Chapter 2: The Middle of June

Before the End of August

A week after graduation, we reunited for Zachary L.’s graduation party, the event that we had all put in our minds as an assurance that we weren’t all going to lose each other after high school. Zachary was known for having great parties, accomplished by having a huge house and by inviting everyone in the grade. Most people don’t realize this, but if you invite absolutely everyone to your party, you are almost guaranteed that it will be memorable. All those people, away from teachers and dressed up for the evening, hallways filled with glitter eyeshadow and Victoria’s Secret perfume, people who never talk bumping into each other on the stairs, it’s a guarantee for social success. Something will happen, and it will have happened at your party. 

We were all gearing up for it. Most of us hadn’t seen anyone outside of our close friends since the day of graduation. Lydia and Jenna and I had hung out. We had seen Peter and Cocoa getting ice cream together at the same time we did. Lydia had started her job at the pool, and Eduardo worked there on Tuesdays. But Zachary’s party meant that everyone would be together again, maybe for the last time. 

Maybe for the last time, that was the phrase of the summer. Every time Box wanted to do something, that’s what he’d say. We have to do it, maybe for the last time! We have to go to Sparky’s tonight, maybe for the last time. We have to play frisbee this weekend, maybe for the last time. We have to take a picture together, maybe for the last time.

Jenna, Lydia, and I arrived at the party together. We weren’t fashionably late, but because we came as a set of three, the host was always glad to see us. Together, we gave the impression that the party had started, and everyone who came after us got the satisfaction of believing they were fashionably late. Sure enough, our reputation held for this post-graduation bash. Zachary swung open the dark wooden door himself, “Welcome to the par-tay!” 

He was never this happy to see us, but here we were, three points for him on the first social event of the summer. We walked in, a few of Zachary’s closest friends already in the living room, and we grabbed drinks from a pre-filled tray of cups that Zachary’s mother presided over in the kitchen. “Welcome to the party!” She unintentionally mirrored Zachary’s exact words, without his raise-the-roof hand motions and emphasis on the last syllable. We saw her scan our faces, probably looking for someone she recognized. I could see her assessing the threat. 

Three girls, standing in their flared jeans and tank tops, only the most beginner level of make-up on their cheeks, no black nail polish to be found, and even Jenna’s blue streak of hair wasn’t showing. Zachary’s mom’s face crinkled. “So glad you could make it!” She turned back to the kitchen to pop pigs-in-a-blanket in the oven, and I could see Lydia start a mental timer to come back to the kitchen when they would be done. 

We planted ourselves on his red couch, and before long, we were surrounded, largely by the same people we had eaten at Sparky’s with the week before. 

Ralphie and Box showed up, accidentally matching in their soccer team t-shirts from the year before. Cocoa and Peter came together. Eduardo came alone. The football team came and walked directly to the basement, and the party began trickling downstairs. Box challenged Jenna to foosball and was horrified when she didn’t know what it was. 

“You’ve never played foosball?” He asked.

“You’re making that up. What kind of name is that?” Jenna returned.

“It’s like a table where there are little guys on poles, and you have to use the sides of the table to kick the ball around.” 

Lydia started laughing. “That is possibly the worst explanation of foosball I’ve ever heard.”

“Have you heard a lot of explanations of foosball?” I teased her. 

Lydia tried. “It’s like air hockey or ping pong, but instead of hockey or tennis, it’s soccer.”

Jenna still looked skeptical. Box prodded her along. “And,” he pressed, “You’re missing the most important part! The little guys are on poles and you have to poke the poles to get the ball to go in the right place.” 

“Still not a good explanation,” Lydia retorted. The matter was settled by trooping down to the basement to show Jenna what foosball was in person. When I found them at the table a few minutes later, Jenna was already beating Box squarely. 

“Looks like you play foosball as well as you explain it,” Lydia remarked as I walked by. 

Zachary’s basement was a cross between a Sharper Image and a rummage sale, unexplainable dull silver gadgets sticking out of boxes in the corners. Vintage records stacked in boxes on the shelves. A disco ball hung on a wooden beam at the center of the ceiling. 

Ralphie and I started scanning through the records. “Literally every one of these is the Doobie Brothers,” he said, pushing the box back into its slot and starting on the next one. 

“Bad luck,” I responded, “This one has everything!” 

“Really?” He moved closer to look at the box I had open. 

“Yep.” I began flipping so he could see. “Doobie Brothers. Doobie Brothers. And more Doobie Brothers.” I laughed and suddenly became very aware of how tall I was and how tall Ralphie was. He laughed as he looked over my shoulder, and I felt it near my ear, like a sudden confirmation of some alien life I wanted to see a flash of again. I pressed into it. 

