The Most Dangerous Thing

things, long and floaty. She clearly thought she looked a little bit like Stevie Nicks, and she wasn’t entirely wrong. She would have looked more like her if her mother had let her get a perm, but that was another one of those odd lines that Tally drew. She, with her long, straight hair, couldn’t bear the idea of her daughter having a curly mane.

The rest of us never commented on the change, no matter how Gwen preened and waited for the compliments she believed she deserved. Oh, we noted her clothes, but only to mention how impractical they were. “Those blouses will get caught on tree branches,” Mickey said. Tim said he could see her underwear through the thin material of the skirt. Sean told her that she was going to slow us down in her stupid new sandals-that’s exactly what he called them, stupid new sandals.

Only Go-Go reached a dirty hand toward her draped arm, eager to feel the material, and she let him. He rubbed it between forefinger and thumb, curious. “Kind of scratchy,” he said. Then: “Can boys wear shirts like that?” How Tim and Sean hooted at him, but Go-Go, for once, was not the naif. Lots of boys, other boys, were wearing clothes very much like Gwen’s that summer. Even Mickey’s stepfather, Rick, wore a linen shirt that made us think of medieval days, peasants toiling the land. It was off-white, with a slit that showed lots of his dark chest hair. And Rick wasn’t someone that the Halloran boys could mock. He knew how to fix engines, he had a motorcycle. He really did look like Tom Selleck.

It was the Halloran boys who were out of step with the times, with their short hair and plain white T-shirts. Their summer clothes were what they used to wear to summer camp, but there was no summer camp for them this year. Something had happened. Mr. Halloran had lost his job, which wasn’t new. Mr. Halloran was rather famous for losing jobs. He had a temper, he liked to tell the boss what was what, as he said, and that usually ended up with him leaving. It was a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg question whether Mr. Halloran was asked to leave his jobs because he told the boss what was what, or whether he sensed the end was near and decided he had nothing to lose by making such a speech. He had lost enough jobs so that he kept his workplace possessions to a minimum. The difference, in the summer of 1979, was that he was having trouble finding a new one. We didn’t talk about it and we didn’t know why we didn’t talk about it. Over time, there would be more and more subjects like that, things we didn’t talk about, for reasons we couldn’t identify. Gwen’s new appearance. Mr. Halloran’s job situation. How good- looking Rick was. Go-Go’s increasing craziness, the things he was rumored to do to cats and small animals. But that came later, when we hardly spoke to each other at all.

Gwen and Sean, falling in love, then out. We never spoke of that. They held it close, like a secret, but the kind of secret that you were dying for others to ask you about. The rest of us refused to acknowledge it.

Perhaps we should have spoken about that because that was what killed us, as an us. We couldn’t be we anymore, not in the face of that impenetrable twosome. We had been a we, and our mathematics teachers, different as they were-the nuns and priests of St. Lawrence and Cardinal Gibbons, the beaten-down old crone at Mickey’s public school, the love-is-all hippie type at Park-agreed that a subset of a group could not be greater than the group itself. Venn diagrams proved it. Yet Gwen and Sean were. They formed a group within the group, and it swamped us like a wave, we couldn’t escape it. All because of the damn clothes, which were the result of Gwen getting thin, which we still trace back to Chloe’s toothbrush, even if it didn’t give Gwen mono, as she had hoped. It began with the toothbrush, with moon-faced Gwen sneaking into some girl’s bathroom sucking on her red-handled Oral-B. Some girls aren’t very good at being pretty. There, it’s been said. Gwen became very pretty, very fast, and she didn’t know how to handle it. She was as destructive as Go-Go, running through the woods with a pointed stick or tossing rocks in the air, heedless of where they might land. But everyone knew to get out of Go-Go’s way when he was acting crazy. Gwen tore through us with no warning.

