He lifts your tube easily, his muscles hardly straining at holding two of them, and you see he’s got those awesome veins running through his forearms. You wonder if this is really happening.
He strides ahead of you a few steps.
“Come on.” He nods in the direction of the water.
You follow quickly because this is really happening … and arm veins!
He flips the tubes into the water effortlessly. You try as delicately as you can to arrange yourself onto your tube. Then you’re off. Floating.
You and the perfect boy.
*
Suddenly, it’s the most beautiful day. You’re not in the rapids yet and the river is calm. The sky is translucent and there’s not a cloud anywhere. Just blue, blue, blue. And a spot of sun.
If you look at the sun for too long, you know it’ll hurt, but it’s one of those suns that burns bright, it’s one of those suns that begs to be stared into. You can’t help yourself. And when you close your eyes everything flashes white except that spot where the sun was—it’s turned black, blinding.
You’re sprawled out on your back on the tube, knees bent, ankles and feet plunged into the water, your fingertips skimming the glassy top layer of the river. You’re floating, just floating, thinking of endless possibilities, when the boy says, so near to you that you practically jump, “Do you have a name?”
You tell him your name and he says he’s never heard that before and you tell him you get that a lot.
He says it’s pretty.
You feel yourself blush but then you’re not sure if it’s the sun on your face or if you’re really feeling a little blushy. You turn your face to get a better look at him.
“What’s your name?” you ask him.
“Ben.”
“Hi, Ben.”
He moves his tube closer to yours and grabs on to it so he’s right next to you. You tense up a bit, but then remind yourself to relax. That this is a not-so-bad day, a partially good day actually, and you’re wearing your favorite bathing suit. It’s just you and Ben; and Jae and all her friends and family floating up ahead.
You’re close enough to notice his brown eyes—dark as Hershey’s chocolate Kisses—and he’s smiling at you, so you don’t look away. He asks if you’re still hot and you say a little, and then you worry he’s one of those jerky guys who might try to flip you over on the tube, and maybe try to make your top fall off, but instead he just dips his hand into the river and drips some water onto your shoulders to cool you off. Which feels really nice and you think it was a sweet thing for him to do.
“Thanks.” You smile at him. It’s the smile you’ve practiced in the mirror. The smile-at-boys smile. You hope it turned out right.
He asks where you go to school and you tell him. When you say you are going to be a junior, he says he thought maybe you were a senior. He’s going to be a junior too, although he’s almost seventeen and you turned sixteen in May, so you’re about a year apart in age. He goes to one of the other high schools in town and you don’t know any of the same people. He runs track and used to play football but didn’t like it. “The guys are all douche bags.”
You mention that your brother plays football.
“Not all football players are douche bags,” Ben says, smiling.
“Oh no, they totally are, my brother included,” you say, and laugh.
He asks if you play any sports and you say no but you like to draw. He asks you to tell him more about it so you explain you mostly sketch, and you like to do line drawings and create cartoon figures.
“I took a ceramics class last year but I got a C,” he says. “I sucked at it.”
“I had a tough time in my ceramics class,” you say, because you want to be sympathetic, and also because it was hard. “Throwing clay on the wheel was the worst.”
You’re floating closer to the rapids and you’re getting jostled in your tube; water splashes everywhere.
“It looks a little rough ahead,” Ben says, and grasps your tube a bit tighter.
“This part scares me,” you admit.
“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you’re safe,” he says.
Jae’s ahead of you and she and some of her friends laugh loudly and a couple of the girls mock-scream. She sees you and waves and you wave back.
There are small whitecaps of rapids and the quiet calm of the river has changed to a whooshing rush of water. The river has also gotten deeper. Your heart speeds up and you close your eyes and tense your body as you and Ben start careening through the rapids.
For a moment or two, things seem okay, but then there’s an unexpected drop in the river, not too deep, but enough that Ben loses his grip on your tube. The good news is, once you’ve hit that drop, you’re coming out of the rapids. The bad news is, you’ve fallen out of your tube.
Just before you’re about to go under, you feel arms reach around your waist and Ben, no longer in his tube, pulls you up in to him.
You thought you were going to lose your breath before, but when you’re this close to him, and he’s holding you like this, you really can’t breathe. He’s got your tube, and he’s holding you in the water, looking right into your eyes. He asks, “Can you get back on?”
“I think so.”
Ben lets go of you to steady your tube. Instead of climbing on top, you plunge under the water and swim up through the hole. You wrap your arms over the top of the tube and hold on, so your arms are hanging over the sides and your legs are submerged deep within the hole of the tube.
“Okay, I’ll go grab mine,” he says.
He swims to his tube, disappears under, and gets in just like you did. When he comes back, he reaches out and you grab his hand and pull him to your tube.
“Thanks,” he says. You are now face-to-face, both of you in the middle of your tubes, arms hanging over the sides. There are those arm veins again.
You expect him to let go of your hand, to just hold on to your tube, but he doesn’t. Instead, he takes your other hand too, and rearranges his fingers so they are intertwined with yours. He moves his thumb over your knuckle, and his eyes light up, as bright as the sun on this beautiful, strange day.
“That was kinda crazy,” he says.
“Yeah.”
The water caresses your skin, the sun is a blanket of warmth on your back, and Ben slides his thumb over and over the top of your hand, like he’s been around forever, like you haven’t known him for only a couple of hours.
You feel it, you feel everything, all the way through to your toes.
You both stay like that, talking, looking into the too-bright sunshine, and into each other’s eyes, holding hands for the rest of the afternoon.
It’s more than a not-so-bad, partially good day.
You’re holding hands.
You’re floating.
3
You’re in your room, listening to music, and there’s that knock. Your parents have asked you not to lock your door, so you don’t lock it and they have mostly respected your privacy by knocking. You want to lock your bedroom door though, because it’s your room, it’s the only place you feel like yourself, and it’s not like you’re doing anything bad. You’re just lying here. Thinking.