“Oh wait, wait.” I turned to the final record of the box. “The Eagles!”

“Wow, what a robust collection.” Ralphie laughed again behind my ear. Suddenly he leaned in to look at the record. 

“I think my dad had this one.”

“Had? What happened to it?” I didn’t know much about Ralphie. He almost never talked about his family, and I only knew that his older brother had gotten a soccer scholarship to Duke after he took our school to the state finals and lost. 

“Eh, he took all his records when he left. But he didn’t even have a record player, so it’s not like I ever heard them anyway.” 

I had so many questions. Why had he left? Where had he gone? Did he ever have a record player? I wanted to ask something meaningful, but I was too tangled up in Ralphie’s voice over my shoulder and too aware of thirty of our classmates causing chaos all around us. 

I seized on the easiest thread I could find, the most basic instinct, to keep Ralphie talking to me, to keep his voice as close to my shoulder as I could.

“Well, it’s time that you finally hear it, right? There’s got to be a record player around here somewhere.”

We rummaged through boxes, the escalation of our flirtation moving up and up and up, and I would like to think that we were part of the party’s success that night. We couldn’t find a record player in the boxes, so we found Zachary who was no help, but we went to grab pigs-in-a-blanket, no longer hot from the oven, but just as salty cold, and Zachary’s mother was more than happy to point out the record player in the living room for us. 

“Bring it downstairs if you’d like.” She had passed her accommodating mom stage, and seemed happy enough to have the loud teenagers in the basement, away from her kitchen, as she sipped wine at the counter alone. 

Downstairs, the hunt for the record player had reached everyone at the party, and Ralphie carried it down the basement steps as I sung processional music behind him. 

“Ladies and gentlemen gentlemen gentlemen gentlemen,” he added a fake echo as he walked. “It has been found!”

The crowd in the basement cheered as if we had won the state soccer championship, whooping and hollering as youth does when an inconsequential goal is met. You could have gotten us on board with any narrative that night, and the cheers would have been the same. 

The arrival of the record player was the pinnacle of the adventure. Ralphie and I, along with a handful of music nerds, were the only ones invested enough to follow it to the corner with an outlet, to put the record on the spinner, and hear it begin. There it was, the sounds of Zachary’s dad’s music mixing in with the shouts of teenagers who mostly knew Usher or My Chemical Romance. 

Take it easy crooned across the room, and the music nerds floated away. 

I looked up at Ralphie. “Well, what do you think?”

He was listening, pensive, not looking entirely happy, thinking harder than a teenager should at a party in a basement the week after graduation. His face turned into a smile as the chorus picked up. 

“I like it. I think it’s good to dance too.” And he swooped up my arms and began dancing me around the room in wide exaggerated trots, the not-quite-country sounds meeting with the stray swing dance steps we had learned during a special gym class one autumn.

Our galloping dance wound through the crowd, and suddenly everyone was bopping along with the crooning of the Eagles, all potential flirtation sparking into dancing, bobbing heads, laughing, eye contact. Box held his hands out to Lydia. “Would you care to dance?”

She gave him the side eye. “Maybe for,” we all finished his sentence with him, “maybe for the last time?” Lydia grabbed his hands, and they mimicked our mad gallop around the basement, until the song ended, and someone turned the record down, and Ralphie and I were suddenly too aware of his hands on mine, and we dropped our arms back at our sides, suddenly uncertain of what we should do with so many hands, so many fingers.

Maybe for the last time echoed through the summer, everyone in the graduating class feeling the tug of the words now. Years later, I would pass a teenager at the park at night as I jogged and they hung on the jungle gym. As I ran past, the boy, probably just seventeen, yelled, “You only live once,” jumped off the highest point as he screamed “YOLO,” and broke his foot landing on the bottom rung. I laughed until I realized he was injured, thinking of our own shouts that summer, the same song in a different key, maybe for the last time. 

✷

Soon our lives began to be split as we each began our own summer jobs. Lydia started work at the pool, and I began at the library, shelving books, helping with story time in the mornings, and avoiding Mr. Fleet, an elderly librarian who hovered around the entrance to the building with a clipboard. It was my job to roll the cart of returned books back from the stall in the parking lot to the building. I sat behind the long checkout desk, processing book after book, checking for damage, and sometimes stopping to read a page, unless I sensed Mr. Fleet was watching me.

After work, Jenna, Lydia, and I would meet and compare our days, usually piling into Jenna’s car to get whatever we had decided on for dinner, usually Taco Bell, eaten on the purple plastic tables outside the building in the setting sun, a Mexican pizza for Jenna, two beef tacos for Lydia, and a fiesta potatoes and bag of cinnamon crisps for me. 