I t was late July, that point on the calendar where summer has gotten a little old, boring. After two days of heavy rains, the stream was wide and fast in places. Emboldened by our friendship with Chicken George, we had been pushing deeper and deeper into the woods each day, taking sack lunches prepared by Mrs. Robison or Mrs. Halloran. We found what appeared to be a broken concrete dam, most of it submerged in the rushing brown stream, but with a few jagged pieces above the waterline. Tim insisted on crossing there. Mickey scrambled behind him, sure-footed as ever in anything that wasn’t an athletic contest.

Go-Go went next, forever indifferent to the water, no matter how many times we had been told it was polluted and deadly, and his very indifference somehow kept him safe. Sean waited for Gwen to go. She clearly didn’t want to cross, but it was too late to argue against Tim’s plan, and she would have been shamed if she didn’t try. She lost her footing on her second or third step, and although she righted herself, the sleeve of her filmy, flimsy blouse caught on something in the water. If she had pulled back sharply, she would have been fine, but she didn’t want to tear the blouse. She reached down, determined to gently extract the material from whatever had snagged it-and that was when she fell into the water. The horrible, murky water, which we had been told countless times could kill us, the water whose merest contact required tetanus boosters.

She didn’t come up.

In water that brown, it would have been impossible to see blood, but Go-Go pointed, screaming in that way he had, so we couldn’t tell if he was happy or scared. “Blood! Blood!” Gwen bobbed to the surface, floated, like the Lily Maid of Astolat. Not that we knew the poem, but Gwen had read Anne of Green Gables, in which Anne has to be rescued after attempting to re-create the maiden’s fate. We knew a lot of stuff in that secondhand, watered-down way, through cartoons and books and television shows. Which, perhaps, is a way of saying we knew nothing.

Those of us who had crossed to the other bank froze, but Sean plunged into the water. Gwen’s body kept moving away from him, almost as if it were a game. Catch me if you can . The others ran down the bank, shouting contradictory instructions. “Shut up,” Sean shouted through gritted teeth. “Shut up.” He was wading, the water up to his waist, reaching for her, but she kept slipping from his grasp. Gwen might have eluded him forever, but a stick saved her this time, catching her skirt just long enough to give Sean time to catch up to her. He gathered her up in his arms and carried her to shore, then began giving her mouth-to-mouth, which he had learned in swimming classes at the camp the Hallorans could no longer afford.

“She’ll be brain damaged,” Mickey said. “She was unconscious too long, she took in too much water.”

“Shut up,” Tim said.

Go-Go jumped up and down, chanting: “Out goes the bad air, in goes the good air.” That’s how it worked in cartoons. We had all seen it ourselves on the old Captain Chesapeake show. In cartoons, the characters pushed on each other’s stomachs with great force and manipulated their arms.

In cartoons, the people always woke up. Gwen was not waking up.

But after what seemed an eternity, she coughed, spitting up a little water before vomiting a violent brackish stream. Sean sat back on his haunches, but he ended up catching some of it on his ankles.

“Are you OK?”

Tim stood over her. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Sean swatted at his leg. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Three,” Gwen said. “What happened?”

“You fell,” Sean said. “You hit your head, you almost drowned.”

“Drowned!” Go-Go said.

She lifted a hand to her head, but there was no cut, there had been no blood, no matter what Go-Go thought he saw. “I feel a bump,” she said. Sean’s fingers followed hers, probing tenderly. It was hard not to notice that the gauzy shirt, the source of all this trouble, was transparent and clinging now, her bra visible. Gwen crossed her arms over her chest.

“The important thing,” Mickey said, “is to figure out what to tell the grown-ups.”

“What do you mean?”

“Gwen’s soaked, her shirt is torn. Her mother will see that and demand an explanation. They’ll know we had to go pretty far downstream to get to a place where the water runs this fast and deep, and we’ll be in trouble.”

“No one said we couldn’t,” said Tim, the master of the loophole, the king of technicalities.

“Mickey’s right,” Sean said. “No one said specifically we couldn’t go this far, but we never ask, because we know they’ll say no, and if they find out where we were, they’ll make rules against it. We have to get Gwen as dry