If You Knew Then What I Know Now

by Ryan Van Meter

  “I’m going,” he says. “But you probably don’t have to go if you don’t want to.” He rolls his sleeves over the humps of each shoulder.

  “Aaron,” Gina shouts. She’s standing with Blake. She says, “Let’s go,” and he heads after her.

  For a second or two I consider following him, but decide to throw myself across a boulder, to just lie in the sun and pout instead.

  An hour later, I shake out of a daze when I hear distant laughter, screams. I open my eyes and squint at the mountain peak. They made it. The group stands at the edge of the snow, straddling the line between white and green, cupping out snowballs, propping their flat hands over their eyes to look at everything below. Blake points at things. They nod. And then I see Aaron, charging through the snow in his shorts, Gina on him, piggyback. Her arms are locked around his neck, they’re both squealing and laughing in the sun.

  That night, after the campfire dinner, after tiptoeing in the crickety darkness to pee, I sleep in a small three-person tent with Aaron and Brad. Between Aaron and Brad. They each unroll their sleeping bags along the tent’s sides so I’m in the middle. Which is scarier than white-water rafting, scarier even than hanging from my fingertips off the smooth face of a rock when we went climbing. Because it’s exactly what I wanted and now I don’t want it. I’m scared most of the defenselessness of sleep, of this pull toward Aaron forcing me to reach out to him in the night or say something weird in a dream. As we settle down on the tent floor, bodies stuffed and sweating against the flannel linings of sleeping bags, I lie stiff and pray that I won’t accidentally touch Aaron.

  With the steady wind outside rippling the fabric walls, and Aaron and Brad breathing low and slow on either side of me, I feel like I’m sealed inside a lung. Lying on my side, I can’t stop listening to the eerie quiet, all the sounds I don’t normally notice, like my heartbeat tapping on my eardrums or my eyelashes scraping my pillow as I blink in the dark. But then I have to flip over so I’m on my back; I can’t sleep facing him because what if he wakes up? What if these feelings are visible on my face like pillowmarks? As I wriggle around, my shoulder brushes his but he doesn’t stir.

  So there are only inches between us. Our shoulders—mine white and thin with the dark smudge of a new bruise, his firm and knotted. I imagine my shoulder reaching out like a fingertip to touch his, just pressing against it and staying there. Listening to the mountain, I fall asleep pushing my finger against my bruise, and each time there’s comfort in the certainty of the pain.

  We return to Sermon on the Mount the next day, our last before going home. We wander around with zombie faces, all of us dazzled by the exhaustion of walking up and down mountains. It’s the part of the trip where we’re getting sick of each other—when I can guess what someone will say before they say it. Even Aaron starts bugging me. Something about how he won’t stay in one spot and how I keep losing track of him.

  Later on, we say good night to the adults and hang out in the swimming pool under the too-bright stars with the mountains huddled around us. I’m wearing my T-shirt in the water. We splash each other. When that gets boring, we try some stunts—Brad attempts some tricky dives, cannonballs, belly flops. Gina suggests trying to stand and balance on Aaron’s shoulders. And of course, she goes first. He hoists her up and grips her ankles as she wiggles with her arms straight out to either side. Pitching back, she collapses into the pool and comes up spurting water and laughing. They try again and again, and she keeps falling.

  “Let Ryan try,” someone says. Maybe it will be easier for Aaron to hoist me, instead of her. I am the smallest one. In slow motion through the water, I walk to him, and he crouches down, neck-deep in the pool. I steady myself with my hands on his slippery back and then press my feet into the rubbery divots of muscle in his shoulders. He counts, one two three, and then pushes us up and out of the water. Once he’s braced, I stand too, balancing perfectly.

  As we stand above the water, I fight the urge to pull on my clinging T-shirt. My shirtsleeve is hiked up, I know that Aaron’s bruise is probably showing, I don’t want anyone to see it— they’re all looking up at us with hushed faces. But to fix it might set us off-balance, might force me to wiggle too much and fall, splayed onto Aaron. Everything sits still for several seconds. But before I can move, Aaron tips himself forward while holding my feet, and his weight pulls me toward the pool.

