On the television, the chunky kid raced headlong toward the climbing wall, then was knocked from his perch by a boxing glove flying out on a mechanical arm. His arms pinwheeled in the air on his way down to the water. The announcers shouted, Ohhhhhhhh!
“You fat fucker,” Elias muttered.
Cade
The quarry was at the end of a long road barely wide enough to hold a car. When they approached it back then—Cade and Elias, Piper and whoever else could fit into Elias’s converted bread-delivery van—broken chunks of asphalt rattled the tires. Now and then low-hanging oak branches brushed the windows, the leaves like aggressive hands. Then the land opened, the quarry lake came into view and Elias parked the van in the scrubby grass in the shade of the tree line. Ragged chunks of granite—some softball-sized, others large enough to stretch out on—littered the ground. A yellow knotted rope hung from a solid branch next to an outcropping of rock, high above the water.
They stripped down to their swimsuits in the shadow of the trees. Just past them lay the shimmering surface of the water, reflecting the treetops in a dark and lacy silhouette. Against it, the squealing teenagers in trunks and bikinis transformed into Indonesian shadow puppets. Treading water, slapping the surface in joyous half-drowning, then flipping like a dolphin and going under into the sudden thick silence. Cade moved through it like an eel. He loved the feel of his own physical symmetry, his resistant strength. Through some primitive sonar he sensed an edge, a wall, and he reached out and grabbed the narrow hip band of Piper’s bikini bottom, tugged. Her shriek penetrated the water, and he came up laughing, already ducking the swat of her hand.
On the ledge stood Elias, brown as toast from the sun, the Hawaiian flowers on his swim trunks blotched yellow and orange. Go, go. He heaved his arms back and then threw himself forward onto the rope, chest and stomach jiggling, and they loved him for it. The fat-kid smash into the water was epic. When Cade jumped in, nobody cared, but Elias drew a crowd. And then Piper scrambled up the rock, her body angular, a knife edge, her hair blunt-cut and threaded with summer blond. On the rope she was an acrobat. She flipped back and around, tucked and rolled, until she cut through the water long and lean and disappeared.
Disappearing: that was what Piper did. She lived down the road but left for months at a time on mysterious trips with her family, to summer camp, to ski. Once, when they were younger, she left for a year. She was never taken for granted. Elias loved her first. But her preferences were beyond Cade’s control, and Elias seemed to bear him no ill will when she singled out Cade for another kind of disappearing. Sometimes, together, they straddled the line between present and gone: on the shaded end of the quarry where a high subsurface ledge made the water shallow, there they could kiss and be ignored. But below the surface her hand worked down his trunks, and she plied him steadily, purposefully, until he came into the water in full view of every one of his friends, his brother, but of course they could not see a thing.
That summer they spent nearly all their free time with one another. Often they bought fireworks and, after building a campfire in the dirt-swept circle of the Olmsteads’ shooting range, set them off above the trees. On more than one occasion Elias singed his fingers and would hold them out, black tipped and smarting, for the girls to soothe with ice from the cooler. The range, deep in the woods as it was, hid everything. They drank whatever alcohol they could steal from the back of their folks’ top cabinets, then played squealing games of Duck Duck Goose, like little kids, around the fire. On one occasion, one of the other guys found a gun someone had left behind on the range. A box of ammo sat beside it, as though the owner had intended to target shoot but forgot about that particular weapon. Cade found a paper target without too many holes in it and clipped it to the pole. Then the whole group persuaded Elias, who was the best shot among them, to try to shoot out the bull’s-eye. He didn’t shoot out all the red in the center, but he hit it on the second shot.