Aaron was a relic. The summer before high school began, I was hopelessly infatuated with him. He was a lifeguard at our local summer camp, where he was a senior counselor and I was a junior counselor. He used to twirl a lanyard with keys to the equipment shack around his fingers, moving in controlled circles. I spent all summer thinking of ways to get those fingers inside me. I hiked up my shorts, pulled down my V-neck. I had a well-fabricated nightlife. I casually dropped Jerky Boys references in front of him and rented the action movies he liked from Blockbuster. I paid a king’s ransom for a vintage Bruce Lee Fist of Fury T-shirt. When he complimented it, I pretended to have fished it out of a secondhand bin.
As the summer wore on and Aaron made no overtures of affection, I didn’t give up on my forced metamorphosis into cool. I wanted to seem like I had good taste and so I accidentally became someone with good taste. I wanted to seem elusive and so I accidentally became elusive. Aaron took notice on the last day of camp. Men, even boys, are very good at knowing when a woman’s heart has left the building. By the time Aaron asked me to help him collect the kickboards, I was inconvenienced.
The walls inside the equipment shack were covered in cheap panels with the manufacturer’s logo on them: Beaver Lumber. Aaron had me up against one of the panels, his tongue exploring my ear. This guy wanted to eat my brains. He dug his hand over the waistband of my shorts and under the spandex of my bathing suit, his forearm cut off by two types of elastic. I’ll never forget the look of concern on Aaron’s face, that I might be unimpressed with his putting his fingers in me. I wanted to tell him there was no need to question if it felt good because of course it didn’t feel good. I had not expected it to. But I was suddenly responsible for this creature who noticed I wasn’t reacting how women reacted in the movies. Neither of us knew how to fix this so Aaron freed his hand and kissed me. He left the shed first.
“See you next summer,” he said, even though I’d already told him this was my last summer at the camp.
I watched him through a crack in the door, moving up the slope of a path. Another counselor came up behind him, a girl his age, and punched him affectionately in the arm. I reached my hand down to smell myself. As suspected: chlorine.
* * *
Out of everyone, I least wanted to see Knox. I was hoping that Clive had overlooked him, but if the Golconda’s net had caught the likes of Howard and Dave, there was no way it was letting Knox slide.
Knox was an emotionally distant librettist and latent sadist from Detroit who looked like a young Daniel Day Lewis. I interviewed him for a Modern Psychology feature on prodigies and we had drinks after the story ran. Knox seemed cultured, confident, and unassuming about both, the kind of man who extended himself as much as he retreated, a function of being an in-demand artist who must answer email eventually. The kind of man I thought I should be dating. In this way, I was perpetrating the same crime against Knox as Dave had perpetrated against me. Whenever Dave assumed I’d like to go cliff diving with him, I thought: Do I even need to be here for this relationship?
I blamed Knox for why I’d later fall for Amos, because I was hoping to date an artist who was also an intellectual. Boots didn’t count because Boots was too practical about his art to risk insufferability. I’d never managed to strike the right balance with creative types. Either I tiptoed around these men, letting them stop me mid-sentence to point out a cloud, letting them expect to be rewarded for banal observations, or I felt self-conscious about my own creative limitations and transformed myself into whatever they wanted me to be.
That’s why I was scared of seeing Knox. Because of the monster I became around him.
Knox’s concern for my physical well-being was the entry point of his affection. At first, I thought his compulsion to nurse stemmed from his immersion in an older art form and, by extension, an older world. He insisted on walking closest to the curb. Or sending cars to pick me up. He would nonchalantly move our café table away from foot traffic and glare at anyone who jostled me, as if prepared to draw his sword. I had a sharp sense of my own body whenever I was around him. I found myself doing things like blowing into my already-gloved fingers, announcing that it was cold. I’d touch the glass of an airplane window, knowing he was beside me, appreciating the silhouette of my ladylike fingers, speculating about the soft field of my thoughts. I was a fragile product of this big bad world. If I stubbed my toe, I’d say something like, “I don’t think it’s broken.” In bed, Knox was adamant about cradling my head to keep it from banging against the wall, even though our sex presented no danger. I’d sigh as I fell asleep, like a baby bear, with a little whistle out the nose and a nuzzle into the pillow, while Knox stroked my hair.