  We crash into the surface. I twist under the water, and his hands surround my shoulders and push down. I can’t open my eyes because I can’t stand the chlorine so there’s only the dark and the swoosh of legs thrashing and bubbles tickling my face. My arms stretch out for something, and as Aaron holds me under, one of my hands presses full against the warmth of his chest while the other wraps around his hard arm, maybe his spider arm. His body feels like the slick stones we lifted from the river when we rafted. I brace myself against him, and we float for a second or two with me feeling the sensation of feeling him. Suddenly he wrenches me up, back to the air. When I open my eyes, he’s several feet ahead, swimming away.

  He joins the rest of them in the shallow end, sitting on the stairs submerged at the entrance of the pool. I swim to them too, and we lounge in the warm water under the floodlights on telephone poles, while hunched over in the distance the outline of the mountains is almost as dark as the sky. Everyone is talking about penises.

  Gina can’t imagine what it’s like to have one, so she’s asking. What does it feel like to be kicked there? In the morning, why do guys always wake up with erections? Aaron and Brad and the other boys laugh and joke and answer. Gina’s swimsuit is yellow and black plaid, and it looks like it doesn’t fit her, as if it’s too tight around her breasts, which she covers by crossing her arms in front of them. I’m staying quiet, grinning and smirking according to how the other boys react to Gina. She stands with her back against the turquoise tiles of the pool wall, stroking her fingers across the top of the water; the other girls beside her are quiet too, and continuously shifting—adjusting swimsuit straps, fixing ponytails.

  What about sex, she asks. “Why do some guys finish before you even get started?” she says, coyly. This silences the other boys. Brad says, “Oh my God,” and Aaron says, “Wow.” Gina smiles again. “I’m just asking. I’m just asking. Why can’t I ask that question?”

  Brad starts to answer. Then blushes. Then continues and gets embarrassed again. Aaron takes over. “Sometime you’re just too, you know, excited? You just can’t stop.” His shoulders shrug. His big beautiful wet shoulders.

  “What are blue balls?” Gina asks. “They don’t really turn blue, do they?”

  “No,” Aaron snorts.

  “So what are they then?” she presses.

  “They just hurt,” he says, his eyes focusing on hers, as though they’re opponents in a staring contest. “You get them when you’re hard for a long time without—”

  “Oh,” she says. “So what hurts?”

  “Your balls,” Aaron says, grinning again.

  “But why does it hurt?” she asks, skeptically.

  I decide to answer this one. “It just hurts because you’re excited, and then it’s over, and you’re like ‘okay, what now?’” I stand with my arms up, palms to the sky, in the cartoon pose of a question. I know the answer because I remember it from health class. It’s something about blood flow—who doesn’t know that? Everyone in the pool nods, waiting for the next question. Gina quickly turns to face me.

  “And how would you know?” she says. Her forehead crinkles in disbelief, and she shakes her head and snickers. I feel a sting in her look and her words—how she knows I’ve never had sex because she knows why. Brad starts laughing, and he flicks his hand against the water and splashes me. The girls laugh, and the other boys laugh, and then Aaron laughs. I stand there, heat rushing up and drying out my mouth as if I’m on the mountain hike again.

  Because I thought we were all just pretending; I didn’t think any of the kids in the pool had actually had sex. In youth group,
we talk about waiting for marriage, about love and men and women, and most often, about temptation. And because I never feel tempted by girls, I assume not giving in is easy for everybody else. I don’t know yet that my desires live inside a tiny spot too tough to open. In the pool, under the white lights, even though my face is pink, I laugh too. I splash Brad back and keep laughing because I want it all to be a joke.

  Somehow, since the last time we drove over it a week ago, Kansas has stretched out three or four times its actual size. In my seat, my body begins to feel stunted, like I’m compressing myself by being stuck in here. The sun shines in on our faces and arms but our legs are freezing from the full-blast AC. I’m sitting next to Aaron who is sitting next to Gina. A long flannel blanket that’s covered in potato chip crumbs is pulled over all three of us.

  Gina finishes our novel. “Here,” she says, reaching over Aaron and thrusting it into my hands. “The ending is stupid. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.” Thanks, I say, and flip to the third-to-last chapter where I left off. I don’t see how it could end badly when everything that’s come before has been so good. Aaron is sleeping, mouth wide open, and now Gina yanks on the blanket to cover her chest and arms and she tilts her head back and closes her eyes too.

