“I’m in.”
The Kittredge girls and I were down at the Lower School boat docks, working up the courage to strip down to our swimsuits. Brooke’s boyfriend, Andrew, had been new as a third former, and as a veteran he introduced us to spring swimming at the docks. It was possible only on the rarest of hot days, after the sports season had ended but before the final commitments of the year.
The pond was murky and cold, not terribly deep. Grasses pushed up from the mud all along the shore, and we were a short reedy curve away from where just four months earlier we’d laced up skates. I studied the spot where the hot chocolate tables had stood. How could the earth change so utterly? How could I?
With the arrival of exams, the sixth formers were readying themselves to graduate, and the school’s intricate scheduling came apart. It was a release, a loosening of the daily corset around our attention. My friends were gleeful. I imagined something more like a breakdown, as if these gaps between commitments at the end of the year signified a great beast stumbling in its gait, falling to its knees. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. Survived the work. Found these friends—these friends! Giggling and sidestepping around the old wooden boards, dipping their fingers in the water to exclaim how cold it was.
“Oh, for God’s sake, just do it,” said Brooke, already in a black two-piece. Andrew lay back shirtless beside her, one hand calmly on her belly. A few of his friends had joined us too—Kent and Mike and Clem, all fourth formers like us. These were boys who talked about things, who did not regard conversation as a sniper’s convention and who seemed to have thoughts beyond our bodies (and theirs). Kent sang in the choirs and a band. Mike practiced piano in the music building every day. Clem had been dubbed “Nuprin” by the older boys in his dorm after the popular advertising slogan of the painkiller—“Little, Yellow, Different, Better”—because he hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, was quite tawny-skinned for a white kid, and sometimes had a weird sense of humor, but everyone liked him. He wore his nickname with good cheer.
Together we all offered encouragement to Maddy, who was quivering like a waterbird, her arms crossed, hems of her shirt in her fingertips, paralyzed by the presence of Brophy farther up the bank on the grass.
“He’s with a million other guys,” said Brooke.
“That doesn’t help!”
“He’s not watching you.”
But we were all watching Maddy. The big guns were about to be revealed. I’d seen her changing, of course, casually, as girls did—in the locker rooms and before Seated Meal. But her breasts in a swimsuit would be a revelation even to those of us who knew her well. Anyone’s body, held plainly in the daylight, was a revelation then, my own included.
Andrew sat up. “Maddy, honey, you’re beautiful. Don’t worry about it.”
“You’re all beautiful,” said Clem.
“Ditto,” said Kent.
A light breeze moved over the water. I felt I was moving too. In the late May sun, the chapel tower was as saturated with color as the dumb cutouts I’d had to make back in the winter.
Maddy pulled off her shirt. She shook out her hair and sat down. Nothing happened. We all laughed.
I was self-conscious too, but I didn’t say anything about it, and nobody noticed. I pulled off my shirt and dropped my shorts and lay down quickly on my towel in my one-piece swimsuit. The sun blanketed me. I thought of Mom, how soon I’d be going home.
“All right!” said Brooke. “Who’s going in?”
They did, one by one—the girls diving and the boys tucking into cannonballs that swamped the old wood and our towels. Still on the dock, Sam and I shrieked.
Then she narrowed her small face at me. “Last one in!”
We let the others pull themselves up and out before taking our places at the end of the dock. I waited after Sam dived. She surfaced, gasping and smiling. I waited so long that the moment passed, and I felt chilly and wanted to change my mind.
“Come on! It feels awesome!”
Sam was climbing out. My friends were dripping and hopping, shoving and hooting on the docks, shining like fish. I dived in.
The water felt gorgeous. An envelope of cool that opened around me and closed me in. I arced up gracefully, imagining myself doing so. Just before my head broke the surface, I felt a sharp drag on my right thigh, and my leg began to burn.
“Jesus!” I sputtered, coming up.
Nobody heard.
I paddled a bit, looking down. I couldn’t see anything, but my leg was searing.
Leeches? Weeds? What lived in New Hampshire ponds?
Legs dragging, I pulled myself to the dock with my arms and hoisted myself up. As I left the water, blood poured off my right thigh. Something had sliced me from high up, near my crotch, all the way down to above my knee, forming a long, thin C. The combination of the injury and the scummy pond water made my body look greased with blood. There were screams, but not from me. I was just breathing. I worried about getting blood on everyone’s towels.
“Hang on,” I heard myself saying. “Hang on.”
I sat back down and cupped water out of the pond and poured it onto my leg. The moment the blood was washed away, the slice re-illuminated itself.
“Holy fuck,” said Brooke.
“What the hell?” asked Kent.
Andrew said, “Oh my God, Lacy. Just wait. Just hold still.”
There were shouts up the docks and onto the lawn, where the fifth formers—now almost sixth formers—were lying about, as though they’d been blown there. Someone’s boom box was playing, and a few guys were tossing a lacrosse ball back and forth with tasseled sticks. Turning back to the water, I saw, as the surface settled, what I had hit: a bicycle on the bottom, its rims
