If You Knew Then What I Know Now

I’m sleeping against the van window when they all start gasping at the sight of the Rockies and wake me up. I squint in the sudden bright afternoon, looking for these mountains, but all I can see is a distant dark bulk. I’m in the last row of seats, crammed against the side of the passenger van because I’m sitting next to Aaron. He’s sprawled out like always, legs and giant sneakers spread across our row. And I know sitting anywhere else would be more comfortable but I always sit next to Aaron. In fact, I have to sit next to him because I’m in love with him. Though none of us has figured that out yet.

I’m fourteen years old and there are twelve of us in the van—besides Aaron and me, seven other high school kids and three adult chaperones. This is our church youth group summer trip, and we’ve almost made it from Missouri to the campsite in Colorado where we’ll stay the week. I’m yawning as Aaron notices my nap is finished, and then punches my shoulder. The hit makes my arm feel dead for a few seconds until the throbbing begins—my pulse flaring right where a bruise will emerge tomorrow. “Mountains,” he says, pointing to the front of the van.

Aaron is a year older than me. He’s tall and solid, a sophomore player on our school’s varsity football team. He’s going to be in the Army so he’s always wearing camouflage. The sun reaching into the van lights up the clear bristly hair that covers his chin, legs, and arms. He smiles and scratches his elbow near the spot where a spider almost killed him. A rare pleasure of mine is asking him to stab this spider scar with a knife; the tissue is so damaged and desiccated that even a blade can’t split it open. It’s his invincible spot, as though he’s Achilles in reverse. I love the story of the spider bite and when I’ve heard it and watched him press a knife into the scar, I’ve imagined his hospital stay, the deadly fevers, a doctor’s needle squirting antidote into his veins at the very last second. That Aaron, the weak, helpless one is so different from this one next to me, it’s almost as if part of him did die from the spider’s bite, leaving an Aaron I can marvel at, and be a little afraid of.

“Here,” Gina says from the seat in front of us, handing me her paperback book. “I’m done with chapter six.” We’re sharing the same novel because I didn’t bring one. She reads a couple of chapters, then I catch up. It’s a book about married geneticists—the husband is sterile so he and his wife create a test-tube baby who mutates into an amazingly intelligent but psychotic toddler; the kid ages too quickly though and eventually tries to murder them. Sex and violence. It’s the best book I’ve ever read.

I say thanks, and fan out the pages to find my chapter. Gina is the oldest of us. She’ll be a senior in high school this fall. Whenever I’m with her, I somehow feel younger than I actually am. She turns around in her seat and rests her chin on the back of it. “Aaron, come here,” she says. He leans his ear close to her mouth, she whispers something, and then he cups his hand around his mouth and whispers something back to her. I watch and strain to hear their secret but everyone is still talking about the stupid mountains. Almost touching her dark straight hair, Aaron’s large hand is tightly strung with fleshy wires and knobs; the tiny twitches moving under his skin remind me of a machine, of what I see when I peek under the cover of my piano at home while I’m pressing on the keys.

Miles go by. The nearest huge mountain slowly rises above our van and glares down like a bully. I’ve tried ignoring their secret but can’t. Silently, I elbow Aaron, point to Gina’s back and mouth What? He shrugs and says loudly, “Just a question from your book. Mind your own business.” Gina turns around. She eyes him, then looks at me, looks at him again, and this time, she smiles. He licks his fingertips and wipes them on my face.

The campsite, for church groups and Christian families, is called Sermon on the Mount, and it features huge vinyl tents that look like white hay bales, a cafeteria and fellowship center, showers and indoor toilets, picnic tables and a swimming pool. The boys are in one tent with the male chaperones, and the girls are next door. I follow Aaron, the other boys in our group, and our youth leader into the tent where we flump our sleeping bags into a heap on the floor.

