the lotion.
She shifted herself around at this so she could look at me, trying, not very well, to keep the smirk on her face from stretching wider. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? Like at all.”
I could tell by her face, her tone, that I had somehow missed something important in what she’d said, and had again revealed myself as the small-town hick I often felt like around her. My answer to this was to feign indifference. “I’m not an idiot. You’re talking about some festival you miss every year.”
“Yeah, but what kind?” She leaned closer, her face so close to mine.
“I don’t know,” I said, but then, even as I said it, I think part of me did know, sort of, like it washed over me and I knew. I could even feel my stupid blush, my body’s way of telling me that I knew. But there was no way I was gonna say it out loud. So what I said was “German Pride?”
“You’re adorable, Cam,” she said, her face still close enough for me to smell the Fruit Punch Gatorade on her breath.
I didn’t want to be adorable the way she meant it. “You don’t always have to work so hard to convince me how cool you are,” I said, standing up, grabbing my goggles and cap. “I get it. You’re very, very cool. You’re the coolest girl I’ve ever met.”
A couple of my teammates walked by and told us that they’d just called the hundred free. I started after them, not waiting for Lindsey, even though this was her event too, like always.
She caught up with me over behind the concession stand, where they??
?d set out the gallon jugs they used to make sun tea—a neat row of fifteen or so, the water inside now various shades of brown. We stepped over them together and she grabbed my arm, just above the elbow, and pulled me to her, her mouth at my ear.
“Don’t be mad at me,” she said, her voice quiet and much less Lindsey than usual. “It’s Gay Pride. That’s what it is.”
It felt like a declaration when it wasn’t. At least not completely. “I kind of got that,” I said. “I mean, I figured it out.” We were weaving through groups of parents, of swimmers, the lawns crowded and loud; and even though we had a kind of anonymity in that, I worried about where this was going, what she’d say next, what I might say if I wasn’t careful.
“If I could take you to Pride, like in a perfect world, if I could private-plane us to Seattle, would you want to go with me?” Lindsey asked, still holding my arm tight.
“Well, is there cotton candy?” I asked, because we were there, the heat benches, and it felt like the right time for a nonanswer.
But that’s not what Lindsey wanted. “Whatever,” she said, taking her card from the lady who was always in charge of time cards at the Roundup meet, the one with red hair in two ponytails and a white safari hat she kept on for the entire day. “Forget it.”
The heat benches were clumped up with nervous swimmers, some stretching, others pulling their tight silicone caps over a heap of hair, leaving a tumorlike protrusion encased in neon purple or metallic silver at the back or top of their heads. A group of girls waved us over, girls we’d been competing against for years, forever. Lindsey was in the heat ahead of mine, but we still had maybe five heats before that.
We found a place at a back bench, close together like you always had to sit on those benches. When our bare knees touched, the way they had to in order to even fit back there, I couldn’t help but remember Irene and the Ferris wheel, just like an allergic reaction. I jerked away, let my other knee collide, instead, with that of the girl on the other side of me.
Lindsey couldn’t not notice this. “God—I didn’t mean to upset you so much,” she said, too loud for me, for where we were.
“I’m not upset. I just don’t want to talk about this two minutes before we have to swim.” I had lowered my voice and was looking around, though there was really no need. Everyone was in their own conversation or prerace zone.
“But you do want to talk about this sometime later?” she asked, sticking her face right up close to mine again, another blast of Gatorade and something else, cinnamon, maybe. Gum.
“You have to spit your gum out before you swim,” I said, thinking again of Irene.
“Ms. Lloyd, did I just hear that you have gum?” Always vigilant, Safari Hat took a couple steps toward us with an outstretched arm, her palm faceup and cupped.
“You want me to spit it in your hand?” Lindsey asked her, though it was obvious that yes, that was exactly what was expected.
“Otherwise I’ll just find it stuck under the heat benches when we put them away. C’mon.” Safari Hat snapped the fingers of her palm before making it a little cup, again. “Whatever you have isn’t going to kill me.”
“Don’t be so sure about that,” I said, right as Lindsey spit.
“I’ll take my chances.” Safari Hat examined the little hunk of chew-marked red before turning to find the trash.
“What exactly is she gonna catch from me?” Lindsey asked me. She tried to look pissed, but I winked at her and she cracked up.
“I can think of a few things,” I said.
Lindsey let that sit there for a little while, but then she asked again, and with complete seriousness, “But you’d go to Pride with me, wouldn’t you? You’d want to go to it. Just say yes.”
I knew that my answer meant more than just the words I was saying, but I nodded and said, “Yeah, I’d go. I’d go with you.”
She smiled big but didn’t ask anything more. They called her heat pretty soon after that, and I was just left there on the bench, waiting to be called up too.
We only ever had two days to get reacquainted, prelims Saturday and finals on Sunday, and then there was the matter of being there to compete. I had to be caught up fast. Lindsey had kissed five girls before, and had done other, mysterious, serious stuff with three of those. Lindsey’s mom knew a guy, Chuck, who was a drag queen, Chastity St. Claire, and Lindsey had seen him perform at a charity thing. Lindsey was gonna join the GLBU group at her high school. U stood for undecided. I hadn’t known, before Lindsey, that it was an actual category.