Lydia would fill us in on the details of pool life, a whole world of drama that Jenna and I weren’t privy to, considering our jobs involved adults who worked there year round, not just teenagers taking advantage of the summer to make extra money and get a tan at the same time. 

“Eduardo says he’s sick of it.” Eduardo worked at the pool too, a job he had taken before he and Cocoa broke up, a job that now required him to watch Cocoa lifeguard each day as he helped manage the office with Lydia indoors. “All he does is talk about Cocoa. And he doesn’t even know that I heard them break up.” 

We were all scandalized that Eduardo was still hung up on this. Peter was a good guy, we contended, and he needed to get over it. Jenna was more forceful than the rest of us on that point. “He needs to learn to deal,” she emphasized. “Lots of people love someone who doesn’t love them back, and they should just shut up about it.” Lydia and I exchanged confused glances. Since when did Jenna care so much about Eduardo being in love with Cocoa, who no longer loved him back?

But that wasn’t all that happened at the pool. Cocoa drove the other life guards crazy too, because she was so pretty but she was taken. “There are three guys from Warhouse High there, and they’re all just juniors, but they pretend that they’re in college the way they strut around. Like peacocks being strangled by a water floatation device.” The nickname stuck, and we would hear near-daily updates about the Peacocks for the rest of the summer. 

“Philip, the tall one, thinks that he’s hilarious because he’s tall and no one has ever told him otherwise.”

“James, who lives in our neighborhood but still goes to Warhouse High, says that he can do twenty shots in a row. I told him he would die, and he said he did die once, and he saw God. In case you were wondering, God is blonde and Philip says God looks just like him.” 

“Levi is the best peacock because he knows when Philip and James are being dumb and he makes faces behind them while they tell stories. But I think he’s kind of a jerk too because I saw him eating Eduardo’s lunch.” 

Lydia’s pool drama filled a dry void that was library drama for me. There was library drama, but the nuance of it was lost on my eighteen-year-old mind. Should we get a new computer system? Can you believe they would do that? Did you hear that the test came back and it’s not melanoma, just a weird-looking mole? I was suddenly thrust into the drama of adults, centered around medical diagnoses and poor management. 

But working at the library was also the first time I began to be aware of that all-powerful surfer circling above us as we bounced along in the water below. The wider world inched into focus, the world events that shaped where I bounced in the water, even if I could choose to ignore where the ripples came from. I would gather library returns of browbeat hardcovers about the Dreyfus Affair or worn-out paperbacks about the political scandals of my grandparents, suddenly recognizing the ripples of a larger world, intertwined with the minutiae of the pool scandals and our own long evenings, riding bikes or driving Jenna’s car through neighborhoods we didn’t know, once driving all the way to the lake and back again, squealing at the discovery that the maps weren’t lying, suddenly holding onto almost too much precious knowledge that we were living in a stray suburb outside of a big city, somewhere west of a lake, between two oceans, on a round globe, hurtling through space, and that if Eduardo caught Levi eating his lunch he would be a dead man. 

✷

The construction site was our secret, and without saying it out loud, we knew we shouldn’t tell anyone else about it, at least not yet, not while the sun was still high in the summer sky, while the days were still getting longer, while we still had two full months, eight whole weeks, before our clothes would be packed for the giant leap ahead of us known as going off to college.

We had been waiting to go back to the site together, on a night without rain or too much wind, when we could all get off of work on time, when we didn’t need to pick up dinner, and before it got too late. The right combination was missing, so we waited and waited and finally decided to try to solve the problem through another method. On a rainy evening, after we ate our Taco Bell in Jenna’s car in the parking lot, a light drizzle shrouded us even as the sun broke through the distant horizon where the storm was not. We had alternated between too sticky in the drizzle, too cold in the air conditioning, and we couldn’t stay put anymore but didn’t want to go back to anywhere there were parents. Gas was expensive, but it was a night for driving around. 

“I wonder if we could find the entrance,” Jenna asked. “You know, where the construction crews go in.”

“I’m sure they have it blocked off.”

“Yeah, but we could at least find it to know where the road goes. To know the road goes somewhere real, to make certain it connects to this dimension, to our reality.” Jenna used her documentary voice for the last part, a hybrid of Keith Morrison and an old-timey radio announcer who had seen the aliens himself that cold and stormy night. 

We drove toward the golf course. We drove past the library, and we drove over the underpass where we had ridden the week before to find the neighborhood ourselves. We turned at the restaurant onto the big road, which turned into a highway further out, but here stretched four lanes between strip malls and grocery stores.

“It’s got to be around here, right? We didn’t ride that far.” From the passenger seat, Lydia craned her neck to watch each block as we passed. “There’s the grocery store, and it’s definitely further than that. That one school where the girl was stabbed…” 

“Geez, Lydia, that’s morbid!” 