  The bump bump bump of the tires on the highway, the whine of the stereo, the soft murmur of conversations. I try to stay focused on the killer test-tube toddler, but I can’t stop yawning and my eyes close suddenly, like the darkness is something I need. Quickly, I enter a dream. In an hour, I wake up when someone shouts that we’re about to cross from Kansas into Missouri. I bend my stiff neck, pop my knuckles and look around in the sun-flooded van. Aaron still sits beside me, now staring at the road ahead of us like he’s got to know exactly where he’s going. I’m lucky enough to have skipped about eighty flat Kansas miles and I stretch, smiling as I yawn again.

  What I’ve also skipped, what I won’t know until about a year later, is what happened under the blanket while I was sleeping. I’ll be in our high school’s library with my English class, all of us supposed to be researching our term papers. Mine is on whale poaching. And because my teacher is down the hall smoking in the janitor’s closet, when I see Aaron for the first time in a long time, he’ll sit down at my table. It will be a long time because neither of us will go to youth group anymore. We’ll talk in whispers about what’s been going on and then we’ll talk about this trip. And he’ll tell me that when I slept beside him in the van, Gina pretended to sleep too, but crept her hand under the blanket and slid it into his shorts. And the night before, the night all of us stood in the swimming pool and talked about blue balls, after everyone else went to sleep, Aaron and Gina had sex. And as he leans in close to whisper the details—how they searched for a wide enough shadow, how she laid her beach towel over gravel and pulled him down—I’ll finally understand I feel something real for Aaron, some kind of love, because I’ll feel betrayed. But I’ll confuse the feeling with disappointment, thinking they shouldn’t have given into temptation, not during youth group, not at a religious campsite, not ever, because they didn’t even like each other, not really, but most of all, because it’s a sin, a word that also finally feels real. And I’ll hate Gina for it, for making him do it, and for what she said in the pool, confusing that feeling too because it won’t be hatred I feel for her—it will be jealousy.

  Before we left Colorado to drive home, I decided to start collecting rocks. It seemed like something I should want to do, especially with so many rocks around, and I was immediately thrilled by my new hobby. I couldn’t find anybody to walk around with so I set off alone, searching the campsite for something worth keeping forever. I didn’t know exactly what kind of rock I was looking for—craggy, fossilized, smooth, or the kind where shapes emerge if you stare long enough and then suddenly recognize a lumpy apple, a man’s fist, a curled fish. Near the bottom of the slope that reached up to the interstate, I found one. About as big as my head, this rock must’ve weighed nearly ten pounds. I had trouble holding it with one hand, but as I turned it in the sun, and looked at its weird streaks of rust and yellow and glittery black, I somehow knew this was what I wanted. Even wrapped up in T-shirts, the rock felt no less heavy, and I was barely able to heave my duffel bag into the van when it was time to go.

  Now, barefoot on our church parking lot in Missouri, I stand at the back of the van with the rest of the group. The thought of leaving them, all of us going to separate houses and families is awful; I’ve been sick of everybody, but now I want to know what they’re doing tonight. Aaron stands at the van doors and starts pulling apart the great mass of our luggage. He grips each suitcase from the pile and swings it down to its weary owner. Mine’s on the bottom. I watch him and know it will be days before I’ll see him again—probably not until youth group next week. When he finally hands me my bag, and the weight of it tugs at my arm, I don’t believe how much I struggle to carry something he doesn’t even notice.

  Cherry Bars

  We have to hear that one again. Angie sits up and presses the rewind button to stop the tape in exactly the right place, in the silence between the two songs. We’re lying on a blanket in the park, eating the cherry bars my grandma baked this afternoon and singing along to the whine of Simon and Garfunkel on my battery-operated tape player. It’s summer 1992, we’re seventeen. A heavy tree stretches over us, leaves so dense most of the sunlight is blotted out and can’t reach our blanket. We look like we’ve been flung, arms and legs bent and slapped down in odd directions. The cherry bars are thick and warm, red blobs swirling across the top. We pick chunks of them out of the blue plastic container my grandma made me promise to bring home. “Like I’m really going to throw it away,” I muttered in Angie’s car, as she reversed out of my driveway. My parents are on vacation, so my grandma is staying with my brother and me even though I’m old enough to watch us.