“Personal Best is good, but you need to rent Desert Hearts,” she told me.
“I’m pretty sure they won’t have that at Video ’n’ Go,” I told her back after she explained the plot.
When Coach Ted passed out sign-up slips to house swimmers for our own meet, I didn’t even put the paper in my bag but rode my bike home with it pressed against my handlebars. Even though Ruth said we could sleep four comfortably if we used the pullout couch, I returned the little white slip to Ted with an X in the box next to: We can provide lodging and dinner for 1 swimmer. Lindsey sometimes got housed at meets and sometimes her dad came with his camper. I had a fifty-fifty shot. I tried to ask her about it casually, at the heat benches the next weekend, but it felt somehow like a big step.
“You’re coming to our meet, right?” I kept pulling at the straps on my goggles. I’d already spit in them twice, rubbed it around with my pointer finger, but I did it again.
“Yeah, why wouldn’t I?” she asked, noticing my busy hands, my obvious need to be doing something other than looking at her and having this conversation.
“I don’t know,” I said, still fiddling. “Because the lake is gross and nobody ever comes to our meets.” The heat co-ordinator moved us to the next bench forward and I stubbed my bare toe, hard, on the edge of the cement lip of the pool deck, watched a blood blister form almost instantly under the nail.
Lindsey saw me wince and touched the top of my knee, left her hand there for a second longer than it took to ask if I was okay. “I like your lake,” she said. “It’s something different than all the other meets.”
“Yeah,” I said, and then didn’t know where to go from there, or why this was so hard, exactly. Then Lindsey started messing with her goggles, and we both sat like that, silent, on the benches some idiot had painted a glossy blue, the kind of paint that heats up like a car hood, toasts the back of your thighs the minute you sit on it in your swimsuit.
I waited until the walk to the starting blocks—when Ted said we should be visualizing the race ahead, focusing on our stroke length, our kick rhythms, picturing turns and pull-outs over and over in our minds—to finish asking her. “Your dad isn’t coming, is he?”
She had already put on her thick silicone cap, and she pulled one side out and away from her ear, looked at me like she was glad I had said something, even if she wasn’t sure what it was.
“I mean, to Miles City,” I said. “Is he coming to the meet? Do you need to stay somewhere?”
“I’m staying with you, right?” She said it so easily that I felt like I’d walked into a trap, into something I wouldn’t be able to handle once it arrived. It was “Swimmers take your marks” maybe fifteen seconds after that, and it was the worst race I swam all season.
Dave Hammond was back from his mom’s in Texas, and he was even crazier than Jamie—up for anything. In the summer he lived in a camper out behind his dad’s fruit stand, and for the last week of June and first week of July, he got to man the red, white, and blue booth they set up next to the long tables of watermelon and corn—Dave’s Fireworks. You can’t be much more popular the first week of July than to be the fourteen-year-old with access to an entire stand of cheap shit made specifically for blowing up. And the best part was that even after the Fourth, when it was illegal to continue selling them, the Hammonds kept the remainder of their stock in a storage shed over by the Dairy Queen. So it was a Butterfinger Blizzard and then a stop at the shed for bottle rockets,
for roman candles, for Black Cat crackers and cherry bombs. I smelled like sulfur smoke and sunscreen for days on end.
I wanted to share this summer world with Lindsey when she came, all of what was best about Miles City in July spread out before us like a picnic table heaped with pies. The meet seemed like a formality, and no home meet had ever felt that way before. In our prelim heats, on Saturday, I beat Lindsey’s time in every event, even the freestyle. Other teams weren’t used to the thickness of the water, the feeling of lake weed tickling their legs, their toes slipping off the algae coating on our homemade turn boards, costing them precious seconds. Most embarrassing, but probably effective at giving us an advantage, were our starting blocks. We stored them in the musty shed across the parking lot from Scanlan, stacked atop one another from September through May, nesting grounds for spiders and the occasional rat or garter snake. They were heavy constructions of plywood, a sanded dowel for backstroke starts, puke-green carpet torn from somebody’s basement stapled into the sloping tops for traction, and lane numbers spray-painted in orange on the backs. Team dads had made them for us one summer, mine included.
Before the free relay, Ruth brought Lindsey and me plates of lime and orange Jell-O cut with a star-shaped cookie cutter. It was cold and sweet and we both agreed it was the best Jell-O either of us had ever tasted, so when Lindsey dropped hers in the sand, I gave her the rest of mine, but as usual, I blushed as I did so. Lindsey didn’t blush at all.
Grandma was there too, in a big weird sunhat and those dark plastic inserts you wear behind your glasses if you’re a certain kind of old lady and want to block the sun. She sat in a lawn chair under the team tarp and ate her sugar wafer cookies and read her detective stories magazine until it was time for my races, and then she walked down to the edge of the dock and watched me. She gave me a big hug when I got out of the water even though it soaked her.
“Your grandma’s a trip,” Lindsey told me after Grandma said something about my having mermaid blood, or at least guppy blood. Lindsey saying that reminded me again of Irene, always Irene, and I got even more nervous than I already was about what might happen, what felt like it just had to happen.