After that, all of us stand in the shade between the tents trading dazed expressions. Brad, one of the other boys, sneaks behind Aaron and tries to clamp him in a headlock. Aaron easily tosses him off and then presses him down into some gravel and pine needles. Brad begs for mercy, then mutters he’ll get even later. When our youth group goes on trips like this, whether we stay in tents, cabins or hotel rooms, the boys organize epic pillow fights. Sometimes I think pillow fighting is the real reason Aaron is in youth group. He’s impossible to knock down, and he’s strong enough to land his feather pillow on your cheek like a sack of flour. He delivers instant headaches with a single tooth-loosening blow. In previous summers when we’ve spent weeks at a camp with cabins in the Missouri woods, each night, the bunk beds were stripped and the mattresses were all piled in the middle of the room. All of the boys would sock each other until only one was left standing: Aaron, on the uneven mass of mattresses, the boys with weaker arms and fluffier pillows whimpering at his feet.

Because I weigh about ninety pounds, I’m a watcher of pillow fights instead of an actual fighter—although I am usually pulled into the ring at least once, most often when Aaron grips my ankles and yanks me in for a pummeling. I’m the whipping boy of youth group. It’s just so easy for them to hold me upside down or wad me up and shove me in a kitchen cupboard. And, like the bruise that’s rising up on my arm from Aaron’s punch in the van, there is some pain. But as much as I make a big show when they wring my arms with Indian sunburns or twist wet fingers in my ears, as much as I squeal in protest and flail around, silently and secretly, I do crave the attention—especially Aaron’s.

He lets go of Brad just as our guides tromp up the gravel path. Blake and Cindy, fit and muscled, blond and pink-cheeked, both wearing gold crosses on chains and expensive sunglasses. Their smiles are identical. This week they’ll take us white-water rafting, rock climbing, rappelling and even hiking—several miles out where we’ll pitch tents on a mountain, cook over a fire and drink from a perfectly clear stream. Blake sweeps his arm across the wide sky and points to a short mountain on the other side of the interstate. A glacier slid down its face and dug out the straight scar we see now. Then, a road was cut across the mountain, clearing out a line of pines about two thirds of the way up. With my eyes, I follow his tanned arm drawing a cross in the air, and then I see it carved there into the mountain. “God’s mark on God’s mountain,” he says. Blake tells our circle to join hands for prayer before dinner. I knew this was coming, so I’m already standing next to Aaron though I pretend some reluctance, putting on my Can you believe this guy? look.

Church is just like school—we go because we have to. The worst part is waking up early on Sundays and getting dressed up. Once we get to church, and slide down a pew to sit in the sanctuary, I’m fine because I only have to pretend to listen. I’m free to daydream, to make up stories in my head. As long as I keep my eyes pointed up front, nobody knows how I’m not really getting it when the pastor says salvation, grace or sin—words that sound important but don’t mean much. I imagine that for everybody else those words have a physical sensation, a feeling like your belly is full of warm water or the lightheadedness after spinning in one spot over and over, and because I never feel anything in church or when I pray, I assume I must be doing it wrong. Like now, holding Aaron’s hand in the circle of kids, the only thing I feel is his hand. Blake says, “Amen.”

The next day, we cram ourselves into wetsuits and go rafting on the Arkansas River. There’s a guide in each raft to steer our inflatable vessel with long wooden oars, point out rock formations and tell us when to bail the inches of water pooling at our feet. Almost every stretch of the river has a name—Gunbarrel Rush, the Widowmaker, Sledgehammer Falls, Big Drop. For six hours, the water jerks us down its course, and I can’t stop thinking how easily my face could be scoured off by each jutting boulder we pass. My wetsuit is three sizes too big, and between dangerous spots on the river I concentrate on trying to flatten the spongy wrinkles around my middle and crotch. Aaron looks like a superhero in his wetsuit—as dark, hulking, and polished as Batman.