  Angie and I are best friends. We are the precise age for believing that always living in the same town and seeing each other every day for the rest of our lives is possible. We’ll always be best friends and never anything more. I know what happens when you date your best friend because that’s what happened with Claire, who, before Angie, was my best friend until she was my girlfriend, then my ex-girlfriend, and now she’s nothing. This won’t happen with Angie, though, because I’m certain that we are forever.

  “These cherry bars taste sweaty,” I say. I’m sucking the sticky bits off my fingers. We’re listening to the lyrics of “The Sound of Silence,” trying to figure out a meaning no one else has ever found. This song means more to us than it did to them, and by “them,” we mean the people who were around thirty years ago when this album was originally recorded, specifically our parents. We were born in the wrong time. Angie tie-dyes T-shirts in her back yard, and I wear round sunglasses like John Lennon. We relive these memories even though they aren’t ours because our parents had hippies and protests and pot and JFK and Vietnam and what do we have: nothing.

  Angie is beautiful. Her eyes are pale watery green. She says they are the same color as her birthstone, peridot, which I know is pronounced “pair-a-doe,” but I say “pair-a-dot” just to be corrected. When we see each other in the narrow hallways at school in the morning, we say, “How are you the smorning?” and laugh, because some people actually say it that way. Angie’s breasts are the largest I have ever seen in real life. She hates them. She lies on the blanket in the shade ripping up grass, letting it sift through her fingers. Her cotton T-shirt is striped yellow, and she’s pulling at it, yanking the bottom cuff down over her waist and the V-neck up, to cover her cleavage. We have a secret hand signal when we are in public and her cleavage is showing. I do the signal—lightly stroke my own neck with thumb and forefinger—and she fixes her shirt.

  I’m wearing shorts, Birkenstock sandals and a double XL T-shirt, even though I weigh approximately 100 pounds. I am the smallest boy in our class. My auburn hair is stiff from gel and hairspray and perfectly parted, a wh
ite straight line always cut across my head. It’s hot today; the sun glaring down on the grass heats up its sharp smell, which makes me sneeze. I have a handful of wet tissues in my pocket. I wipe my nose with the worn shreds and stuff them back in my shorts. Angie rewinds the Simon and Garfunkel tape again. I have to hear this one part. It’s from “Bookends” which is our song now. It used to be “America,” where he and Kathy ride the bus and count the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel and Angie and me all sing, “Time it was and what a time it was, it was.” We love that line—the reminiscence but also the wisdom we think we understand. We smile and fall down again on the blanket.

  We start talking about Kevin, her ex-boyfriend and Claire, my ex-girlfriend. Angie and Kevin dated for two years. They had sex. Claire and I dated for a year and a half. We never kissed. Right now, Kevin and Claire are hanging out together, we just know it. We think Claire likes Kevin, and we don’t like that at all.

  Claire and I got to know each other when we were both actors in an experimental school play. We wore black turtleneck sweaters and stood in front of giant neon arrows while delivering monologues about teen issues. Our friendship deepened after rehearsals when I needed rides home—we performed the radio songs in her car and soon discovered we enjoyed melancholy music, melodrama and each other. We were also both writers, and we already knew that one day we were going to be famous—she for her poetry, me for bestselling suspense thrillers about lawyers—and we constantly tried to impress each other with our words.

  It wasn’t long before Claire and I were best friends. When she ate dinner at my house, we whispered jokes and sayings my parents didn’t understand. My mom would ask, “What?” and we’d smile or laugh at her, one of us nudging the other’s shin under the table, my dad rolling his eyes. We made mixed tapes for each other, the music always organized in a theme. She made Solitude for me, a collection of moody, depressing songs with an illustrated booklet folded out of gray résumé paper. And we wrote notes, a lot of them. Both of us could fill the front and back of an entire sheet of paper in a 50-minute class period and still get As and Bs—except I couldn’t write notes in Algebra. Our notes were dramatic, passionate, ridiculous. We described the moon, the stars, our tears, smiles, and wishes. I used big words I didn’t understand; she addressed me as “Dearest” and laced her letters with thou, doth, and shall. She signed her notes Solange and I signed mine Sergé, our names from French class. Love, Solange or Love, Sergé—even when we were just friends, we already signed Love.