“Sorry, I don’t know the name of it! I just know that’s where that girl got stabbed.” 

Jenna looked troubled. 

“She was fine! She survived.” 

“Guys, guys,” I cut in, “we’re missing it! Did you see anything back there?” 

We turned around in a neighborhood and crawled back on the opposite side of the road. “Nothing.” I was disappointed.

“One more try, one more,” said Lydia, and Jenna pulled a U-turn, and we went as slow as we possibly could up the road again, past the grocery store, past the school where the girl was stabbed.

“Man, I really don’t see anything!” Lydia slouched back in her seat. “It doesn’t help that the windows are all rainy and keep fogging up.” 

Jenna turned the car into another neighborhood. “Maybe we can find the top part of the site, where we haven’t been yet, if we go all the way to the other side of it?”

We looped up and down streets named after poets, all the houses looking suspiciously similar to our own, but with different little league signs in the yards, and green honor student bumper stickers on the mini vans instead of blue. 

“Maybe we’re too far north,” I suggested. 

“I have no idea which way is north,” Lydia laughed. “But sure, yes, I agree that we’re too far north.” 

“We live south. The golf course path and the big road go north. The side of the construction site that we’re trying to find here would be north.” I tried to explain it, but I could tell Lydia and Jenna were starting to laugh. “I don’t know, it just makes sense to me!” 

“Like the lake that you can find in your head?” Jenna teased me. 

“I think you guys have it too and you just don’t realize it. It’s the secret power that we all have when we’re born here. We all know which way the lake is.” 

“Okay Lydia,” Jenna tested it out. “Which way is the lake right now?”

I waited, resisting the urge to tell her. Lydia paused. “Hm, that way.” She pointed east, the right way. 

“Yes!” I jumped in the back seat, and Jenna laughed.

“Lucky guess. I’ll test her again in a little bit and see. If that is a superpower, I don’t know why it skipped me.”

“Probably because you were born in Florida, not here,” Lydia retorted. “Do you know which way Disney World is?”

Jenna waved her hand over her shoulder. “I don’t know, probably that way,” she motioned south.

I bounced on my back seat again. “Yes, it is!” 

“That was definitely a lucky guess then. Try me again later.” 

We had circled the whole neighborhood of poets and we were back at Byron again. 

“I think we’ve given this neighborhood a fair shot and nothing.” 

Jenna pulled the car back onto the big road and we started the trip home. I watched the blocks roll past. The school. The grocery store. The golf course. Over the underpass. And home again. 

✷

That night, I was up late in my room, using my new computer for college. I had gotten it a few months early, right as the deals were starting up, so that I could use it over the summer before it was just for school work. I had opened it up earlier in the week but had barely had time to use it. I powered it up again, watching the blue power button light up, and the bright glow wrap around my bed in the corner. 

Maybe there would be something about the neighborhood online. I opened up the search bar. I didn’t even know where to start. I pulled up a map. There it was, my house, the library, our high school, where we used to go to school, where we had spent so much time. I zoomed in on the golf course. An empty patch of land between the golf course and the big road, a nameless blot, seemingly too narrow of a stretch for the neighborhood we had discovered. I found a button for a satellite view, and suddenly, our neighborhood flooded with dark greens and browns, black gray stretches of concrete and roofs of buildings. 

The site, still too small, was only a stretch of green, empty of the half-constructed houses and gravel roads we had been exploring. But there, at the top of it, right in the area we had been searching for tonight, a gray dot, floating between neighborhoods and forest preserves, public parks and water retention basins. I zoomed in. It was a building of some sort, but perfectly round. Another dark green patch, this one a rectangle. A tennis court, maybe? Or an emptied overgrown pool? 

I searched online, learning for the first time that summer to scour the internet for answers that the real world wasn’t willing to hand me. In the comments on a blog about haunted places, I found it. Somewhere near our suburb there was supposed to be a silo, the last remaining vestige of a bygone era, according to one poster, the silo that was once on the land used by the mob to hide out from the law. According to another, the silo that was once on the land of an insane asylum, long since abandoned when all of the inmates escaped. 

I woke up a few hours later to my computer, hot on my lap, churning its fan as though I were running it toward death. I shut it and slid it onto the floor, knowing what we would be looking for when we finally made it out to the site again. An insane asylum? A gangster’s hideout? Or just a farmer’s last memento as he gave up his land to a developer for a cluster of houses that already seemed to exist everywhere else?

When I look back now, I almost forget all the possibilities the site held for us that night, because we painted over it so thoroughly the rest of the summer with our own lives. By the end, we were the gangsters, we were the inmates, and we were the ones trying to build something new in that lot, certainly doing a better job than the developer, and maybe doing a better job than the gangsters or the inmates ever did.

✷