When we return to camp that evening, we’re all sunburnt and soggy. After I wrench off my wetsuit in a bathroom stall, and change into a T-shirt and shorts, I limp into the big tent and collapse on my sleeping bag. With the late afternoon sun slanting over the mountains, the air is warm and still, and after the daylong turbulence, I don’t mind it. One by one, the others climb into the tent, including Aaron, to change clothes and rest before dinner.

His army duffel bag is unzipped next to me. I nod to him as he unlaces his sneakers and brushes sand grit off his feet and shins. I’m lying on my back, my damp hair grinding into my pillow, and I throw my right arm over my face like it’s too bright. In the blurry margin of my vision, I see Aaron lift his chin and pull down the zipper of the wetsuit at the root of his neck. The teeth unlock in a long high note like a sigh, and from the noise and movement beside me, I know he’s stripped off the suit, and he’s down to his camouflage trunks. He steps out of the suit and flings it into a wriggling pile near my feet; drops of water hit my petrified legs. More digging in the duffel bag, then a T-shirt is unfolded and shaken out, snapping like a flag.

My eyes still point at the crossbars holding up the tent’s ceiling but they want to peek at Aaron. I want to see him, the hidden parts of his body I’ve tried so hard never to think about. If I turned my head just a bit, if I only glanced, I could probably catch a quick flash and he wouldn’t notice. And if he did notice, couldn’t I pass it off as just looking around? My tired eyes wandering without really looking? Would it have to mean something?

There’s the sudden soft shushing of his swimming trunks as he pushes them down his legs. Now, he’s naked beside me, no more than a few feet away. Right there. I’m frozen, afraid of what I want to see, afraid of what I want to do, afraid of what he’ll do if I look. In my head, with my eyes staring hard at the black X above me, I try picturing what he looks like, and I can see all the parts of Aaron I’ve already seen, with a murky grey nothing floating over the rest.

We’re ready early in the morning for the hike—through a forest and up a mountain to an expanse of grass where we’ll spend the night. Blake warns us how tough it’s going to be. “It’s June,” he says. “And today, you’re going to touch snow. That’s how far we’re going.” I’m not impressed, I can see the snow from here. We’re all strapped down under enormous backpacks, full of gear we have to carry though most of it isn’t actually ours. Because I’m so short, my pack stretches over my head and something rough rubs my neck left then right then left again as I waddle under its weight. “You all right?” Aaron asks.

The hike takes all day, and there are several moments when the cramp in my side almost forces me to toss my body down the scrubby flank of the mountain. At one point, Blake doubles back to encourage me; I’m the last of the group, behind all the girls, which isn’t necessarily surprising to me but is strange to him. Plus I’ve already drunk all the water in my canteen. We’ve gone about a quarter of a mile.

When we reach the grassy flatness that will be our campsite, we pitch our tents and then gather in a circle around Blake as he bows his head and thanks God for our safe journey and for this majesty. But the view is so gorgeous it’s fake, as if we’re standing in front of giant postcards. Wide sky, thick pines, the snowy peak reaching up and sparkling, an actual babbling brook—I recognize the beauty, but that doesn’t mean I feel anything. With Blake’s hushed voice praying, his words droning like a hum, I can’t keep my eyes on anything besides Aaron’s sweaty forearms. And when I look, there is real feeling—something physical that runs through me with a sudden thrill like fear.

At the moment, I don’t know what staring at Aaron really means. I’ve tricked myself into thinking that I like looking at his body because mine is so small and shapeless, as if this is Mrs. Kline’s second-hour biology class and Aaron is one of the rubbery frog specimens we have to examine and touch and report on precisely. At the moment, I’ve also never kissed anyone and don’t really understand what kissing is, or what you do with your body once you start kissing someone. So I don’t think about that either when I stare at him. I don’t think about what his body could do to mine. What I do think about is all the strength working inside him, the force when he collides with players on the football field, how this hike was nothing for him, not even hard. And sometimes I do wonder what it would be like to take on that force, to be crushed by him and squeezed from the inside out—like the cramp in my side except over my whole body.

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.

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.

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.